Contest
A couple of weeks before the Xbox launch, Microsoft ran a 24-hour gaming contest in New York. “We hired out a restaurant on 5th Avenue,” says O’Rourke, “and set up a bunch of Xbox consoles for a contest among hardcore gamers. Among the games were Madden, Tony Hawk, and Project Gotham Racing. It was essentially an Ultimate Xbox Gamer contest with the winner being the one that had the most points after all that time. We got a lot of attention paid because of it, saying the console was ready for prime time, and those were on very early production units coming off of the line.” In addition to J Allard and other Microsoft people and an MTV crew, Gavin Rossdale of Bush attended and performed an acoustic set during one of the breaks, which, according to O’Rourke “very un-Microsoft in many ways.”
Pre-Launch Anxieties
Anxieties were high as the day of the launch approached. The whole process had felt rushed—and it was—and there had been many surprises and peaks and valleys during the production process, both on the hardware side and the software side. O’Rourke remembers the anxiety he felt over the final months leading up to the launch. “In the early days, we thought Munch’s Oddysee was going to be a big hit because it was one of the earlier titles that we could actually show. It was ready enough to actually demo. Gotham demoed incredibly well, also. We didn’t have titles to demo until late summer when we could truly show off the games that we had. If there was any time that we were concerned or scared, it was in those months leading up when we were worried that were weren’t going to have any titles that we could show.”
By launch day, most of those worries had subsided. Their launch titles were strong, and most important of all, Halo was ready to rock and roll.
Sometimes all it takes to make someone anxious is to realize suddenly that, figuratively speaking, they aren’t in Kansas anymore. Or they are suddenly thrust into the major leagues. For Beth Featherstone the Xbox experience was like that. She, like Ed Fries was when he first took over the Games group, had been happy in her former, low stress position in the Hardware division. When she took over the game marketing, that, too, seemed comfortable. Even Xbox, at first, was an interesting and exciting challenge. But then it became a different, bigger… no, massive event. A story visible to the whole world and a multi-billion dollar responsibility. “I liked being in the hardware group and then the little games group where we could do our thing and make money and not have to impact the P&L of the company. And all of a sudden, we were in that position. Imagine you’re a baseball player. It was sort of like going from triple A to the major leagues—in a second.”
Skepticism and No Mario?
Ed Fries was concerned as Launch Day approached. There was a lot of skepticism about the platform, he says, and especially about Halo. Despite the fact that people were very excited about it, there were those in the press who were still not convinced, and they were finding ways to pick it apart. “Halo was seen by a lot of traditional console press as a PC game. Even if I pointed out that another first-person shooter, GoldenEye, had been done and was pretty fun on a console, they’re like, ‘Yeah, but that was Rare. You guys aren’t Rare.’ Within my own team people were concerned with the way Halo looked. Somebody did color palette analysis. They said Halo was built using PC colors, not console colors. The colors weren’t bright and cartoony enough, like console games. There were a lot questions, including from Bill. ‘Where’s your Mario?’ I heard that a lot as the head of the 1st-party group. ‘Where’s your Mario?’”
There’s a First Time for Everything
Part of the pressure people felt had to do with the realities of retail sales in the game industry. They were planning on launching during the most important time of the year for game and system sales; it was the logical time to launch. And Microsoft wasn’t dipping its toe into the water to test the temperature. They were diving into the deep end of the Christmas buying/selling season, and based on their experience in the field, or to be more precise, their lack of it, they were swimming in completely uncharted waters. When Sony launched its original PlayStation, it not only had decades of experience with consumer electronics, but they had worked previously with Nintendo, and Ken Kutaragi, the leader of the PlayStation team, had even controversially moonlighted with Nintendo while still working at Sony.
In Microsoft’s case, other than Coyner and Booth, they had nobody on the team in marketing or in development who had previous console experience. They had very limited experience with hardware and had never produced a successful consumer device other than joysticks, keyboards and mice. Even their number one game had been developed by a company that had never produced a console title before, which was the case for many of their developers.
Add to that the impact of 9/11, and it was clear that they were coming to the end of a long, complicated, and improbable yearlong sprint, and, with both excitement and trepidation, they could see the finish line approaching quickly.
Retail Realities
Featherstone points out that movies are not generally released before all shooting and editing is done. “Well, the reality is that in the video game business and in the console business, 80% of your sales occur between Thanks-giving and Christmas, and so yeah you can say it’s your marketing people who are driving the deadlines and everything, but the reality is that’s really the marketplace, and it’s retailers like Walmart, and Best Buy and Target and Game Stop… That’s who’s driving those dates.”
“A video game is not a toy,” she adds, “but it has a sort of similar life cycle as a toy product because it winds up being a huge holiday gift item. And so they can sit there and complain, ‘Well Beth, I’m not going to be ready.’ And I’m like ‘OK, do you want to go in and tell the buyer at Walmart why you can’t meet their deadlines? Because if they don’t pick up your product, you’re dead. If you miss the holiday season, you have no product. We fail.’
And in launching a new console, it’s even more important to be on time. You only get one chance to make that all-important first impression. And to be sure, some games can launch successfully at any time of the year. (Maxis famously launched some of their hit games, like SimCity, outside the holiday window on purpose because the market was less crowded at that time.) And arguably games destined to major hits, like Halo and Grand Theft Auto 3 could ship at any time of the year. But the same can’t be said for a console, which is not a single product, but a consumer platform.
“A lot of the developers are focused on their product and getting it to be the best it can be, and they’re not necessarily thinking about the big picture,” observes Featherstone. “Bungie had never done a console game before, either. They were a Mac developer primarily. When we bought them, they were planning on developing it for the PC and the Mac. It was not intended to be a console game, and part of what messed up their schedule and made things take longer was that they had to do some reengineering work to make it a console-friendly game.” The job of marketing, she says, is to work with the developers and producers to understand the realities of the business. “It’s not your evil product manager plotting against you in the marketing wing of the building. This is the reality. And this situation was unique. That’s the marketing side of it.”