Inside story: The birth of Xbox by Ed Fries

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From develop-online.net:

Offering unprecedented insight, former Xbox boss Ed Fries pulls the curtain back on how Microsoft joined the console race

 

Ed FRIES: �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."

�To image what the early prototype was like, think of a PC with a hidden OS, and putting a PC game in there and it going in auto-install and auto run. So, a little bit like a console."

 

Ed FRIES: �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."

�Our idea was like a boxed PC at that point. It had an Intel chip. It ran Windows. It had a hard-drive."

 

"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."

"So he wasn�t exactly happy when we told him we�d changed our minds and didn�t want to run Windows anymore."

 

"In the end, the final design for the Xbox was something in the middle between what our DirectX team wanted and what the other team wanted."

 

Full Story: develop-online.net

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