And I was out of a job. I was halfway through college, and I was writing games to help pay for my college. So I had to get a real job. I started working in the computer center at school. I started to look for summer jobs back in my hometown of Bellevue, Washington. And Bellevue, Washington happens to be adjacent to Redmond, Washington. People probably know Redmond is the home of Microsoft. So one spring I sent a resume to Microsoft. And they liked what they saw, and they flew me back up home for an interview during spring break and hired me. And so I worked as an intern for that summer, the summer of 85. And they liked the job I did that summer, and so they hired me full-time. They offered me a full-time job when I graduated from college in 86. So anyway, fast forward. So I basically, yeah, things went pretty fast over the next 10 years for me. They hired me in to work on Excel. So I was the youngest of seven programmers who were working on the first version of Excel for Windows. We were trying to battle Lotus. Lotus 1, 2, 3 was the biggest PC product in the world. Lotus was bigger than all of Microsoft, so we felt like we had a pretty important job, just seven of us trying to beat this company that was bigger than all of Microsoft. And so we worked on that game, that non-game. It's hard, I know. I've done so many games since we worked on that program, shipped it, and the group grew from seven to 15, and we did more Excel, and then it grew to 35. And by then, all of us, original seven, were managing small teams, and then it became a group of 50 programmers. And I was the lead programmer by then. This is after about five years. And anyway, so I'm working on Excel. My boss, gets called over to run Word. Okay, so now we're talking about early 90s. So the head of Word leaves. My boss gets promoted to run Word. He goes over and immediately has a big fight with the development manager on Word. And the development manager gets mad and quits. And so my boss is like, hey, Ed, why don't you come over and work on Word? And that would be a step up for me now. And I like this guy, so I'm like, sure, I'll come over and work on Word. Programming is programming, right? It's all fun. So I go over to Word and now I'm managing 60 people, okay? Been at the company a little over five years. And I'm also programming on the side because I love to program. But now I have a job where I have to manage 60 people and also write code because writing code is fun. So I do that for the next five years. Put out a bunch of words. We battle WordPerfect. which was the leading word processor at the time. And everything's good. And so it comes the point where I've been at the company almost ten years and they're like, well, the next thing for you to do, the next step in your career is to run a business at Microsoft. You know, maybe you should go run like the PowerPoint business. That would make sense. And I'm like, yeah, but if I ran a business, I couldn't program anymore. And they're like, yeah, that's true. You wouldn't be able to program anymore. I'm like, but I love to program. I mean, there's really only two things I love. I love, you know, I love programming and I love video games. So, you know, like when I wasn't at work, I was home playing all the greatest games. And, you know, early 90s was a great time to be a PC gamer. So they didn't care about that. They're like, you should go to California and run PowerPoint. But I cared. So I looked around the company and there was a small games group at that time in the company doing flight simulator and not too much else. And I said, why don't I run that group? And they told me that was crazy. Why they multiple vice presidents called me into their offices. They said I was committing career suicide if I left office to go run this games group, another vice president said to me, why would you leave office, one of the most important parts of this company, to go work on something no one cares about? So I'm like, I care about it. I think games are great. I think they're really important. So I put my foot down. I said, no, this is what I really want to do. And they kind of rolled their eyes and they were like, okay, fine, go waste your career. Go work on your game thing and they let me go take over this little group. And so that was, we're talking mid-90s now. And it was great. It was really great. I was worried whether I was making the right career choice until a week into the new job they're like, oh, we have a trip plan to Japan. You want to come to Japan? I'm like, yeah, I'd love to go to Japan. So we go to Japan, we meet all these amazing game developers. It was incredible. It was just incredible. I'm like, I love my new job. My new job is great. And really, it turned out to be good in another way, too. And that is, you know, when they said to me, why would you leave office to go work on something no one cares about, I didn't really realize they meant it so literally. I mean, they really didn't care what I was doing. You know? Like, as long as I wasn't losing money for the company, I could do whatever I wanted. You know? So, I mean, my, what would you do, right? You work for this big company. They don't really care about what you're doing. But you've got a group of 50 really hardcore game people, you know, and you can pretty much do whatever you want. What would you do? I mean, I bet you would do what I did. I bet you would like just go all over the world, try to sign up all the great game developers, everybody's game who you've ever played, who you thought was great, who you had respect for. You'd meet them, you'd talk to them, see what they want to work on, and then you'd try to get them on your team to make games for you, you know. And so that's what we did. We ran all over the world, met with every great game designer you can think of. And we started to put more and more game deals together. And actually Chicago, since I'm here in Chicago, I should talk about Chicago for a minute. Chicago was a really important source for us of great game development, great game developers. Of course, at the beginning, our core product was Microsoft Flight Simulator, which was made by Bruce Artwick Organization, right here out of Chicago. My predecessor had just acquired that company. So when I came in, the first job I had was to move all the people from Chicago who made Flight Simulator out to Seattle and get them all settled and working on the next version. So that was the first time I raided Chicago. A few years later, we're doing pretty good. We had shipped Age of Empires, which was made by a great group, Ensemble Studios, down in Texas. And that was a big hit for us. And so between the money coming in from Flight Simulator and the money coming in from Age of empires, we could reinvest and do more acquisitions and try to grow the business even more. And so I came out here again and bought FASA, Jordan Weisman's company, and moved Jordan and his team out to Redmond. And Jordan has been a friend ever since, an amazing game designer, creator of Battletech, MechWarrior, Crimson Skies, Shadowrun, many franchises that people know. So anyway, that was the second time I raided Chicago. So things are going pretty good. The group is up to maybe 400 or 500 people. You know, we're growing. We're making money. We're making better products, better games. And then one day, I'm sitting there in my office and these crazy guys come in from the DirectX team, okay, and they said, we want to make this DirectX box. And so if you don't know, DirectX is the Windows, it's the name of the API it the name of the interface between programs and Windows for things that have to do with gaming okay It the gaming part of Windows say it that way So anyway I like what is this DirectX box What are you talking about? And they're like, well, it's going to look like a game console, but it's really just going to be a PC. A PC running Windows, and you're going to stick a game in, and it's going to act just like a game console. It won't show the Windows logo or anything. it'll just boot the game. But really, behind the scenes, it's going to be copying the stuff off the game disk onto the hard disk. And so it's going to act to the customer like it's a PlayStation or, you know, N64 or something. So I was, you know, naive and I also thought, I thought about the console market. I thought, well, you know, we had grown a lot in the PC market. It was getting tougher to grow our market share. It would be nice to get into the console business because that's a big business. And here were these guys saying we could have a Microsoft branded console that was basically a PC in disguise. That would be great for me because I have all these PC developers. I don't have any console developers. So if I wanted to like make console games, I'd have to work with completely different developers, I'd have to, you know, make different kinds of games. But this thing sounds like out of the box. It could just run basically games we have today. Which turned out, all of this turned out to be false. But anyway, pretty much. So I'm like, all right, I'm on board. Let's do it. And that's where we start to get into Microsoft politics. And, you know, Microsoft, one way to think of Microsoft is like this giant turf war fought between these big groups. You know, everybody has got their area staked out, you know. So like I had games staked out. If someone else in the company was trying to make a game, sooner or later they'd have to go through me. So, you know, I would like end up getting that in my territory. You know, so in this case, who else had game console territory? You know, these DirectX guys wanted to do it. Well, it turned out there was another group in the company that had already tried to stake out this territory. And that has to do with Sega. Does anyone know about, can anyone guess this? No. No. No. Dreamcast. Windows CE on the Sega Dreamcast, that's right. Microsoft had acquired this company and along with it had come some guys who had worked at 3DO. And the 3DO guys had convinced the Windows guys, the Windows CE, the embedded version of Windows guys that they should get into the console business. And then they went to Japan and they twisted Sega's arm really hard until I think probably by piling a lot of money on the arm until it bent so far that Sega put a little Windows logo on every Dreamcast because there was a way to boot a Dreamcast into this Windows mode that no one ever used. And so that team was like, all right, we achieved a great job with Dreamcast, now we're on to our next thing. So they wanted to build a console, we wanted to build a console. So then when two groups at Microsoft both want to do the same thing, then you have to have a battle, right? And so that was the next step for Xbox was we had to have the battle. And the way a battle works at Microsoft is each group gets as many vice presidents as they can on their side. So we went out and we gathered a bunch of vice presidents and they went out and they gathered a bunch of vice presidents. And then we go in front of Bill and Steve Ballmer and we're like, you know, here's our plans. So they presented their plan. Their plan was basically they were going to build something very similar to a PlayStation 2. It was going to be completely custom, custom hardware, custom software, built for games. And then it was our turn and we're like, ha, ha, that's so silly. You know, we're, it's not just silly what they're proposing, it's really off strategy, which is about the worst thing you can say to somebody at Microsoft, that their plan is off strategy. You know, that means it's like not, not following the religion of the company or something. It's off strategy. So they were off strategy because are they running Windows? Are they, is it part of the PC ecosystem? No, it's like totally custom, this thing. You know, we're on strategy, you know. We're making a PC in a box that runs Windows. Heck, Dell could build this for us maybe. You know? Adele, other people could build this. So Bill and Steve, you know, they listen to both sides and then they have to pick and they bless our project. They bless the Xbox and the other project blown away. Their jobs are gone. They got to find new jobs in the company. Some of them come knocking to work for us. We let them in. We let them in. But now, now we have to actually figure out what we're going to do because all we really have at this point is like a PowerPoint presentation. So we spend the next year trying to figure out what we're actually going to make. And so this is the year between 1999 and 2000. And the more we look at it, the more what these 3DO guys were saying is making sense to us. And the less our own plan is making sense to us. I mean, could we really have this thing running Windows? I mean, Windows isn't great for games. It gets in the way. It takes up a lot of memory. It's, you know, it's a problem, you know. And could it really be just like exactly like a PC? Or wouldn't it be better if we really had some custom hardware that was unique, you know, that would make it perform better? So we kind of, our plan kind of slid more and more towards their plan. We didn't go all the way to where their plan was. But it was, we slid closer to their plan. Maybe it ended up somewhere in the middle. And the biggest part of that slide was when we dropped that it would run Windows, okay? So the thing you got to know, I worked for a guy named Robbie Bach. And one of Robbie's real great abilities was managing up within the organization. This was probably how he got to be a senior vice president of the company. He was really good at managing his bosses. And one of his great skills was something that we called pre-disastering, okay? And pre-disastering, in Robbie's speak, pre-disastering means that Let's say we're going to have a big meeting with Bill or Steve. Before that meeting, Robbie would be on the basketball court with them. This would be with Balmer, not with Bill. Playing basketball. And he would just let slip, oh, you know this thing we're going to show you two weeks from now? Yeah, it's not, you know, we had to change this thing or we had, you know, we're going to lose money on this project, but it's okay. We're going to make it up later, blah, blah, blah. And so by the time we would walk into a meeting normally, they would already know what we were going to say. They'd already know all the bad news. They had been pre-disastered. And so sometimes we'd be in these product reviews, and one team after another would get up, and they'd get up, and Bill and Steve would just, bam, pound these guys, and bam, pound these guys. And then we would get up, and we would give just as bad news as the other guys. And they would just kind of nod and shrug, and then we would move on. And the other people were like, why did that happen? It happened because they'd been pre-disastered. That's the important thing. But we had this big important meeting coming up. And this was the meeting where Xbox was either going to be approved and it was going to go forward or it was going to be killed, okay? And that meeting took place February, February 14th, 2000, okay? So either on this Valentine's Day. Either we were going to get approval and then the next month we had it set up so that Bill was going to get on stage and announce the Xbox to the world at the Game Developers Conference or the project was going to be canceled. Well, for whatever reason, Robbie failed in his pre-disastering going into this meeting. And this is a meeting that we call the Valentine's Day Massacre. And so this is kind of a famous meeting in the lore of Xbox. And so we walked into the board room for Microsoft. This is about as serious as a meeting could be at Microsoft. You know, and you're going to have the CEO, you're going to have the President, and then many, many Vice Presidents there to hear this presentation. Okay. So we go into this meeting. Bill's a few minutes late. He walks in and he's got the deck for the meeting, the PowerPoint slides in his hand. And he slams them down on the table and he says, this is a fucking insult to everything I've done at this company. Okay, that's the opening line of the meeting. So, clearly pre-disastering did not happen. This is the first thing that we realized. And the second thing we realized is we know why he's mad. He's mad because a year before he had picked our team over this other team because they were off strategy and now we're off strategy because we're not running Windows. Well, whose fault is that? It's not the hardware guy who's sitting next to me. It's not me, I just make the games. Now, Jay Allard, he's in charge of system software. So, Jay, we all turn to Jay, but Jay is not saying anything. He's still in shock from the Bill Gates shock wave that spread out across the room. So Jay's not going to say anything, fine, I'll say something. So I try to defend it. Bill yells at me, shoots me down. Robbie tries to defend it. Robbie gets yelled at. He gets shot down. Now Jay's got his voice again. Jay stands up, you know, tries to defend it. Jay's getting shot down. And by then, you know, Balmer's also getting his turn. See, the way it would work is Bill would be all about all the technical stuff and Balmer would be all about the business stuff. And Balmer is like flipping through the deck and looking at the business slides. And the business slides, frankly, were pretty terrible. I mean, we were going to lose at least a billion and a half dollars, probably more, over the life of this project. And that was probably optimistic. So as soon as Bill runs out of steam. Then, Bomber's on there. Bam! You know, why are you losing all this money? You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. So, they're taking turns, you know, and they're yelling at us and they're yelling at us and they're yelling at us. And, you know, Robbie and I had been at the company for 15 years at that point and we were used to getting yelled at by these guys, but still, by their standards, this This was like a lot of yelling coming our way, you know. And we're just basically saying the same thing. We're like, we looked at this for a year. We're really confident that this, if you want to do this, this is the best way to do it. We don't know if the company should do this or not. We're not saying you should blow a billion and a half dollars or not. We're just saying, if you're going to do this, this is what it's going to cost and the best way for us to do it So basically we just kept saying that same thing over and over again And they kept yelling at us over and over again So it 5 o It 6 o It 7 o It Valentine Day Did I mention it Valentine Day I mean, all of us have, like, you know, girlfriends or wives or whatever back home. We have reservations, you know. So now we're going to be in trouble not only at work, but also at home, right? This is getting really serious.