The Xbox Live beta kit.
Xbox Live was ready for beta testing by spring of 2002, and kits began going out, first in small numbers, then in larger numbers, all over the world. During early internal tests, members of international teams in Europe, Japan and the U.S. played together. Not only were these tests successful, but they were inspiring, with members of the teams reporting how great an experience they had.
Each beta kit included a headset and a specially modified version of Acclaim’s radio-controlled car racing game for Windows, Re-Volt. According to Andrew Walker, who was responsible for the beta title and who got permission from Acclaim to use it, this version of Re-Volt was ported from PC to console by engineers within the ATG and ultimately shipped to 25,000 beta testers. It featured eight-person multiplayer and voice. And, of course, J Allard’s Snow Crash inspired Hiro Protagonist gamertag was seen often.
Walker remembers showing Re-Volt for Xbox Live to Bill Gates. “I remember demoing it to Bill and he was like ‘Oh. This is the game that sold me on the Xbox idea in the first place.’” What happened is that Blackley had used Re-Volt with a console controller long before Xbox had been approved, when they were still using modified laptops. “They basically put a TV on and hacked up a controller and showed Bill, and it was a pretty big deal for Bill to see this.”
Beta Hackers
During the beta period for Xbox Live, Microsoft sent out regular updates. At the time, in Xbox everything was linked into a game, so new clients got updated by the beta testers when they ran a new version of an Xbox Live game. Meanwhile, Dinarte Morais was watching the logs and checking out who was connecting. “I was experimenting with the various dynamic challenges that were being sent down to the boxes to see if I could detect any modded boxes, to see if they were connecting to the live service.”
Not surprisingly, there were modded boxes, and Morais was able to collect data that would help him deal with various problems that would arise once they opened the service to the general public. “We didn’t actually act on the data. I configured the security gateways to ask the questions, but just log the results. No matter what the answer was, people would still be able to connect to the service. When Xbox Live went live, that’s when we banned all of the boxes that were known to be modded.
Morais was also keeping up to date with various hacker and modder boards. “People were talking about using their boxes to do different music services and run games that were copied, usually modding them using mod chips that would change the OS and relax some of the security rules. Those were the types of things our system was attempting to discover when you connected to Live, and the modded systems went in a list that would keep them blocked from the service even if they toggled off their chip.”
When the service opened officially, Morais activated the list of modded boxes, and there were a lot of complaints from people who couldn’t connect. “At the time we shipped,” he says, “I didn’t have a lot of time to modify the client to say anything like ‘The reason you can’t connect is because you have a modded box.’ It just behaved like Xbox Live was down, it just timed out.
“If you read the hacker boards at the time Live went on there was this interesting effect. Before I turned on the blacklist, everything was fine. People were in beta, they were connecting to Live, they were playing with other people. It was all great. They were letting other people on the modding boards know that everything is fine, there’s no problem playing on Live. Then Xbox Live goes live and BLAM—everything stops. Software hadn’t updated at the time, and you had this Xbox Live DVD you needed to install to have the service on your box. We just deactivated them to keep them from connecting to Live.
“So if you were to look at the Xbox official forums, people would, by and large, be happy with the service because it appeared to be working and they could connect to other people, but if you looked at these hacker boards there were all these threads of ‘I can’t believe they let the system ship like this,’ ‘this doesn’t work,’ and ‘I can’t connect.’ It was like two different worlds, but they eventually figured it out and realized that they need to switch the chips off on their modded boxes if they want to connect to the Xbox Live system.
“This goes back to the whole thing of us not caring if you want to cheat in Solitaire, but if you want to cheat in a game with other people, then we do care. If you did modify your box, for whatever purpose, and you want to play games solo, I don’t really care. As soon as you want to belong to the community, everyone should play by the same set of rules.
“Our Terms of Service says you cannot modify your box, but one thing that is interesting is that the boxes themselves are what were banned, so you could always go out and get another box. There were machine accounts and there were user accounts. So you as the user had an account on Xbox Live and so did every box. When we detected a modified box, we banned the machine, not the user. If someone went and got another box, they could reconnect and play.”