We wanted to shift the medium from these rigid narratives with clear beginning, middles and ends to enable people to create worlds that were constantly alive and that participants not just passed through, but left permanent marks while they were there that affected everyone else.
-J Allard
Am I Playing Yet?
-Cam Ferroni
Things were definitely looking good for Xbox, particularly in North America, and in November 2002 they launched something that took them over the top—Xbox Live. Although it launched a year after the debut of the console, Xbox Live was no afterthought. Even the failure of previous attempts at creating online services, such as SegaNet on the Dreamcast, didn’t deter Microsoft’s visionaries, such as J Allard and Cam Ferroni, from envisioning a truly connected online game experience on the Xbox. Xbox, unlike any console before it—including PS2—shipped with an Ethernet plug-in for broadband, and no low-bandwidth modem. They were banking on features such as voice connections and downloadable content (DLC) to drive people to the system.
Allard described the vision that he and Ferroni shared as “a living entertainment experience powered by human energy.” Looking at the history of video games (although this is true of most games throughout history) Allard observed that they had begun by involving people playing together, citing some of the earliest games, such as Pong and Spacewar!, neither of which had a single-player mode. “gaming transformed in 20 years from a social medium to a solitary medium. it shifted from being designed for everyone to games being designed to address the ‘most valuable segment.’ 16-26 year-old boys was the proxy that most people used.” He says that games like Doom, which inspired people to play together in LAN* parties, “rekindled the thinking in the industry that there was something about re-introducing the ingenuity of the players and ‘human ai’ into the gaming experience.” The problem, as he saw it, was there was no platform to support these kinds of experiences. The effort it took to put on a LAN party was considerable. There was no plug-and-play in those days. It was more like kluge-and-(hopefully) play.
One way they tried to encourage people to play together was to put four controller ports on the box. But there was more to the concept. Allard wanted to build what he called the “virtual couch” so you could “have your friends over” no matter where they were in the world. “we wanted to shatter the limits of physical devices and enable 16-, or 64- or 16,000-player gaming worlds. we wanted to shift the medium from these rigid narratives with clear beginning, middles and ends to enable people to create worlds that were constantly alive… we wanted to rekindle that idea of an arcade and the high-score boards on games that allowed you to see what was possible, or show your stuff even when other people weren’t around. we wanted to shift the business to generate revenue beyond the initial sale and to allow publishers and creators to have an ongoing relationship with their audience.”
If you haven’t already noticed, Allard had very poetic ways of expressing his grand vision, and perhaps this is why he so inspired the people who worked for him. John O’Rourke says that Allard’s had an incredible ability to tell a “very good, quotable story. As a leader, he really did a tremendous amount at Microsoft with his ability to paint a picture of the future and get people excited about going to that place in the future that he just talked about. He may not have all the details and all the steps necessary to get there yet, but his passion and his ability to articulate that drew a lot of people to him.”
In an email to me, here is a picture Allard drew for me in words about his vision for Xbox and Xbox Live: “until xbox, every game console constrained the designers imagination. we wanted xbox to intimidate their imaginations - like you might imagine the sistine chapel blew away michelangelo - a canvas for his magnum opus that demanded an entirely new way to think without the rigid constraints of canvas or marble and a scale that would allow for a new type of narrative vs. a simple moment in time.” Allard’s Sistine Chapel for game designers would do away with CD-ROMs, single-player, 3D action button-mashing and introduce instead a world of multiplayer, voice, leader boards, identity, tournaments and serialized, evolving content. He wanted to hasten the game industry’s embrace of the Internet. He wanted to inspire masterpieces of player involvement and connection.*
*Again, the quotes from Allard’s emails are reproduced without alteration. This is how he writes, and as Boyd Multerer told me, “There is a reason we always refer to him as just ‘j’ with a lower-case ‘j’ You should too. He never (or very rarely or just when referring to formal acronyms) uses caps.” For convention and easier reading, I do refer to him as “J” or “J Allard” throughout the book, but do not edit his communications with me.
Allard also talked about the promise of the upcoming broadband revolution. He noted that MTV, CNN and ESPN drove cable adoption on TV. “the original value proposition was reception and it evolved to be about selection, we knew broadband wasn’t about performance in terms of mainstream adoption, it was about new scenarios - online gaming would be one of the key drivers and someone was going to be the ‘ESPN of games’ we wanted that to be us. We just wanted to bring gaming back to where it started - as a social medium - using technology that was going to see widespread embrace - the internet. Thus, LIVE…”
Allard would show an old Atari video to inspire people. It alternates images of Atari game screens like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command, Pac-Man, and more, interspersed with images of manic happy kids and families, starting with two kids, and adding more family members and friends with each new shot. Everyone is leaning forward with their controllers in hand, smiling, laughing, screaming with joy, while suitably energetic announcer’s voice, speaking over some equally happy music is saying, “Only Atari makes the world’s most popular home video games. The only Space Invaders. The only Asteroids, the only Pac-Man, the only Missile Command, the only Defender. And the only way you can play any of them is on a home video system made by Atari.” It ends with the Atari logo and little jingle, “Have you played Atari today?” The link below is bad quality, but amusing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU3gHAGbi0Q
“The funny thing was of course that the moment portrayed in that video never really happened,” he says, “but that did illustrate both the soul of gaming then and its potential.”
Finally, he adds, “as you can see, it was a 10+ year vision that we started and infused in the culture. so many people had so many contributions and so many specific ideas and accomplishments and successes and failures and partnerships to bring it to life there’s a million stories to tell. but all of those activities and players orbited a single purpose, a single raison d’être. And that purpose still exists today in that culture. it was bigger than any of us, bigger than all of us.”
Allard picked his partner and fellow visionary Cam Ferroni to lead the project, and Ferroni’s prime directive for Xbox Live was “Am I Playing Yet?” He says, “That ideal drove through everything we did. It both fueled the success, and caused all of the struggle for the next years. We developed an ethos that carried us through the entire lifecycle of what we were building. We obsessed over one core principle—that consoles were simple. They were the original plug and play. It didn’t matter what TV you had, you hooked up no more than 3 wires, you plugged it in, and within seconds you were playing a game. You didn’t have to download patches, mess around with video drivers, type in activation codes… 2 or 3 clicks and you were playing.”
The First Xbox Live Guy
I always like to build things that are going to be relevant when they ship and not relevant when you start. That means you’ve always got to be predicting where the world’s going.
-Boyd Multerer
Boyd Multerer graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering and thermal systems in 1990, but he discovered that his real passion was in software programming. So he decided to “make the fun thing the job and the mechanical thing the hobby.” Next, he decided to move to Seattle “because, I don’t know… I felt like it.” And not being someone who likes being told what to do, he started his own software company marketing desktop publishing tools.
Multerer’s company supplied software to large corporations such as Aldus, Adobe, and Microsoft, and one of his contracts was to write code that ended up being used in Microsoft Office 4. While working on that contract he met Rebecca Norlander. He invited Norlander and her husband (J Allard) to dinner one night, and that meeting with Allard led to a job working on II3 (Internet Information Server 3).
While working on II3, Multerer became convinced that “this web thing is just going to destroy desktop publishing.” He sold off his major projects, primarily to Adobe, and went to work on web servers at Microsoft under Allard. He wrote code for iS4 and iS5 as well as some data center management software. Multerer kept in touch with Allard even after he no longer worked for him, and when Allard came back from a long sabbatical in 1999 and became the lead on the Xbox project, he was invited to join the new project. On August 4, 2000 he joined the Xbox team and was once again working for Allard.
Boyd Multerer
Immediately, Allard gave him a mission. “J basically points to the back of the box and says, ‘Alright. We decided to put an Ethernet port in the back,’ although that was still in debate. He told me, ‘Go figure out what it talks to.’ And that was my job. I can say I was the first person to work on Xbox Live, although it was called Xbox Online.”
From that point and for the next four years, Multerer ran Xbox Live engineering. In the beginning, he was highly selective in his hiring. You had to be more than good to join the team, you had to be exceptional. Like Jon Thomason’s Xbox OS team, Multerer built a lean and highly focused team of 15, dedicated to working quietly, efficiently, and with a constant eye to keeping costs down.
Separation
In order to create his vision of the Xbox online service, Allard believed that his team had to be insulated from the Microsoft as a whole. He knew the politics of the company and he knew the propensity for meddling that was common, especially in something as new and revolutionary as what he and his team had set out to accomplish. And so he had fought to move his team off the main campus, to the “Millennium Campus” and specifically into Millennium E.
Even though the Millennium Campus was not far from the main campus, it was light years away from any casual interference from outside the project. Of course it was connected through the networks and phones, but it was a place where the entire focus could be on Xbox and Xbox Live because, in Allard’s mind, Xbox was its own company and his team was working for Xbox more than for Microsoft.
JJ Richards, an engineer who came late to the project to work on Xbox Live, credits Allard and Robbie Bach with insulating the Xbox team from the normal predatory culture at Microsoft, pointing out that it wasn’t just physical separation that was important, but something far more ideological. “What Robbie and J did was to create a new subset of culture within an established cultural organism. There is a lot of history at Microsoft of projects that had good ideas, and they get crushed by the machine because they weren’t Windows or Office or competitive. So the idea that they could create a consumer company, a true consumer entertainment company, out of thin air in a business enterprise company, that cared about beating Sony while no one else at Microsoft even knew why Sony mattered… that was instrumental to the success, because without that, Xbox would have been killed early.”
Part of the reason Multerer had favored a small and separate team was that he hoped to avoid an all-out fight with the core team on Xbox, which in time began to grow suspicious of Live’s drain on resources. Many at Microsoft, including some on the Xbox team, saw Live as a distraction, at best, and at worst a case of terminal mission creep that could jeopardize the entire Xbox effort. A project doomed to fail.
Projects and Horses
“I heard an analogy at the time, which I’ve seen applied to many projects,” says Multerer. “The analogy is, any project that you’re doing, if it’s radical and new, it’s sort of like having a horse. At first all the other people look at your horse and say, ‘Aw, what an old nag, somebody oughta put that horse down.’ Then the horse lives on and you move along and you start making some progress. Then they say, ‘Oh, why is that horse getting so much attention? We need to kill the horse and not have it as a competitor.’ Then it survives and it moves along, and then it’s like, ‘Hey, this is actually a business driver. I want to hook my cart up to the horse!’ I’ve seen so many projects go through this. It’s not just a Microsoft thing. This is just humans.”
Meeting the Broadband Challenge
Remember the three bets that Microsoft made on broadband even before Xbox was built?
1. Bandwidth penetration was going to happen.
2. Data center bandwidth costs would fall.
3. Servers would improve so that they could handle the load.
Now that Xbox Live was a real project, it was time to get specific. There wasn’t much they could do about broadband penetration in the home, but there was a lot of analysis they could do in planning and analyzing the challenges they faced, such as data center costs and what kind and how many servers they would need.
At the time, they were looking at data center costs at $350 per peak megabit per second. “Let’s just say, it would be wildly expensive,” says Multerer. The way it worked when you were doing it “in bulk,” he explains, they don’t precisely measure how much bandwidth you’re using. They look at the outgoing bandwidth for a given month. “Because it’s all outgoing. What they really care about is, what’s the balance? If you’re bringing in as much data as you’re sending out, then you tend not to pay anything. If it’s all lopsided, going one way, then you pay for the difference.”
The way it worked was that the data center reserved bandwidth based on expected peak activity for the month. “So you pay for the reservation, not for the actual usage. During any given month, they take the peak amount that you hit, and then some figure slightly below it, and that’s what you pay for, as if you were at near peak the whole month. And it was on the order of $350 per peak megabit per second, which is tremendously expensive. We could not have run this business at those kinds of prices, so we had to bet that those prices were going to fall.”
The problem with servers at the time was that they were designed to scale up to numbers in the 100,000 client range, but when they discussed the project, they were talking in the millions of users. “We needed internet scale services that look more like a directory service that were traditionally aimed at enterprises, but this didn’t exist. And the hardware to run those things was too expensive. So we also placed a bet that hardware was going to get cheaper, and that would allow us to build a web scale system that had enterprise-like technology behind it.”
Multerer says, “I think one of the rules we said was over the first couple of years, we would go no more than $50 million in the hole in datacenter commerce. I don’t know that we actually hit that. I think we probably went over. But we were trying to be cost conscious. So that was baked in pretty early.”
Another area they considered was fiber optics, and they were initially thinking about the oil companies. “Every time they were digging a pipeline, they would put the big pipe in for the oil to go down, and then put a little pipe next to it full of fiber optics that they didn’t know what they were going to do with. So it was all dark fibers. It was laid all over the country. And we even toyed with the idea of, ‘Maybe we should buy a couple of fiber lines and set up a private Xbox Live channel to reduce latencies and increase the total bandwidth. That was a fourth bet that we made, which was, ‘Nonono. The internet’s going to get better with us. It will improve. The web is going to push them harder than we are, and the backbone will get good enough that we don’t have to go and build a private network.’ And that totally worked.”
For more on the technical challenges behind Xbox Live, “Moving Information” on page 407.
*LAN = Local Area Network