Original subtitles

Let me find it. Let me watch it real quick.

It's really good.

I love it.

The ad was polarizing.

Yeah and it did end up getting banned.

Stations would not run the ad because it was, you know, so shocking for people.

There was tension for the company to be doing this gaming thing

because it was really different

than really the image that the company was trying to cultivate.

Some of the stuff like that commercial

I don't think senior leadership saw until it was done.

You know we don't talk about Microsoft Xbox.

We just talk about Xbox.

Because Microsoft was good on the funding side,

but bad on the branding side.

And if they wanted to go market it like they market Windows

and they market Office, it was a deal-breaker,

it was not gonna be successful.

The games industry did not speak the same language as Microsoft.

But, if we were gonna do this really hard thing

and not lose billions and billions of dollars forever,

we had to get it right.

People had to have the belief that they were working

with the Xbox team, and if that meant there was

something slightly unconventional that had to be done,

the Microsoft bureaucracy wasn't going to get in the way.

There's a new contender in the video game wars.

Xbox is going to be....

- The future. - Truly the future of video games.

Xbox. Taking over the living room.

Limitless, connected digital entertainment.

You guys never understood.

The company is going to face fierce competition.

Sniper. Nooo!

It's a ticking time bomb.

It makes me very nervous to actually play this for you.

Xbox, getting a major overhaul.

A bold vision for the future of gaming.

It's the Xboooooooooooox!

The Xbox is a breakthrough game console that ships in fall 2001.

Most console companies start working on the next console

as soon as they finish the current console.

So five years, six years, seven years.

So for Microsoft to go from announcing in 2000 to being on store shelves

in the fall of 2001, is kind of insane.

Before Xbox landed on store shelves,

the team had to run a gauntlet of very public deadlines.

A hardware rollout in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show.

A first glimpse of Xbox games at Microsoft's Gamestock event in Seattle.

And finally, an event that brought the entire global gaming industry together

to see what was new... and judge it mercilessly.

E3 is the biggest moment of the year for games.

For new entrants, it was really important to show up and make a good impression.

That E3 was critical for the Xbox, but you know, a lot of what you're showing

is beta software and beta hardware.

Hardware that's not proven yet, or probably not even finished.

A lot of things at E3 can go wrong.

Adding pressure,

the lead executive on Xbox development, Rick Thompson,

had just left Microsoft, which meant Microsoft's mission

to quickly deliver an industry-changing game console needed a new leader.

The idea of finding somebody else externally didn't make sense.

We had a schedule that is crazy to begin with.

The project just didn't have the time for that.

Nor did we think that somebody externally

could sort of fit into Microsoft and make this happen.

And so, I concluded that it was something I needed to do.

A new challenger enters!

Sort of a fateful decision,

because it led to the worst 18 months of my professional career.

It's a hard project, I mean what we are doing

is something that is intensely difficult.

Robbie was...

Robbie was the grownup, was Robbie's role.

Booo!

We were a young group of kinda rag-tag kids.

Let's go ahead and take the cars, give 'em 3...

What the hell's that?

You know I gotta demo to do up here.

Really... I don't think Robbie should be seeing this.

What we needed more than anything else is we needed an adult in the room.

I was part of Office when it was, was smaller, and then as it grew big...

Robbie also has a sense of propriety

and I don't think we had a sense of propriety at all.

The opportunity here way outpaces that opportunity, I think is very exciting.

He was the one inside of Microsoft that Bill Gates trusted

with all the complexity and the cost

and the risk involved in doing something like this.

Robbie's a good guy. People can trust him. He doesn't break his word.

However, everyone who comes into games can't be prepared for what it's like.

Because it's an entertainment business.

The software doesn't just have to work

and have the right features, it has to entertain also.

This is hard.

I had no clue what I was doing.

I didn't play games.

The business model I barely understood.

We are launching an entirely new business,

competing against two established competitors

in one of the largest entertainment industries in the world.

I was learning something new every single day,

and that meant obviously I failed most days, too.

I think the next six to eight weeks are going to be super exciting.

Little challenging.

I didn't think about how to plan for going from 20 people to 2000 people.

We went from 4 people to a dozen people

to hundreds to honestly thousands involved in some way with the creation of Xbox.

It was crazy. I mean it was no time at all

before I didn't know everybody in the organization anymore.

When I think about it today it just makes my head kind of spin sideways.

Every week I would hear about somebody I knew in the game industry

that was moving up to Redmond to work for the Xbox.

We just said, this all has to get done.

We need bodies. So we hired people in bulk.

We brought in teams of people.

I remember thinking, this is a lot of people

changing their lives for this effort.

It's either got to be something that everybody believes in

and they're willing to uproot their families

and get behind this initiative, or it's going to be one

of the biggest cluster of all time.

It became clear that we needed our own place

because we were just gonna bust at the seams.

So Microsoft has this beautiful campus

and all these beautiful buildings and everyone works together.

We were not part of that.

We went to this campus called Millennium

which was still in Redmond but pretty far away from Microsoft.

Part of that was we needed space.

But part of it is like we need a few miles away from main campus

to get some breathing room to do something different.

We were deliberately a renegade team.

They were rebels inside of the Microsoft empire.

We were kids in our early 20s who loved video games

and could not believe that Microsoft had given us jobs to go create them

and we were all kind of growing up together.

The thing about games is, it's Hollywood for nerds.

You have your star directors.

You have your Ferrari-driving rendering engineers.

Congratulations!

And after a full day of working on making games,

we would get together and play games.

And there was a little bit of a weird culture of not leaving

which I think was, maybe not the healthiest.

Maybe like a college dorm room kind of vibe.

Your social circle was Xbox.

Your family was kind of Xbox.

But we all had a common purpose, a passion around games.

Being able to do something very different

and revolutionary was where you was getting our energy from.

Because we were still young, we had moments where we were like,

"Wait a minute, like, am I the best person to be doing this?"

It was definitely open to kids making decisions above their pay grade.

You had a bunch of passionate people who weren't necessarily 100%

the most qualified people to be doing their jobs,

running as fast as they can to make this thing happen.

We were young and we were naive.

You know I always call it the best funded startup ever.

Me, in my twenties, you know, I had, millions, millions of dollars of budget.

And there wasn't really any oversight, it was a little bit of the Wild West.

You know I had to negotiate all the components that went in.

Hard drives, power supplies, the circuit board.

Here I am, this kid, negotiating these deals

that are hundreds of millions of dollars.

There were definitely some terrible decisions being made.

But on the other hand, that level of freedom, you know, made Xbox happen.

What resulted was sort of a weird combination of craziness and genius.

My recollection of that time was being so fascinated by watching

this big company around us try to wrap its brain

around what it meant to be an entertainment brand.

We didn't have a lot of interdependencies with the rest of the company.

It was Robbie, right, that had to go over to main campus

and deal with Microsoft people.

One day some executives came to visit the studio.

And one of those people who came was Bill Gates.

I showed him my cinematic tools and how I wrote scripts

and how I laid down cameras in the engine.

Bill spent time with Marty O'Donnell, our audio director.

Chief whatever you're gonna do, make it quick.

It's raining aliens! Oh Jesus, why you do this to me?

The hopes of all the covenant rest on your shoulders, Chieftain.

He spent time actually

watching Marty play some of the themes from Halo.

He went to go see our art department - where one of our 3 - D artists

was sculpting a character in clay, making a maquette.

And at the end of the Bill visit, we got in the conference room,

the leads of the studio and there was a pause.

And you can see the magnificent machine that is his brain,

calculating down the Microsoft org chart, from him at the top all the way down

to the crazy artists in this studio, in a gravel pit, literally.

And Bill leaned forward and he said, "So, there are artists who work here?

It really was a cultural change for the company.

Xbox was already forcing people within Microsoft to think differently..

But what really mattered was changing public perception.

Behind the scenes, software engineers were hard at work building Xbox's capabilities.

Now the hardware team had a chance to win over the doubters on a big stage.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

CES was a trade show, where companies from around the world

would come to unveil the latest in technologies.

A lot of buying decisions from retailers

get made at that show for the holiday season,

and so we had a lot of proving to do.

The press was skeptical, gamers were skeptical.

"You don't know how to do this stuff, you've never done this before, good luck."

The gaming industry is not a believer.

While Microsoft works on the insides of the new Xbox,

it focuses an equal amount of attention on the outside.

I was the creative director of Xbox.

Horace Luke is the man.

Horace Luke is the man.

What Horace had to do was, take the thing that we had

produced in hardware and then figure out some wrapping around it.

The first time we ever showed him like "Hey, you're going to need to put

this board that we're about to manufacture for, you know, millions of consoles

into something that looks good."

He's like, "What the [BLEEP]?"

My office was where everybody brought their ideas,

from the technology team to the design team, to the management team.

At the time that we were building

the original Xbox, there were no other consoles

with a hard drive or an Ethernet port.

So how do we put something around this that vents heat,

that survives a drop test, and looks cool.

And you have to fit all of this of course

into a box that's not gonna be giant sitting in your living room.

It was a constant battle between the different groups.

I went through thousands of different sketches,

trying to jam it and shrink it in every way possible into a box.

I remember him saying like, "Well maybe we just gotta slim it down, like,

you know, we'll just dress it in black."

Everything was very aggressive-looking.

The console itself was large.

It was bulging on the top.

It looked like the engine cowling on a Dodge Hemi.

It was the physical embodiment of power,

like no other console's ever been designed like this.

It was quite a miracle to fit everything in that box.

Looking back today, you say the thing is huge,

but in comparison to the PC of the '90s, it was tiny.

It is a small miracle that we actually were able to pull this off.

And it looked awesome!

The 2001 Consumer Electronics Show is packed

with every new gadget and gizmo about to hit stores.

CES 2001, in Las Vegas, in the convention center hall, Bill Gates was there.

CES will give actually give us a better idea

of just where Microsoft is going to fit into the gaming market.

For the very first time, Microsoft was going to get

to show off its final Xbox hardware design.

Good morning.

Welcome to CES.

Everybody felt like we were on the verge of doing something special, historic.

Ah, for the first time, let me now unveil Xbox.

But when you show up as the third entrant

into the space with well-established competitors,

you have to break out, you have to be bold.

How do you unveil a product in a way that might surprise the world

and get the world to see Microsoft doing something differently?

If you smell what The Rock is cookin'.

The Rock says...

We decided to bring The Rock to CES.

There was honestly some disbelief,

like you know, Bill Gates, The Rock, like, what's going on here?

Thank you. Thank you, Bill.

It was really like muscle-bound Hollywood meets,

you know, gamer geek of the tech world.

It just might appear that The Rock and Bill Gates

don't have a heck of a lot in common.

Well The Rock's here to say that that can't be farther from the truth.

The Xbox is everything The Rock is.

Cutting edge, powerful, exhilarating.

And they were funny together. Like, it actually worked.

And they looked like they were best friends.

I mean The Rock doesn't impress easily, Bill, you know that.

But I'm pretty damn impressed with what we're seeing here today.

And considering that this Xbox at this moment is only running on

one-fifth of the system's power is very impressive.

Bill, do you have any idea what The Rock would be like

if he were only running on one-fifth of his power?

- Well I, I would think that... - It doesn't matter what you think, Bill!

I'm sorry, Bill. It's just a force of habit.

Rock apologizes.

It went well. We showed nothing, technically.

But it started to build the excitement.

We gave it five out of five stars.

We really like the Xbox a lot.

You throw in an 8-gigabyte hard drive,

a 10/100 Ethernet adapter, and you basically have

the most powerful system on the block.

The Xbox is really slick.

With excitement building around the console,

Microsoft was under tremendous pressure

to build a portfolio of hit games before the Xbox launch.

By the time they had announced that they wanted to do Xbox

to the time when we needed to launch, was an incredibly short period of time.

We didn't really have the luxury of saying,

"Start building a game from ground up."

That was almost impossible.

What we were looking for were games

that were partially in development, ports already in development.

We went out and started to look for developers all over the world.

A barnstorming tour across North America, Europe,

and ultimately Japan, to create some sort of excitement

around the console, and convince game developers

in particular that we could be successful.

All right boys, let's roll.

One day we presented a new idea from a, a small game publisher that had come to us

and said, "Hey, we want to dust off one - of the 2 - D games that we had done for PC.

We're going to really invest in it,

we think it's going to be really exciting."

And these newly-important executives in Xbox,

who would review all the pitches

from publishers and developers, they said, "I don't think that game

is going to be able to make - the transition from 2 - D to 3D."

They felt that it was complicated,

they didn't really understand the user interface,

they thought that it was based on a game that hadn't been all that successful.

To my surprise it was rejected.

And that game was calledGrand Theft Auto III.

It ended up selling 14-and-a-half million units,

it was the top selling game of 2001

and would have been the top selling game of 2002

if it wasn't beaten by its own sequel.

It was the "pass" heard around the industry.

Despite seeing Grand Theft Auto III go to PlayStation,

Microsoft was still well-positioned

to attract other developers to its platform.

We needed a vibrant and strong third-party lineup of games

that customers would love.

And we wanted the industry to look at us

as something that was going to be worthy of development.

We wanted to have the very best games.

On March 13th, 2001, Microsoft put their commitment

to developers on public display at their Gamestock event in Seattle.

Thanks, and welcome to Gamestock 2001.

What you're seeing is a sneak peek at what's to come on Xbox.

We're gonna start off with a game whose vision was really

just too big to fit in the PS2, so we brought it over to the Xbox.

Our characters certainly aren't the,

muscle-bound superheroes, you know, that we want to be.

They're more like the poor, sad, schmucks that most of us really are.

Getting Oddworld. That, that was important.

It was an established PlayStation franchise,

beloved by the console game community.

That's the last damn Gabbit there is!

We had a chance to work with an amazing creator in Lorne Lanning.

Did all the voice acting for his own game.

So Munch had these things we called Fuzzles,

and they were like "memememememe!"

And Munch was like "You've got to come over and do this for me."

You know, and so then Abe's like, "Come on guys, let's go!"

Here goes... Whoa!

And they were really vulnerable characters

living in extremely dangerous worlds that you're trying to keep them alive,

but when they get whacked it's hilarious.

Ooh!

Next, we're really happy to announce our new relationship

with one of the premier racing developer teams in the world, Bizarre Creations.

Project Gotham. It's a new product for Xbox.

Now check out the reflections on this car.

The whole environment is completely mapped to the entire surface of this vehicle.

Project Gotham Racing was based on your style of driving

as much as how fast you crossed the finish line.

For us it was an opportunity to make this amazing,

really accessible, fun, arcade racing game.

It was a really important part of our launch.

And that was just the beginning.

Hardcore, freestyle snowboarding.

This is only one mountain

of seven international mountains we'll be bringing to you in Amped.

AZURIK That double-ended axe is pretty wicked looking,

and we can tell this is a hand-to-hand fighting game.

NFL FEVER Playing a football game you wanna kick your buddy's butt

so hard he's gonna wear it for a helmet.

And that's it for our show today, I hope you got to see everything that you wanted.

Did you see everything?

Halo! Halo!

Oh, I feel like I am forgetting something.

What was... What was it?

Oh, Halo. How could I forget Halo?

Hey everybody, so I'm Jason.

I'm one of the co-founders of Bungie and the lead on Halo.

Bungie was a Mac-first developer.

That's where they started, that's where they'd had their success

with Marathon and Myth and Myth II.

But Bungie was also dealing with the aftermath of a catastrophe.

Myth II, one of their hottest titles,

had an installer bug that could erase a user's entire hard drive.

In order to fix the bug and keep the company above water

and working on new games, they needed a serious cash infusion.

Apparently they had this thing called Halo.

I hadn't seen it yet.

Some of my guys had.

They had multiple games in development,

but all I wanted was this new thing that they were working on.

So we did a deal, and bought out the company and they started to work on Halo.

That's really when true development began on what the game would be.

When we were purchased,Halo was not a game.

There was no real story.

There was no real sense of what the gameplay tempo would be like.

We knew it was powerful to control a space marine

who moved fast and could jump into a sophisticated vehicle

and you know haul ass around this alien world.

And that was it.

What do you think Jason? - I got something for ya.

Do you?

People knew about Halo.

They knew that we'd been acquired by Microsoft, they knew about Xbox,

they knew we were still working on the game.

That period of getting Halo from a series of prototypes

to on a disk playable by an Xbox was just a mad rush to get this game done.

But there was this excitement that we had something special.

It makes me very nervous to actually play this for you.

Um, welcome to Halo on the Xbox.

We started off that demo showing you flying to the land in a Covenant ship.

You know, running around the environment,

getting in a vehicle, doing all those, you know, building block Halo things.

We had our test environment, what we called a B30.

The island map in the middle of the water with Halo in the background.

It was just fun to play.

Whew!

Gamestock was that real first coming-out party for us

and it was just that moment where I think

the whole organization began to wake up to,

oh, there's something really special here.

Thank you. That's it. Good night.

Xbox had made a high risk bet on Halo.

At the time, first-person shooters were considered PC games.

The only right way to play was with a keyboard and mouse.

At the time, people thought, well how are you going to translate,

you know, mouse and keyboard game into a console game?

Dual-stick first-person shooters had almost never been done on a console.

I remember, right before the demo, Ed was very clear.

He's like, "Hey when you're playing,

like make sure that people see the controller.

What we need to demonstrate is, you can play a shooter

with thumb sticks, maneuvering around the environment."

You can go back and you can look.

Adamant blog posts that shooter games like Doom

would never work with a game controller.

Can people actually play a first-person shooter on a controller like this?

Is the audience going to accept it?

While gamers wrestled with the idea

of a first-person shooter on a console,

critics also keyed in on a not-so-tiny issue.

I don't like the controller.

Unfortunately, it's big, I think it's too big.

The Duke, they call it.

The Duke wasn't a small controller, it didn't feel cheap.

It felt, it felt like you could kill somebody with it.

You had to have gorilla hands to work with this thing,

it was the industry's biggest game controller.

The Duke controller was like a newborn baby.

I mean the thing was like 9 pounds, 3 ounces.

You had to kind of hug it.

As an adult with big hands you can hold it farther back,

and it's really comfortable and cool.

It was done bass-ackward as most things were in the original Xbox.

To get to that design, we kind of used you know

the human factors, ergonomic approach.

For those of us with smaller hands, we all thought, "Oh my God,

did all these guys just sit in a room and go,

'Oh, yeah! This is gonna be great!'"

It was like, "Oh, yeah, this is totally not going to work for us."

And it was like, "Okay, this is a problem."

Perhaps we didn't take into account the full range of hand sizes.

There's no way we can ship Duke in Japan.

People couldn't use it there.

There was almost a plea, you know, "Carl-san,

you've gotta find a way to make this smaller, please."

We knew it wasn't the right thing, but we didn't have enough time.

E3 was coming up, and so we had to go with what we had.

On May 17th, 2001,

global gaming's biggest event, E3, kicked off in Los Angeles.

The E3 is clearly the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the World Cup,

all rolled into one for the video-game industry.

For Team Xbox, it was the most important public test

for their new console before a looming November launch date.

We're trying to make an impression at E3,

and we don't know what hardware we're gonna be able to show,

and are we gonna try to show a lot or a little?

Should we show games at all?

We were heads down, focused on having all of our games

prepped for E3 and it nearly killed us.

It's Broadway. It's opening night.

You're going to read the reviews the next morning

and you're either hot or you're a flop.

I was pretty eager to get to E3 and get hands-on with the Xbox.

But, your first time making hardware, is painful.

And what you demo, and what ends up on the store shelves

are often very different things.

And so, I was really skeptical that this Xbox is gonna be ready.

It's a pleasure for me to be the first to welcome you to Los Angeles,

for what I'm sure is going to be quite an exciting week.

- So, it's 8 - AM in the morning.

The hardware team is like literally using duct tape to get the box done.

Sony had had their event the night before, and a party afterwards.

This was gonna be our coming-out party, and we now have a hungover media group

at 8 o'clock in the morning, coming to see Xbox.

That is not where you want to be.

We've made Xbox a reality.

And you can see here if I slide this down,

Xbox itself, now live, and ready to go.

I walk out on stage, and I do my first line.

And in fact, if I press this little button here in the front...

And then I, you know, hit the magic button that's supposed to start the Xbox.

You'll see Xbox will actually start up.

We can bring that video up.

We can bring that video up?

And nothing happens.

Nothing happened.

Well if we could bring the video up, Xbox would be live and starting and running.

I didn't know what to do so, I just went on.

So it's with great confidence

that on November the 8th in the North American market,

you'll be able to go into retail stores...

In less than a year's time, you're going to release this thing into the wild

and people are going to be able to play it and you're gonna love it...

and it doesn't turn on!

It was a devastating moment.

As the hardware planner, like, I mean, my heart just sank.

And you'll be able to get a box just like this with Xbox in it.

It was, um... a disaster.

A legendary sort of press conference snafu.

We had to convince the press very quickly

that we had a box that worked, and we needed to get

their hands on these games as quickly as we possibly could

so we could wash away that moment that we had on stage.

We're very excited about that.

But the disasters kept rolling.

The Xbox wasn't done yet.

The graphics hardware that they were running on

was running about half the speed

of what we expected the final product to be at.

Basically, I'm making excuses for it. It was slow.

Microsoft had never had a meaningful presence at E3 before.

The booth was packed.

And we decide to show Halo because we feel like we have

to show what's going to be our key title.

In terms of the games we were working on,Halo had the biggest role.

And so, it was the E3 demo on the floor.

So many people were coming in with huge curiosity

about what it was capable of, and I was completely disappointed.

I'm like, the frame rate's terrible.

The split screen stuff, it's kind of cool

but it just doesn't feel like it's powerful enough.

On the show floor, the unfinished game seemed to fall short

of its original promise of revolutionary gameplay.

So now you have a bad launch event and the key title

that's gonna carry the day looks bad and people start to think we're crazy.

Shortly thereafter E3, Peter Moore,

he's at Sega, and he says "Hey, I wanna give you our feedback from E3."

That E3 was critical for Sega to stay alive.

In February of 2001, Sega made the decision

to discontinue the Dreamcast and focus exclusively on software.

Part of that transition included a huge bet to focus on making games for Xbox.

But a disastrous showing at E3 from Microsoft meant danger for Sega.

As we were moving from being a first-party to a classic third-party publisher,

we absolutely needed somebody like a Microsoft

to get us through this difficult period.

And so Peter comes up to me, he looks at me and says, "Well, here's our feedback.

Retailers aren't gonna stock you, developers aren't gonna develop for you

and consumers think the product's not very good and it's too expensive."

MORTAL KOMBAT Scorpion!

I took it very personally.

I'm the leader of the team. It's my responsibility,

it's my obligation and I felt like I failed.

This is my resignation letter to my boss Rick Peluso.

I wrote this on Friday, - May 25th, 2001 at 2:02 - AM.

It starts off, "My status Importance High.

This is not going to be an easy email to write

and frankly I've postponed doing it several times.

The short summary is that my direct involvement in Xbox needs to end

and sooner than either of us would like.

I think this is both in my best interest and the best interest of Microsoft."

But Bill Gates and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

did not accept Robbie's resignation.

They just encouraged me to get it done and said you've done a great job, keep at it.

We're with you. I mean it wasn't much more they could say.

Right? There's no advice they could give me.

They were too far away to say, "Hey, go do this."

The only person who could figure that out was me.

I never told anybody on the team.

Rick and Steve and Bill.

They're the only people that ever knew.

That gives you the sense how personally challenging it was

for a person who hates losing.

Electronic Arts.

It's one of the biggest game makers in the world

and its CEO Larry Probst was quoted in the Financial Times as saying this,

that "Microsoft has a lot to do over the next few months.

They are on a death march now."

I don't think anybody had an easy ride to launch.

All we're thinking about is getting the device done

so that we can make launch date.

If you didn't have console units on retail shelves for a holiday, you missed a year.

That holiday was vital.

There were a lot of late nights.

We were trying to engineer and design something that we'd never done before.

We were building the technology, we were building the hardware inside.

The Xbox circuit board is about, yea big.

It had probably on the order of 800 parts.

Parts of the Xbox were coming from all over the world.

Like Hungary, and Mexico.

You know there were people who went and lived in China,

in a hotel room, for weeks on end.

We would be flying back and forth with hard drives to get stuff back to test.

Microsoft had never shipped a console before.

It turns out there's a lot of regulation, everywhere in the world.

You had to be certified by the right agency, and approved.

Their approval took longer than we expected.

Parts wound up getting delayed from suppliers.

It was, every day, come into the office, see a fire, try to put the fire out.

We were tracking the hardware, tracking the components,

tracking our launch dates with such an accelerated pace.

It was, um, chaotic.

- Chaos. - Total chaos.

People themselves were doing Herculean things.

We would sleep at the office.

This was all happening in real time.

It had just never been done before.

Xbox was the toughest job I will ever have or have ever had.

I will never do it again.

Every day was a challenge, both sort of technically

and professionally, but also personally.

You know, you were lucky if you had

a personal relationship that survived launch.

Mine did not.

It's kind of like you're on this horse that's bucking and you're thinking,

"Okay, is this ever gonna stop or will this be the end of me?"

8 to 12 weeks before launch, we're coming in way hotter than anyone expected to.

We doubted whether the hardware's gonna be done in time.

We're not sure any of the games are gonna be done in time.

The ship is still on fire, the plane hasn't landed,

all the metaphors for crashes you can think of.

But in the end, that team believed.

There's no second try at the Xbox, so this was a Hail Mary culture,

and if we were to succeed it was going to be absolutely epic.

Touchdown!

November 15th, 2001, Xbox was released in Times Square.

Mr. Bill Gates!

We painted Times Square green.

Everywhere you looked you saw the Xbox green logo.

Xbox was up on all these big billboards.

One of those moments in your life you're never gonna forget.

Here we are, huge line of gamers down the street waiting to buy this Xbox.

20 years old, first time going to the city alone.

I get on a bus and I show up in Times Square.

I go straight to the new Toys R Us and I'm looking for the line.

I'm prepared to stay there all day.

We worked with the city to open up the WWF Restaurant,

across the street from Toys R Us Times Square.

And that's where all the gamers came first.

They have Xbox consoles set up everywhere.

They pretty much just allowed all the gamers to hang out

and play and test out all these games.

Bill wanted to be on-site.

He wanted to help hand over the first console.

Bill Gates is down at a gaming system,

shook my hand and said, "You ready to play?"

And then we were playing Fusion Frenzy.

And Bill Gates made a comment that he had actually taken

two weeks off of work just to practice this game.

He wanted to beat the gamers.

Does anyone know what the shoot button is?

- It's the A, I think. - A?

He couldn't beat me.

I absolutely took pleasure in beating Bill Gates, yes.

Thank you for this.

I've been waiting a long time.

Everybody got a tag on their wrist and when your color was called,

we brought you across the street to Toys R Us,

and Bill was there to hand out the very first Xbox.

Tonight's kind of a celebration, it's after a lot of hard work.

Ah, so, they count down.

Bill Gates has it rung in on the register.

Price is up there, 299.99.

Four, three, two...

One hits and he hands me the box and says, "Don't worry, I'm buying it for you."

I turn around with even more excitement

and raise my prized possession over my head.

Edward Glucksman became the first gamer in the world to ever own an Xbox.

It was a magical night.

I'm a 20-year-old kid looking for a console.

That's all I wanted to do.

First time going to the city alone.

I managed to get sent home in a limo.

- He's a celebrity. - Every night.

They actually did it.

You know, Microsoft actually built and delivered this thing.

The feeling was like, you know, crying level of exhaustion

and like intense pride for the thing that we had made.

There's never been a prouder moment in somebody's early career.

You know, I still have goosebumps today thinking about it.

I tell people that faith is a force multiplier.

That team believed.

And because that team believed, Xbox got done.

If that team doesn't believe and they're just there

doing their jobs, we never finish.

That small group of big personalities managed not only to convince Bill Gates

and the board that we wanted to get into this nascent industry,

but they also managed to get an entire organization

of game people created and pointed in the right direction.

Get on the subway, the whole station is covered in Xbox logos.

I had to sit down and started to cry.

And even Kevin got emotional.

It was an impossible task that we should not have been able to do.

I was tremendously proud of it.

But at the same time, that was the end

of that special moment in time that we were all able to be part of.

It was the end of an era.

With the Xbox out of their hands

and into living rooms around the world, Kevin Bachus and Seamus Blackley

left Microsoft for new adventures in the game industry.

Microsoft Xbox went on sale at midnight,

but when it comes to video games,

it's not the system that counts, it's the games.

Nobody actually really cares about the hardware,

all they care about is the content.

To be successful, you have to give the gamers

that platform-defining title

that you had to go out and buy an Xbox if you wanted to play.

Halo was like this gem, like this was going to be

the diamond we offered up at Xbox launch.

But remember, Halo showed up at E3

6 months before the game was supposed to launch,

with pretty serious framerate issues.

Why is it running like Internet video from the early '90s?

We got hammered for how it showed up on the floor.

This is our lead title.

Are we gonna actually launch something that is this terrible game?

I think there was a bunch of panic.

People didn't see what they expected.

That was the part where people actually got super worried.

There was an incredible amount of pressure on Halo.

If Halo wasn't a hit, then the future of Xbox really was in doubt.