Former Xbox Boss Reveals Secrets, The Birth Of Microsoft’s Xbox

Ed Fries, the former vice president of game publishing at Microsoft has the former vice president of game publishing at Microsoft. Fries, who left the company in 2004 and is now a board member at Mixamo revealed in an interview on how the Xbox was conceived and the beginning stages of Xbox development.

There was originally two Xbox-es; the DirectX box that finally became the Xboxes and another project that didn’t see the light of day:

“And then, one day, a couple of guys from the DirectX team dropped by my office, and they said they had this idea. It was called the DirectX Box.”

“It was basically a PC running Windows, but they wanted to hide the windows-ness of it. So the Windows OS was going to be hidden, and it was going to be packaged and sold as a game console.”

“But the first problem we had was that there were two groups inside the company that wanted to make a game console.”

“One group had been working with Sega on the Dreamcast – they had their own proposal for a console that was very much like a PlayStation, y’know, a very straightforward game console.

“Their idea was a basic console with a disc drive and dedicated operating system; no hard-drive.”

It was Bill gates who gave the go-ahead on the DirectX box which became the first Xbox.

““I don’t know if you’ve seen the very first concept for Xbox – basically it was a giant silver X with a pc board attached inside. So, once we won the battle to be the team that was going to move things forward, I decided that we should take the other team’s design idea [Laughs]”

The main reason why Bill Gates approved the DirectX box was that it ran Windows. However, the team later decided to use a custom operating system”

“Once we got going, the biggest step we had to take was removing the Windows OS from the Xbox. A key reason why Bill [Gates] chose our team instead of the Dreamcast guys was because our idea for the Xbox kept Windows’ OS inside, theirs didn’t.”

“But the more we looked at the user experience, the more we realised that this needed a custom operating system to work.”

Ed Fries, who left Microsoft in 2004 and is now a board member at Mixamo.

You can read more on the birth of Microsoft’s Xbox thorugh the above link, including the decision to use a HDD which was revolutionary at the time, Xbox Live, Halo and the Bungie-Rare deal.

More at Develop-Online