While marketing was refining its strategies, production of the Xbox was nearing completion and the last-minutes of the development and manufacture process were underway. “Every component on that thing had to be negotiated,” says Holmdahl. “Everybody was taking any job… doing what needed to be done, and I ended up negotiating a bunch of these deals. I remember all the different characters from that, from the Micron deals to the Micro Chip deals, to Conexant video encoders, to the GPU and CPU deals. It was a lot of work to get all that in place with the number of people we had available.”
Then there was the optical drive. The problems started in the summer of 2001 and persisted. The console was only months from its release date. They were working against time now. “We had lots of problems with the ODD drive that we were pitching at the last moment,” says Holmdahl. “I think Leo and I met for 60 days in a row with Thompson Manufacturing in order to try to address the problems we were having. We were literally working day and night on that one. There were a number of things… they had to detect a CD-R, they had to detect a CD-A, had to detect two or three different disk formats, and it had a hard time detecting them, and once it detected them, it didn’t read. We started working on that around July or August of 2001. Not having a DVD drive that read disks was a problem, so we worked long and hard on that.” Eventually, they did resolve that problem but with little time to spare.
The actual Xboxes were being assembled by teams in Guadalajara, Mexico and in Hungary, and plans were in place to ship them and test them in time for the launch. “Rick Vingerelli and Desmond Koval were the guys who got both Guadalajara and Hungary set up, and that was a monumental task. They were living in Hungary and Guadalajara. This was before we ever moved to China. They have stories of sleeping head-to-toe in beds in Hungary that was the last room they could get.”
Having finally wrestled the optical drive into compliance, Holmdahl says that the rest of the box came together pretty well. Then the attack on the Trade Towers in New York happened. 9/11/2001. “We had units being built in Guadalajara at that time, and basically they shut down flying things for three or four days, and we were under such time pressure that we chartered a jet to fly from Guadalajara to Redmond. So we got all the units in, and I remember it was a Saturday, and we unloaded them in the parking lot of Millennium D for people on the team to take them home that weekend and test them out. We had an instruction sheet for everybody to use in testing them out. People were sticking in DVDs and playing games, playing with the dash and trying the controller out all through the weekend. We were using that to gather information in order to make a decision and assess the viability of the product.”
The 9/11 attacks also affected other members of the Xbox team. Robbie Bach remembers that day vividly. He was on an Xbox press tour, along with J Allard and Seamus Blackley. “I flew into New York City the morning of 9/11, and J Allard was flying to the east coast as well. He ended up in Canada, I think… or Buffalo or some place. And I had already landed in New York. I took the red eye and was doing a press tour that afternoon and went to the hotel to sleep. I woke up to a phone call from someone in our PR agency, who’s a lawyer. It’s like, now why is a lawyer from the PR agency calling me? And he says ‘Look, my office is across the street from the hotel. If there is anything I can do to help, let me know. Sorry your press tour has been messed up.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Turn on the TV.’ So, of course I turn on the TV, and I’m watching the towers burn. There were two other Microsoft people from my team with me, as well as a friend of mine from our local church who happened to be there on business. We got together, and the next day we were able to rent a Ford Taurus, which we drove home to Seattle. It took us 55 hours with very little sleep.”
In South Dakota, at the Mount Rushmore Mall, they stopped to buy some pillows at a Target and grab a quick meal when they noticed a nearby Software, Etc., which was displaying Xbox promotional material. This was three months before the product launched. They had a good talk with the assistant manager of the store, took some photos, and moved on. “It was 8:30 at night and the mall was basically closing. We’re eating bad Chinese food across from Software Etc. and that’s my first exposure to Xbox at retail.” Bach relates that he has exchanged emails with that assistant manager each year since.
Robbie Bach at Software Etc. on the way back to Seattle after 9/11
Blackley was also on a flight to New York that night and ended up in Buffalo, NY. His adventure was a lot less harrowing, however. According to Bachus, “He made his way over the border to stay with a friend of ours who’s one of the singers for Bare Naked Ladies.” Blackley was able to get a flight to Vancouver Canada, and Bachus drove up and brought him back to Seattle.
Direct Impacts from 9/11
Ed Fries says that the 9/11 attacks did affect one of their launch titles directly.
“We were building Project Gotham Racing, and the ‘Gotham’ in Project Gotham Racing comes from New York City. You could race through downtown New York and the Twin Towers were in our game, and so there was a lot of debate whether they should remain in the game. Ultimately, we took them out. It was pretty late in the process. By September we were pretty much finishing things up for a November launch.”
Fries mentions other factor that did not affect Xbox, but did affect people at Microsoft. “We were the ones building Flight Simulator, not for Xbox, but it was our product and, something that came out in the early days was that the terrorists had trained on it.”
Various versions of Xbox
Images of testing and duplication setups here and on the next page.
Xbox boxes open and ready to receive. Spider-Man approves.
