Excerpt
The people who make consoles are made of sturdy stuff. They take a lot of risks, but they don't always get much glory. In my first book on the Xbox, and in this one as well, I've tried to dwell on the humans behind the machine. This is their story.
I didn't land a publisher for this book until August, 2005. But I have been working on it in some fashion from the moment my first book on the chronicles of the Xbox ended in 2002. I wrote my stories on the evolution of the video game industry for Red Herring magazine and, later, The San Jose Mercury News, and I saved my notes like a pack rat.
At first, I didn't think the subject would lend itself to a second book. Microsoft didn't conquer the world the first time around, so who would want to read a sequel? But I have run into a lot of people who felt the subject deserved another telling. Popular demand drove me to give it another try. I wanted to give this book an insider's take, a probe into a single project, with as much detail as possible in the hopes of recreating a feeling that you're there with the team. This would be a story that you wouldn't get by simply following the public announcements about the project in chronological order. That's what Tracy Kidder pulled off with The Soul of a New Machine, and that has always been my beacon.
I proposed the book, as I had done with the first one, as an independent journalistic project. Microsoft isn't paying me for this book and they have no right of approval on its text. But I needed to talk to a lot of people at the company above and beyond my normal daily newspaper interviews.
This book has consumed so much of my time for so many months that I haven't had time to play many games. That's the curse of being a writer who loves video games. But my kids didn't let me off the hook. Instead of watching Saturday morning cartoons, we are slowly making our way through one of Microsoft's first Xbox 360 games, Kameo: Elements of Power. It's an epic role-playing game where we take turns playing Kameo the fairy princess. Sort of like The Seven Samurai or its Western copycat, The Magnificent Seven, we are collecting a series of comrade creatures who will help us unseat the evil Thorn and his army of trolls that threaten the Enchanted Kingdom. As most gamers know, there are different ways of plowing through any game. You can take a straight shot through the levels, skipping all of the side missions and the dead ends. This is the quickest way to burn a path through Kameo. But you miss out on a lot of fun if you don't explore a few of the side quests along the way. Side quests are the equivalent of stopping and smelling the flowers.
I have come to look at the creation of the Xbox 360 the same way. There are 2,000 people working within Microsoft's Xbox division. Beyond that, the number of people who touched the Xbox in some way, from game developers to factory workers, amounts to more than 25,000. There is no way that I could have interviewed them all and still come out with a timely book. I have tried to capture as many of the side quests as I can, but by and large I have burned a path from inception to launch, interviewing the key players as I could. The stories I have collected range from the reaction to security breaches on the original Xbox to the genesis of some of the most interesting games for the Xbox 360. But I've also tried to stick to the fundamentals of the mission at hand.
As Peter Moore told me when it was all done, "All the complexities of doing a global launch are hidden. The incredible sweat, tears, anguish, euphoria." I hope that this edition brings those behind the 360 into the foreground, if only for a moment, before everyone returns to playing their games.
