First xbox live game

My expectation, honestly, because this was my boss's boss, was that I was going to present at a very high level and [Allard] would nod and ask a couple of questions and that would be the end of that.

I was not prepared for his level of knowledge. He proceeded to grill me in levels of detail that absolutely blew my mind. I had no idea he had that level of knowledge. Xbox Account Manager Ric Neil describes another meeting in which Allard was sharing his excitement with the team over the amount of extra memory he had been able to put "on the metal" in the Xbox.

Neil argued that extra memory in the retail Xbox wouldn't matter if the test kits they were developing didn't also have it. He pushed back on Allard. I kinda made that obvious in the meeting. He wanted everybody to be excited about the extra memory, and I was like, 'Thanks, but no thanks.

The room turned silent. Neil's boss turned to him and stared. It was one of those moments when the sound of a heartbeat can fill an entire room. And that mattered. It really mattered for the first time at Microsoft.

Allard shared his vision with the entire Xbox team. He gave copies of Snow Crash to everyone, and made everyone read it. There was no subtlety about his desire to bring that fictional world to fruition nor his desire to eventually become Hiro Protagonist.

Protagonist is describing a virtual sword fight that took place in the interconnected virtual world he inhabits in his off hours. Allard, to this day, without prompting, is able to quote the scene verbatim. Multerer believes that roughly half of what would become Xbox Live was inspired by the novel or Allard's retelling of it and the other half were simply practical concerns about the future of gaming on consoles. That's super important. And you need to be able to find people and see what they're doing and then invite them to play with you.

Those are the key ingredients that made it work. This "social layer," although few at the time called it that, would be the glue holding the entire service together. Years before Facebook, the Xbox team was working on what would become one the most widely used social networks in the world. And when Xbox Live goes online, Allard's gamertag, the name by which all users are known on the service, will be HiroProtagonist. In , Microsoft employed tens of thousands of people.

Ask most of those where they worked, and they'd tell you "Microsoft. And it wouldn't have allowed us to scale the way we did. Most of the Xbox team people came from within Microsoft and knew what the company had to offer. Xbox wasn't about building a team from scratch and reinventing the wheel; it was about building a rocket using rocket parts made by a company that was already building rockets.

And of course, it also had rocket scientists. Real ones. I graduated from Woodside High School. Shut up. I might have argued with J and Jeff. I made Jeff's life impossible sometimes. But there was still a level of respect. We still liked each other at the end of the day, and we made something great happen. Because of that, because of the passion. We all cared about making it happen. Xbox veterans refer to the days of the original box and the birth of Xbox Live as "the Golden Age of Xbox.

Now president of Hidden Path Entertainment, in the early days of Live, Pobst was the lead technical game manager for Xbox's Advanced Technology Group, the team of programming and game development veterans Microsoft would send to third-party developers to help solve problems and make their games run smoothly with Xbox. It had a startup culture. It had really passionate people.

It had everyone wanting to do a lot of the right things. The opportunity to take on such a bold, risky project and potentially change the way games were played attracted a particular kind of talent.

The result was a sort of skunkworks inside of the traditionally corporate Microsoft, where a lot of the traditional ways of making products were thrown out the window.

Xbox producer Jeff Henshaw, drawing on an analogy widely used inside of Microsoft, describes the original Xbox team members as "pioneers. Not just a new product, but even a new culture or a new philosophy around how you build products.

The settlers are the people that come in after things are established, after the product is built, after the business is established.

They grow it and nurture it in a safe, conservative way. But pioneering is where all of the fun is in technology. There were safer things to do at Microsoft. People consciously gave those roles up because they wanted to work on something new, where they felt like they could have a tremendous impact and really satisfy this lust to make video gaming better than it had ever been before. The Xbox Live team of pioneers was small and nimble, but perhaps most important, it was headquartered away from Microsoft.

One of Allard's earliest and continual fights was keeping Xbox separate from the main campus in Redmond. Instead, it was housed down the road in the rented set of buildings known as Microsoft's "Millennium Campus. In terms of actual physical separation, Millennium E was only a five minute drive away from Microsoft.

In terms of some functional separation, the distance didn't matter at all. Email and telephones still worked just as well in Millennium E as in any of Microsoft's other buildings.

But in terms of psychic separation, that five minutes down the road was critical to Xbox's early success. And maintaining that separation became a passion for Allard. And honestly we needed some of that head space to tell Microsoft to leave us alone with the other agendas and let us go build something that's focused and does a few things around gaming really magically.

Neustadter believes there were decisions made at Millennium E that would not have been possible had Xbox been built closer to home. I mean, now we're on this shiny new campus across the street from main campus and we're very integrated with the rest of the company, down to the point of being able to log on to Xbox. But we had to build those relationships later. We didn't have any of them, really, at start time.

I think it helped us be successful. So we didn't worry about that kind of stuff. We just worried about, is this going to make Xbox Live amazing? If so, we'll do it. If not, don't care. Over time the Millennium E building became bedecked with green lights the brand color of Xbox and other decorations to physically differentiate it from the main campus.

It was furnished like a game development studio, with games to play, televisions to watch and comfortable places to sit, and as the team worked through and , its status within Microsoft grew legendary. When new positions opened on the Xbox team, the response from within Microsoft could be overwhelming. Xbox was the place to be inside Microsoft. The way I describe Xbox, especially back then when we were a much smaller team, is I say we were kind of like the world's best funded startup.

We had great talent and great passion around what we were doing, and yet we're at this company that did two things really right for the launch of Xbox, I believe.

The first was that Microsoft funded the project well. The second was that it recognized it had no idea how to build a console and stepped aside to let Team Xbox figure it out.

We're putting this team together to go learn how to build this,'" Whitten says. That was pretty special. In Allard and his Xbox leadership team identified the principles Xbox Live had to embody in order to be successful. They were:. Users had to feel as if the service was secure, and that their information and identities would be protected. The service had to work the first time and every time. It had to reward good behavior and punish those who took advantage.

It had to be effortless to connect with and able to adapt to the needs of different games and experiences. It had to be a level playing field, free from exploitation by hackers.

And it had to continue to provide a premium experience that users would be willing to pay for, year after year, game after game. These seven "pillars," as former Live team members call them, were enunciated by Henshaw in a PowerPoint presentation to Microsoft in the Summer of We had the whole leadership team present there. We had J Allard And then a handful of other leaders from around the organization. Chief among the seven pillars, Henshaw believed, was simplicity. Xbox Live had to "just work," and it had to be consistent across all games.

The worst crime it could commit, the Xbox team believed, would be to ask gamers to create separate accounts and logins from game to game to game. Xbox Live had to be one service from top to bottom, and the makers of games had to fall in line. These principles are solid. We believe that these are principles for an online service that is designed for the long term, designed for the future, and designed for growth.

We will build this. Miles of tunnels route through the park to allow them to keep the environment clean, safe and functional unlike any other park. Because of this, they are able to preserve more of the illusion they wanted to deliver to their customers. Coney Island is just, well, a distraction. Families save for years to go to Disney World because of the unprecedented experience — they've created a destination.

As it set about creating Live, the core team envisioned it as the digital Disney World. The Xbox team worked with broadband partners and router manufacturers to ensure the service would work reliably on available hardware and that the bandwidth wouldn't get shut down by ISPs.

Meanwhile, working with the enterprise server experts at Microsoft, it began sketching out the infrastructure of the service, pulling servers from one place, database tech from another and installing a stringent security layer on top of all it.

Staking out a place in the wilderness and creating an unprecedented experience that gamers would — hopefully — be willing to pay for. As PC gamers, the Xbox team members were familiar with online experiences, but they were mostly turned off by them. Early PC multiplayer worlds were plagued with cheats and exploits, and finding your friends and getting connected to them was a chore.

If you were able to get a game going in the first place, it would often be interrupted or disrupted by inconsistent connections or griefers empowered with hacks. I remember having a blast with Diablo , and then the online hacking and cheating started," says Multerer. It became not so much fun anymore. People didn't go online, because you'd go online and immediately someone bigger than you would show up, kill you, take your loot, and disappear again.

It was all being hacked. That became a teaching moment for us. We said, security has to be a primary feature. That's a place where we can add value. The solution devised by Multerer was to employ a single security gateway in front of the Live servers. Each Xbox would send encrypted data to the gateway, but behind the gateway the servers would treat the requests for information like normal web traffic. This allowed him to build what, at the time, passed for a fairly standard web server database without the expense of having to encrypt every single server.

The Live team would create the largest secure online service ever devised by treating it like a website. We were looking at expensive equipment, backbones We had a big room over in Millennium E where we built out a couple of test versions of the service, and it was a blast to just go back there and look at all the wires and the heat.

It was all new. That style of web development was just getting going. For a while, until we got the team off the ground, I was the team's only server guy. I was the team's only network guy. I was the team's only security guy. In just over a year this collection of random computers would morph into a service comprising more than servers, complete with an operations center from which Neustadter and his team could survey and control every aspect of the Live service.

Using off-the-shelf technology and Microsoft expertise allowed the Live team to build quickly and cheaply, but it had a downside: It built too much. Let's say matchmaking and leaderboards," says Neustadter. But we didn't do that, because we wanted to simplify, as much as possible, both the troubleshooting process and also making sure that if we had to go touch matchmaking, to roll out an upgrade, we didn't also have to worry about any implications to leaderboards at the same time.

Today, in the world of iTunes, Google and global data centers, servers sounds quaint, but in the early days of Live it was overkill. Xbox Live had server clusters for every single aspect of the service, no matter how small or how many users it would serve.

It was the metaphorical miles of tunnels underground, supporting Live's seven pillars. But we were paranoid. We didn't know how to build these clusters, so we had a cluster for everything. Eventually Live would be re-scaled to support various services from shared servers, but, for a time, it was the most extravagantly-designed server center in the world. The Live team members were wiz kids in a technology store. This was our consistent experience we were building around.

And we were at Microsoft, which meant we had access to As the team at Millennium E was devising how the system would work, the effort was also underway to devise how games would work with it. A dedicated online console service was new to not only the people building it, but also the people building games for it — and the birth was not entirely painless. A lot of people were just saying, okay, I'm gonna drop this, because I can't get this done in a way that's going to work for our game and for users.

XBE that they could drop into their disc, and put some little mild skinning on it to make it look like their game. If you went to go click on 'Downloadable Content' in the menus of those very early games … it would actually reboot the box into this downloader app.

You'd download your content and reboot back into the game, which allowed us to get through it. In fact, that was the genesis of a lot of our thinking in how we did [Xbox ]. Two minutes into the game, backup quarterback Matt Hasselbeck drives downfield and scores for an early lead against the squad of Peyton Manning.

History is made. Just not football history. This is not week seven of the NFL season. This is This is a game being played on Xbox Live. Manning and Hasselbeck, separated by a continent and each surrounded by film crews, are playing Microsoft's NFL Fever They are online, playing against each other on a game console over broadband internet. And they are trash talking.

And it's true. Hasselbeck, as he would be again in , was a relief QB. In he played for the Seattle Seahawks, and it is from his Seattle home that he is beating star quarterback Manning fair and square in a video game played live and filmed for posterity by Microsoft. That, to me, was the first time we'd really seen it work cross-country. It was such a powerful way that it happened. By the spring of Live was ready to road test.

The box had shipped the previous holiday season, and the Xbox team had begun sending out Live beta kits, at first to Microsoft employees, then wider. Around a thousand of the kits went out in the first batch, some to far corners of the globe.

Gamercards, customizable with a small thumbnail "gamerpic," showed off a user's Gamerscore tied to the new achievement system, game zone, review rating one to five stars , and geographic location. The Xbox Guide, the gateway to the Xbox Dashboard, was only a button press away. There, players could send messages to one another, rate recently encountered players, and purchase content from the Marketplace. Speaking of which…. In , J Allard didn't expect publishers to come for our wallets.

In , he was leading the charge. Microsoft's experiment with downloadable content on the original Xbox was a success. With the creation of its new currency, Microsoft points, users were given fair warning to expect new, paid content for their favorite games. This is definitely 1reasonwhy. Since then, DLC has become a subject of debate due to varying quality of content. At its best, add-on material can expand the life of multiplayer communities and give players reason to revisit single-player campaigns.

At its worst, it can leave gamers feeling abused and alienated. Paid add-ons that launch simultaneously with retail products have frustrated consumers for years, and there has been a shift in retailer pre-order bonuses from tangible items to in-game perks, missions, and cosmetic changes. Microtransactions for purely aesthetic reasons permeate the landscape and, if our crystal ball is accurate, this is a trend that will only grow as the Xbox fades into history.

There is great expansion content out there though, and many developers and publishers have pushed the boundaries of their game worlds thanks to the opportunities presented by DLC. Let's be honest. As much of an improvement as the original Xbox dashboard's blades were over the Xbox's user interface, they weren't terribly attractive. Blades were certainly functional, but the space limitations imposed by a fixed number of pages inhibited growth.

In November , just a few days after the Xbox 's three-year anniversary, the dashboard received a complete overhaul. Gone were the static blades, replaced with a more dynamic display though the original concept is available to this day by pressing the Guide button on the dashboard. The original five blades System, Media, Games, Xbox Live, and Marketplace were replaced by a vertically scrolling set of broad categories with mutable tiles.

The Spotlight section allowed Microsoft to highlight new titles and promotions, with the game currently in the drive showcased on the far left. By exploring the current title, users could install discs to the hard drive a first with the NXE , view achievements, and browse related marketplace items like dashboard themes and in-game content.

Upon loading up the console for the first time after installing the update, users were instructed to pick and customize an avatar. A variety of clothing options were available, with more added over the following weeks for free.

Once Microsoft was sure people were hooked, new virtual apparel started carrying a price tag. Today, many games are teased with themed costumes and props. Thankfully, users can expand their collections with Avatar Awards earned by playing some games.

Once the Avatars were designed and dressed, parties with friends awaited. On the dashboard, it was easy to see which of your friends were in parties and with whom they were playing. The introduction of Netflix streaming also enabled viewing parties for a time. You can switch recurring billing off and back on through your Microsoft account. Learn more about stopping recurring billing at Microsoft Support. Promotional offers may not be valid for all members and are only available for a limited time.

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Connect and play See what your friends are playing and chat with them while you play. Love a game in the library? Despite renewed enthusiasm in the Xbox brand following the decision to remove consumer-unfriendly features, the Xbox One has found itself in a nearly constant struggle to match the sales of the PlayStation 4.

However, second place also led to a tremendous amount of innovation from Microsoft. The company made nearly all of its first-party games cross-platform compatible, enabling friends on PC and Xbox One to play together and even allowing players to switch between the two platforms without losing progress.

It also introduced Xbox Game Pass, a program that gives subscribers unlimited access to a vault of older Xbox games, as well as day-one access to the latest releases. A mid-generation refresh also helped to make the Xbox One hardware just as appealing — if not more so — than the PlayStation 4.

It is capable of native 4K gaming, something no other game console can do on a regular basis, and the use of vapor cooling allowed the console to be even smaller than the Xbox One S.

Despite the sales struggles of the Xbox One, Xbox fans have reason to be excited about the future. Given the ray-tracing capabilities of the PS5 and its own support for 8K resolution, that would be quite a feat. The system resembles a PC tower, but can still be placed on its side, and features a large number of vents in order to keep itself cool.

The directional pad has also be changed to more closely resemble the Xbox Elite controller, but the face buttons, sticks, triggers, and shoulder buttons remain very similar to the Xbox One design. Microsoft announced a new generation during E3 Official sources referred to the new generation as simply Xbox before unveiling the Xbox Series X name.

There have been reports of a second, significantly less-powerful machine that will omit a disc drive and be offered at a reduced price. This includes Halo Infinite , which will also be coming to PC.

After experimenting with the Project xCloud initiative, Microsoft recently announced that players would be able to access a cloud gaming service. Microsoft aimed to incorporate a cloud gaming service with their existing Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership, starting September With Stadia, a cloud-based gaming service, becoming incredibly popular with gamers, Microsoft had to step up so they could stay in the competition.