Original subtitles

E3 2001, when we saw Halo, my friends and I, we were like, "Ugh."

It's crashing, it's buggy, it sounds terrible.

It seemed like Microsoft bit off more than they could chew.

At each build, it didn't seem to be improving at all.

Like at some point it wasn't about making Halo perfect.

Honestly, we were just focused on,

how do we get this thing on disk in time for launch?

There was an incredible pressure on Halo.

This is our lead title and this is what we've got?

If this thing fails, it would all be for nothing.

Xbox was finished.

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 figure of gaming.

It's the Xbooooooox!

Soon, you will be food.

On Halo, we were doing the thing

that people weren't quite sure would even work on a console.

A first-person shooter.

And the framerate was terrible.

HALO Come on, make my day!

All of a sudden we were in a new area, console games,

and what do we know about console games?

I had only heard things about,

you know, "It's not very good, really."

Bungie may be a, a good studio, may be a fine studio,

but the game wasn't really being received that well.

We're gonna make it, aren't we sir?

With Halo and Xbox's fates intertwined,

something drastic had to be done to get the game right.

So, in a last-ditch effort, Ed Fries and Bungie essentially

put the development team under arrest.

Ed Fries had put Halo behind the curtain and won't let anybody see it,

won't let anybody talk to the Bungie team.

He's like, "You guys seal yourself off.

Literally and metaphorically, and deliver a great game."

Like, our doors, I don't even think Ed could get into some of the Bungie doors.

I kept saying "Hey, Ed, you know, when can I play Halo?"

And he goes, "Oh, not yet."

I mean we only had a couple more months before

we had to get this thing into boxes.

Good to see you, Master Chief.

Things aren't going well.

We had to stand up a complete game that was performant on new hardware.

We had to create a compelling story with characters,

we had to cut levels, take shortcuts,

just a mad rush of long days, sleeping under desks,

full-on, old-school crunch to get this game done.

- That's got to hurt. There it is. That's got to hurt. Oof!

The one positive thing

that comes out of crunch is ideation and invention and polish.

Ultimately that was one of the things

that Bungie took very, very seriously, was polish.

For us, at Bungie, this was a passionate effort

to make the best game possible, but when you show up as Microsoft,

you are open to a whole different level of criticism.

Yeah, dude, that's cool. All right!

And Halo had the burden of showing up excellent in all ways.

And we had no ideaHalo was gonna be a hit.

We hoped people would like it.

Here we go.

But the rubber hits the road when you meet the gamer for real.

Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven!

- Six! Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Go faster!

Halo? - Fourth And Long.

Anybody else, Halo? - Halo, yeah. Halo.

I remember very vividly going to local launch events.

Hold it up!

Starting to look at chatter online with fan sites.

And then game reviews. And then comments.

And realizing, "Oh my God. People like it."

How the hell are we gonna beat this game?

Halo, which had problems entering the fray,

came out on day one and it was amazing.

It was really amazing.

I just felt that sense of possibility.

Damn it, Jenkins! Fire your weapon!

That you could go anywhere and do anything

on this beautiful, lush planet

filled with things that were trying to kill you.

They just did it so well.

The controls felt natural.

You could tell like that it was going to be

a breakthrough for first-person shooters.

I didn't care that I wasn't using a mouse,

I was using a controller,

I was in the Halo universe, and it was fantastic.

It was a bit of an epiphany, of, oh, [BLEEP], like, you can do that?

Like, you can play this kind of game on a console?

Awesome!

Halo was a phenomenon, that dual player mode was, wow.

Landing on the beach with the Warthog trying to protect Marines

with Master Chief...

it just blew me away man.

Banshee on flames comes down and lands on the ice

and is skidding towards me across the ice, and it's gonna run me over and kill me.

And it skids to a stop right in front of me, and I live.

It was like I was there.

It was like I had that experience.

Somebody order a Warthog?

With Halo, Microsoft had that platform-defining title,

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

and that was something that I always envied and admired.

Halo formed so much of the backbone of, I think, what, what Xbox is.

Woo hoo!

Xbox!

Watching the feedback we were getting on Halo,

the stories people were telling, it was a cultural moment.

- You getting Halo? - Oh yeah.

Good. Just checking.

Without Halo, you know, we're not here.

Halo. Combat Evolved.

Microsoft estimated that they have sold

one million copies of Halo in the US alone.

Fifty percent of Xbox owners are also Halo players.

Xbox was the Halo box.

That's what made it work.

Halo broke ground in so many ways.

In game control, camera control, storytelling.

Even art style.

It inspired a lot of people to tell a different kind of story.

It changed the game for Xbox but I also think it changed

the way we look at first-person shooters.

First-person shooters had only really largely existed at scale on PC.

And mapping those controls to the controller, they just did it right.

It just felt right.

No one had done it that well before,

no one had nailed it, they just nailed the controls.

So before Halo came out, the conventional wisdom was

if you wanted to play a shooter you had to do it on a PC

because that's where you would have the precision with the mouse

and keyboard to aim, make the small movements

to land that headshot on your enemies.

What Bungie did with the help

of Microsoft's playtesting and user-research labs,

is figure out how to get something that would approximate that feeling,

on a console, where all you have is the two sticks to move and aim.

They weren't the first to do a shooter on the console but they did it best by far.

And the influence of what Microsoft and Bungie were able to achieve

is still being felt in games today.

Even today it's the largest genre in console gaming.

And, really because of Halo, Xbox became the console for first-person shooter fans.

The multiplayer was transcendent.

It was just something that you didn't experience on any other platform.

Microsoft made a huge bet on broadband.

Every single Xbox had an Ethernet port in the back and it paid off in spades.

You could use it for LAN parties and to system link on a LAN.

Oh my God!

PC gamers understood the joy of the LAN, the local area network.

You make a network of computers in a local area

which means you have to be face-to-face and nose-to-armpit with gamers.

- I got the flag I'm out the front! - Oh, that sucks.

And it's a fun experience, you can all be in a shared virtual world

and run around and do things that you couldn't through a modem

just because you're all there, connected, and it's higher speed.

Microsoft ushered that in for consoles.

Manually plugging machines together to play games

was not a new concept.

But it had always required a lot of technical know-how.

Now, the communal gaming experience wasn't just for computer geeks.

It was for everyone.

Right now we have this game going here which is sixteen.

Downstairs, I was just down there, they probably by now

have at least a sixteen game going there.

They keep on bringing in more stuff and it seems to be expanding.

It was a communal party multiplayer atmosphere

that you could have with a massive group of people

and have multiple consoles all connected.

- We'd get together at like 8 - AM

and play 16-player Halo all the way - until 8 - AM the next day.

I remember running an Ethernet cable up the stairs

so I could have a friend bring his over and play.

I'd go to my buddy's house and we're on two different floors,

we're in four different rooms cause screen looking's a thing.

Man, the fights were legendary.

"You looked at my screen." "No I didn't." "Yes you did."

Don't look at my screen.

I can't! I can't see your screen!

We'd make a little flyer at work like "Halo LAN Party," this Saturday.

Bring an Xbox, bring a controller, bring a TV.

That changed everything about my social life for probably ten years.

And these, by the way, weren't small TVs.

These were the big cathode ray TVs that you had to find a way to be able to use.

I had a heavy-ass TV.

Flat screens weren't around back then.

- You got it? Yup.

So I bought a PT Cruiser just so I could get my TV around and my Xbox.

That was a fashion statement to have a Xbox in the car

back in the days, with that big screen.

- Gimme a second. Gimme a second. Your foot! Your foot!

I know it's my foot... Ow!

I remember playing nonstop and just sitting there in my own puddle of sweat.

The minute you stepped into a multiplayer match on Halo, time just disappeared.

You just got sucked in.

And we would play all night long.

It provided me an experience I had never had on a console before, period.

Halo was a runaway hit, that had spawned its own social scene,

putting Microsoft in the big leagues with Sony and Nintendo for the first time.

But the team wasn't done.

They saw a way to take those multi-room raucous LAN parties, and make them global.

Sniper. Sniper! Ohhhh!

The initial concept for Xbox Live

was one of those magical ideas, so it gets to go in a special folder

that I call Epic Pitches.

Because they're pitches that even though they were in their infancy,

they planted a seed of ideas that turned into something

that had an impact on the entire industry.

Maybe an impact on global culture.

We built an Ethernet port in every unit,

and the idea was is now we can

actually have a networked community of gamers from living room

to living room around the world no matter what language you speak,

no matter where you are in the world,

and we can all be part of one bigger community,

and that vision was like awesome.

Yes!

There definitely was some skepticism about the idea of playing

multiplayer games over the Internet.

When we were scrambling to get Xbox done,

Xbox Live is like a vague fog in everybody's head.

Nobody knew how that was gonna work, and whether it was gonna be

a good ecosystem, and whether the quality would ever be there.

And it became a huge point of tension

in terms of how it was designed and how it was gonna work.

But we're gonna do it.

Microsoft is putting literally billions of dollars on the line to back us.

But the program was fraught with risk.

It required technology that really hadn't been built

anywhere in the industry before.

And those kind of tech investments are always, always risky.

With so much riding on the success of Xbox Live,

the team couldn't afford to develop it in a corporate vacuum.

If they wanted to deliver a gaming experience unlike any other,

they needed gamers to tell them exactly what they wanted.

We went out and talked to a whole bunch of gamers

around the United States.

One of the things that came back was

that voice communications was going to be imperative.

You know, it is a good day to die, Cheesemaker..

Nobody wanted to sit there and text with a typewriter,

just taking out their buddies.

The first thing was you had to get this starter kit,

it had a headset in it, it's like...

You were talking about console gaming.

What are you supposed to do with a headset?

The Xbox communicator.

It lets you talk to other gamers while you're playing.

This broke down the barriers of how you could speak.

You simply banged on your headset, and you could talk to anybody

in the world that was on the platform.

Back to throw! Zips the pass over the middle.

Your defense is offensive.

Your defense is offensive?

Building that global couch where people can talk

and kind of virtually elbow each other,

with four gamers on four continents and have it all perfectly fluid

through headsets just as if they were sitting in the same room together.

This was before Skype.

So the notion of low-latency, great-quality voice,

we had to go build out that tech.

I like this one, you get your own digital personal ID, remembers your moves.

- That's a good idea. Yeah.

We're creating this giant gaming universe

for gamers to play in over generations.

We knew it was important to have this one identity,

ah, that linked to you, where you could build your legacy in gaming.

Your gamertag.

It's your identity on Xbox Live, the legend you build for yourself

in this brand new gaming universe.

Remember, you're building all your stats and friends in that name.

Rather than have a gamertag for Madden

and a separate gamertag for Halo, it's like,

you just want to be known as one thing.

My gamertag is TheRealB.

My gamertag is Cowboy22.

My gamertag is HeroProtagonist.

- It's KingDoug. - TheSpeceman.

Xbox Live wanted to bring that

fundamental instant fun into the world of online gaming.

You will never be without a game to play, anytime, day or night.

It was a revolution in online gaming.

The team was finally feeling confident.

They had the technical knowhow to build Xbox Live.

But on the other side of that challenge, was another, even bigger question.

If they built it, would gamers pay for it?

The technology was in the box, but the commitment from a player,

we just didn't know how it was gonna fly.

That firstly someone's gonna pay fifty bucks a month for broadband,

but they also have to go tell their friends that it's worth it.

Ah, I've never been shy to share my opinion,

and there was one time where I was talking to J.

and we ended up arguing about it all the way into the hallway,

and it was me saying, "This Xbox Live idea you have

is the dumbest idea I've ever heard.

Like I hate this idea.

Somebody's gonna pay 50 dollars for,

for multiplayer games when they can get it for free?"

And people did laugh at that and said this,

"Why would you pay for access because you're already paying for your game?"

It wasn't just me, it was like an entire division worth

of people saying "What, are you nuts?"

So this experience had to be amazing.

That was crazy to people. Like, who's gonna play

multiplayer if they have to pay for it.

Microsoft is taking the Xbox game system to a whole new level.

- Xbox Live. - The future of video games arrives today.

Microsoft is putting the Xbox online.

Today the Xbox goes live.

Manning is at his home in Indianapolis,

Hasselbeck at his in Seattle, and they're about to play

each other in a video game, using the Microsoft Xbox console.

Oh, sit down!

Son, don't your coaches tell you you can't take a sack in the red zone?

That is quarterback 101.

Last night, we had gamers all over the country

playing against celebrities here in LA where we had our big premiere party.

We're checking the perimeter.

All right. So here I go.

Xbox Live launched exactly one year

after the original Xbox itself launched, November 15th, 2002.

The launch of Xbox Live was almost like a second launch for Xbox.

Blow up and kill everything in sight. Is that what you're getting?

That's the idea man, it's just like doing RoboCop.

I'm gonna open up a can of whoop-ass and see how it tastes.

The two launch titles that I have such fond memories of,

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, which was a port of the PC game,

and MechAssault, which was a third-person action-orientated take on MechWarrior.

Just lightbulbs went off, just the magic was there.

Live let us add the element of community and human society to game design.

It was just immediately clear to me

that this was gonna be like the thing for video games.

What Live did for Xbox was it created this community

that once you got into it and attached to it, was very hard to leave.

I met so many people online playing games

that I never woulda been cool with, based off of us playing each other,

me beatin' him, him beatin' me, him havin' some great plays.

And there's an extraordinary number

of like 50-year-old males that play Xbox Live together,

and they will not go to another system because their buddies aren't gonna go.

So they're only gonna buy a system to hang out with the guys so they can play

while the kids are sleeping and they're gonna play

Call of Duty or something right?

Every night me and my homies be on a party

with about 15 to 20 of us, and we be talkin'

and talkin' about what happened in the day, and we playin' the games,

and it's just like a great gossip line for some grown-ass men.

What a nice play!

We had forecasted how many

Xbox Live subscribers we were gonna have, you know

month 1, month 2, month 6, et cetera.

Hey we got 50,000, hey we got 100,000.

Hey, we got a million, hey we got two million, it just kept growing.

And that happened, like,

like, I wouldn't say instantly, but pretty damn close.

It happened very, very fast.

Xbox Live was unprecedented.

Everybody else's version paled in comparison.

What you think of gaming today, being on a headset,

talking with friends, playing games, that just seems commonplace now

because it is commonplace now, but Xbox made that possible in a big way.

Xbox Live could be considered one of the very first social-media platforms.

Before Facebook, even before Myspace, Microsoft really did pioneer

the very first interactive dynamic social platform.

Quite frankly, Microsoft proved to the world that online multiplayer

was going to be the key to the future.

Gamers flocked to Xbox Live in numbers

that even took optimists within Microsoft by surprise.

But while the platform was teeming with newly devoted fans who loved sniping

their college buddies from different continents,

there was one consistent complaint.

What happened to the game that put Xbox on the map?

Where was Halo?

When we started working on the second Halo game,

the weight of expectation came crashing down on us.

Halo 2 had to be a blockbuster movie.

And that was always a danger is, what if we just push to do this

big triple-A spectacle, and miss the heart of what

made Halo a success in the first place?

Goddamn we have a lot of work to do, between now and E3.

Everybody on the team had a different idea about what being more excellent would be.

We loved that you could get into vehicles, for example, but it frustrated us

that you couldn't, like, tear someone out of a vehicle

and jump into their vehicle and take it over.

So boarding vehicles became a huge design initiative.

Look out!

We were really good at coming up with great ideas.

We weren't quite as good at production discipline

and figuring out how to right-size all those ideas,

fit 'em into a box, timeline, and ship on time.

When I got there, they had reached

a point in development where they were basically

gonna have to cut half the game, and in some ways start from scratch

on a lot of the promises that they'd made themselves.

Within a year, it became clear it wasn't working.

Just the way the game felt Jason really wasn't happy with.

He looked at the game.

this.

And he came to me and said, "You know we have a problem.

I'm gonna have to rework a bunch of the work

and it's effectively gonna add another year to the schedule."

Jason help!

There was a lot of pressure.

How can we ship a better game than Halo?

And from Microsoft's point of view, Xbox's point of view,

how can you ship that game as quickly as possible?

This is now by far the most valuable franchise that we have.

You know this is Halo, we can't screw this up.

Jason saying he needs a new year, time for me to step up and do my job as a boss.

I do know that Ed went to bat for us.

Ed was very much a purist.

He was about creating great games and giving the dev teams

the time they need, and that is at conflict

sometimes with actually making a profit.

So, to me it was a no-brainer.

But ah, Robbie wanted to put it in front

of the other leads on the team, because Halo was so important,

it's gonna affect, you know, the Xbox Live team and what they do,

it would affect the continued marketing of the platform and things like that.

Microsoft back then was a technology company.

Software, shipping on time, at quality,

was a big part of the rhythm of the business.

So, we go in and we have the meeting

and Robbie basically goes around the room and takes a vote.

And it went around the room and everybody voted to keep it on the original schedule.

I walked out of the room and basically I just threatened to quit immediately.

Robbie gave in.

He calmed me down and he agreed and he gave us the extra year for Halo 2.

Ed got the Bungie team the time they needed to finish the game.

But the delayed launch had a ripple effect throughout Microsoft.

Really that Bungie meeting was the beginning of the end for me.

When I walked out of there, it wasn't just that I was mad,

it was the first time I could imagine leaving the company.

I had been there since I was in college.

I had a lot of stuff going on in my life.

About to turn 40. Um, I had been at the company a long time

and made plenty of money so I didn't need to be there.

Within the next six months I quit.

In January 2004, Ed Fries resigned from Microsoft,

while Bungie set out to finish what they'd started, creating a sequel

to one of the most popular titles in console history.

The extra year Fries bought them turned out to make all the difference.

Not only did it elevate the game, it built fan excitement to a whole...

New...

Level.

The lead-up to Halo 2, I had never experienced anything like that in my life.

It was genuinely a pop-culture event, and I don't say that lightly.

7,000 stores are opening on midnight.

They've been waiting a long time for this.

They were chanting, "Halo 2! "

Halo 2!

Halo 2!

It just felt like something new was going to happen in entertainment.

Because Halo 2 is the best,Halo 2 is everything!

Xbox's Halo 2 is expected to generate more revenue in 24 hours

than day 1 sales of any full-feature movie in entertainment history.

Halo 2 is probably, you know, one of the biggest, ah,

phenomenons to ever hit my life, and a lot of people's lives.

It was the biggest day in entertainment history.

Halo 2 sold 2.4 million units

in 24 hours.

Here was a video game, for the first time really crushing movies.

It was a coming of age story for the video-game industry.

This game is simply the best game on the planet.

I played Halo 2 with my friends literally every night for at least a year.

That's how transformativeHalo 2 was for me,

and what it did for Xbox Live, there had been nothing like that, ever.

With the innovative success of Xbox Live,

and a full-blown cultural phenomenon in Halo 2,

it seemed like Microsoft's bets were paying off.

Xbox was even surpassing Nintendo in US sales.

On a winning streak, the team put their eyes

on an industry-changing follow-up to the Xbox.

When I arrived at Microsoft, it was my job to think about the way

that the gamer was gonna be using this, two, three, four years after launch,

and how do you continue to deliver content.

We started then to plan this multibillion

dollar investment, that became the Xbox 360.

Xbox 360 is the new entertainment system

that's designed around high def, wireless, and always connected.

And it doesn't stop there.

It's totally personalizable

so you can change the way it works, and the way it plays,

and find your friends no matter what you're doing.

When they unveiled the 360, I saw a very powerful console

with a stunning interface, with a focus on, on being online, always connected.

This was all stuff that they had sort of experimented with,

with the original Xbox and Xbox Live but now they were building it

into the core experience of the console.

Xbox 360 was five to ten times more powerful

than the original Xbox.

To achieve that, we had to push technology

and solutions that didn't exist in the previous generation.

We had to go explore things that had never been done.

As opposed to leveraging a lot of off-the-shelf components

and existing technologies, we were actually building,

a brand-new processor and chipset for this particular console.

So we were taking a lot more of that engineering effort on internally.

At the heart of the Xbox 360 are 3 IBM CPUs.

Whatever you'd heard about the PlayStation 2,

Emotion Engine, you know, whatever big, wild dreams

you had created in your head, we needed to create

a leapfrog product that said, "Hey, this is even more powerful.

This is the most powerful console on the planet."

And so, we evolved the Xbox from a powerful console

that plays all the games you love, to a console that connects you

to all your friends and connects you to a lifestyle,

this digital entertainment lifestyle.

We involved movies.

We got content generated that you could access, music.

The magic in Xbox 360 is, it does so much more than the original Xbox did.

Xbox 360 guide?

It is your launch pad to all of your digital entertainment.

Here you can store your pictures, videos, and music.

We've also added a new concept called achievements.

Sort of a record of everything you've accomplished

across your entire library of games.

With Xbox 360, we've created technology that will enable people from every age

and every corner of the planet to gather together in new ways.

A product with games at its core, surrounded by limitless,

connected digital entertainment.

Everything we were trying to do had just never been done before.

We're really focusing hardcore on building

an online experience for Xbox around games.

Gaming was always first.

But this was no longer just the ability for you to play a game online.

This was breakthrough thinking.

We built Xbox 360 with a mission.

They showed it as a media hub in your living room.

You could connect other devices to it, you could play your photos.

You can do this, that, the other. They targeted a broad range of gamers.

They were building this thing to be future-proof.

Microsoft's new Xbox 360 will be first to hit store shelves this fall.

It's huge. It's a big, big statement for us.

The next generation of consoles starts now.

We wanted to try something new with the Xbox 360 launch.

- Xbox rules, man! What are your favorite games?

- Woo! Where are you guys from?

Did you drive far? - Well, from Indianapolis, Indiana!

- And Kansas City. - Los Angeles.

- Los Angeles, Hollywood. - I came in from Minneapolis.

Orlando, Florida.

It's the only way to get it on the 360, you hear me?

Hey this is Xbox Live's Major Nelson,

we're here at Zero Hour in the Mojave Desert.

Hey guys, you ready to go?

Tonight marks the biggest gaming event of the year, and it starts right now.

Zero Hour was this in-person fan experience in the desert in California.

I was at G4 at the time, and I remember we got wind

that they were just gonna throw an epic party for Xbox fans.

It's the Xbox 360!

I'm hexed!

We had a hangar in the middle of nowhere.

And decked it out with hundreds of gaming stations.

We are seconds away from this hangar opening,

and all of these people getting a chance to play the Xbox 360!

And as the doors start to open, like the biggest doors you'd ever seen,

you knew that you're about to run in to what would be the future of gaming.

- Are you ready? Yeah!

And we basically said,

"Hey, come here and you're gonna be the first to play games

and we're gonna sell you consoles here as well."

I want Xbox!

Thousands of gamers came.

People that had met on Xbox Live

that had never actually seen each other in person before.

People were so happy.

It was a magical launch event.

The Zero Hour event was a huge success, a massive celebration.

We had so much pride in this product.

Was this a transcendent moment for you?

Oh yes.

The excitement generated in the desert

spilled into the rest of the country,

as the console became available to the public on November 22nd, 2005.

I waited in line in like freezing rain for like three hours

outside this Best Buy to try and get a slip so I could get an Xbox 360.

I was so stoked when I got it, I took a selfie.

They had a great launch lineup, they had the gamer in mind first.

It had the features that I would want in a console.

It had the games for casual gamers, for hardcore gamers.

The Xbox 360 Marketplace was where you could buy digital games.

Sure you had Steam and people could do it on PC,

but this was a managed, curated portfolio, much like you know as an app store today.

And we were one of the first ones to have it.

I start downloading games, and I download,Joust, Robotron, and Defender,

and like all of a sudden everybody's having fun 'cause these games are amazing,

and I'm like, okay, we were sitting here, at grandma's house, and we were bored

and I just got on the Internet and downloaded games

and now we're playing video games and having fun.

Huh? Ah!

This is the future, this is the greatest thing in history,

and this is what this console transition is about.

I can view my profile, so I can see you know, what games I've got,

and it's got the whole achievements thing here as well.

It was the first console with achievements.

We take that for granted now but all the little bonus points

and your gamerscore and your rating.

You achieved something in the game

and that something is whatever the developer decided.

Hey, did you scale this mountain, did you open this door, did you find this thing?

Somebody could play through the game but

if you wanted to really complete it you had to get every achievement.

Kick some ass.

I've got 148,000 gamerscore.

People are like, "What is that?

Why do you, why do you care?"

Because it's something that reminds me of all the time that I've had,

all the games that I've played, all the, the...

I feel like I've accomplished something.

They had an incredible console that

was built for always online, always ready, with a stunning interface

that ran on top of everything and ah, they came out guns blazing.

Mine, finally!

We had low price, with high def,

with great games, and a product that was great.

And so we felt we had a chance that generation.

Yeah, we were riding high, we were celebrating, morale was extremely high.

They had arrived.

They had to gain the trust of developers.

They had to make a statement with the gamers, ah, they had to show

that they belonged at this party, and the 360 was a beautiful iteration

of all of the lessons that they had learned with the original Xbox.

I think 360 was finally that moment that J.

and Seamus and everyone, you know, dreamed of.

Gamers were looking to see whether we would get it right this time.

And we thought that we did.

We needed to be seen as the start of the next generation.

And this all needed to come together flawlessly.

Unfortunately, that's not quite what happened.

This is called an E74 error?

Contact Xbox Customer Support.

It was in the forums and I started to notice that something wasn't right.

I think there's something going on here.

The criticisms that we're reading about

are coming from the games press

who are hearing from gamers, who are saying,

"I'm having a problem with my box."

You can feel the top of the Xbox, it's pretty hot.

We could hear retailers starting to say...

"There's an issue here."

With the 360, Microsoft had built something

amazing and special, but this problem was something...

What the [BLEEP]!

...that could kill the Xbox.

And all the work that they had done to get to this point.