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. Everywhere daylight shone on the Microsoft flag. Each kit came with a headset and a game — a version of Midway's RC racing game Revolt , re-engineered to function with Live. The team wanted to ship a simple game with Live so that players new to online experiences wouldn't also have to learn how to play the game. With a game like Revolt , it would be as simple as picking up the controller. We're racing around, talking to each other, choosing cars, laughing, and we did this for hours and hours.

No one in the public had seen this. We hadn't shown it. E3 hadn't come around. But we knew Everything we talked about, it was going to happen. This was going to be an amazing thing. We didn't know how big it was going to be, but this experience we'd just had, it was going to set the world on fire. By September the kits were going out to a wider audience. Limited beta testers. Friends of friends. The number of beta kits eventually reached 15, Allard's HiroProtagonist gamertag was a regular sight during the beta tests, usually playing against Xbox team members.

One night, playing Revolt , he heard a female voice, laughing. It was a voice he didn't recognize. Allard asked who he was playing against and the woman replied that she wasn't playing, just chatting with the other drivers while her son played the game. Isn't this thing amazing? We've been playing for 5 hours! Allard was awestruck. His vision of a connected device bringing a family together over a game had come to fruition.

In just two years he'd built the box of his dreams. And to outsiders, it was everything he'd wanted it to be. Here I was talking to a 40 year old woman that doesn't play games sitting on the couch with her 15 year old kid and talking to people around the world all day as the kid tried to work his way up the leaderboards.

It was that Atari ad. We did it. Fucking awesome. On the night of Nov. Samuel L. Jackson was there. Freddie Prinze Jr. They were playing NBA 2K , online. For the Microsoft executives and Xbox team members it was a brush with fame they didn't typically see. And Microsoft products didn't typically get launch parties at The Sunset Room. The next day in Redmond there was a celebration at the Millennium E cafeteria.

Multerer was called back to the Op Center. There was a problem with the numbers coming in from the service. Multerer investigated. It's actually a bug in the reporting software. The numbers were fine. More than fine. They were breaking every projected target, and then some. There's nothing more magic than that. To mark the occasion, Mott, Ferroni and Allard each grabbed a controller in the cafeteria, fired up Xbox Live launch title MechAssault and waited for one of Live's earliest subscribers to join.

When he arrived the fathers of Xbox Live were there to greet him. That guy was like, 'Oh, this is awesome! We've got a new problem. We've already exceeded all the goals we thought we were gonna have in a day. We were running the service. Now all they needed was two things: a game that would drive consumers to the service, and a partnership that would all but guarantee its success.

The world is full of mystery. Historically, it is not a new thing that we humans, observing these mysteries, will stare into the abyss and make up our own answers. Why does the sun chase the moon? Why does fire lash down from the sky? Why do things inevitably fall apart? Take, for example, the Madden curse. The Madden football franchise defines the sport on video game consoles, and for over a decade, each new entry in the series has arrived in stores emblazoned with the likeness of a popular player.

There was a time when this was considered an honor. That was before the curse. Since , nearly every player asked to be on the Madden cover has suffered injury. Some of these injuries have been minor, some career-endangering, but almost without exception, every player on the cover of Madden has suffered one. Is it scientifically provable that by simply appearing on the cover of a game, a player will fall victim to injury?

More likely is the explanation that football is a dangerous sport and that these things tend to happen, video game covers or not.

But humans have evolved to find patterns in the world around us. Take, for example, the other EA curse.

On Sept. Expected to be a technological breakthrough, it instead crumbled, taking the company's entire hardware business with it. On Oct. Like the Dreamcast, it was packed with cutting edge hardware and lauded as a brilliant entry into a competitive market. And yet it, too, crumbled. What do these two game industry failure stories have in common? Quite a lot, actually. Both consoles launched at volatile times for the games industry amidst stiff competition from nimble rivals.

Market forces, relationships with game developers and publishers and some factors beyond anyone's control all combined in a wretched stew to foil the ambitions of the companies behind these products. Yet, ask anyone and they'll tell you different. They'll blame EA. It should surprise no one that EA, as the historically largest and most influential game publisher, is an attractant of curses. Its fortunes rise and fall in tandem with those of the industry it dominates.

And there usually is. But it can't be so simple as good leadership, canny business prowess and luck. It can't be, we reason. Because that's too simple. Utilizing the required broadband bandwidth, Xbox Live featured a unified gaming "Friends List", as well as a single identity across all titles regardless of the publisher , and standardized voice chat with a headset and communication, a feature that was still in its infancy. Leading up to the launch, Microsoft enlisted several waves of beta testers to improve the service and receive feature feedback.

The first wave of beta testers were given Revolt! Once beta testing concluded, Microsoft sent these beta testers a translucent orange memory card, a headset carrying case, and a beta tester T-shirt with the slogan "I have great hands".

When the service debuted, it lacked much of the functionality that later titles included, but Xbox Live grew and evolved on the Xbox and many aspects of the service were included with the Xbox console out of the box, rather than through a later update.

Microsoft's th patent was Live-related and gave Xbox users access to watch other gamers compete against each other over Xbox Live. The packaging for playable Xbox Live titles on the original Xbox console featured the trademark gold bar underneath the Xbox header.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell and Brute Force sported a Live "bubble" design, as they only featured downloadable content. It was changed later, wherein all Xbox Live titles included the universal gold Live bar. By the time of the Xbox , all titles were required to provide at least a limited form of Xbox Live "awareness".

In July , Xbox Live had reached 1 million online users and only a year later that figure had doubled to 2 million online users. On November 15, , Microsoft celebrated Xbox Live's 5th anniversary by offering its then over 8 million subscribers the title Carcassonne free of charge and awarding gamers who had subscribed to Live since its inception free Microsoft Points.

Increased demand from Xbox purchasers the largest number of new user sign-ups in the history of Xbox Live was given as the reason for the downtime.

On January 18, , Microsoft announced Undertow would be offered free to both Gold and Free members for the week starting January 23 through January 27 as compensation.

On November 12, , Dennis Durkin , COO of Microsoft's interactive entertainment business, announced that November 10, , the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 marked the busiest day ever on Xbox Live, with over two million active users simultaneously.

On the same day, Larry Hyrb , Xbox Live's Major Nelson, announced on his blog that Xbox Live support for the original Xbox would be discontinued on April 15, , including online play through backwards compatibility on the Xbox and all downloadable content for original Xbox games. The basic service was also renamed.

Prior to October , the free service was known as Xbox Live Silver. It was announced on June 10, that the service was going to be fully integrated into Microsoft's Windows 8. In June , Microsoft retracted the Xbox Live Gold requirements to download streaming media apps including Netflix , Hulu , YouTube , Internet Explorer , Skype , and others , though various rental or subscription fees may still apply. 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. The xCloud initiative and new Game Pass cloud gaming feature are those efforts to compete with services like Stadia directly. You can also access most of these through the Game Pass cloud computing program.

Microsoft announced that they have more than titles ready to add once xCloud is officially made public. However, Microsoft is currently cooking up something interesting for customers, whether they enjoy using a console or like to stream. They can no longer afford to ignore customer demand to diversify their options. The company must continue to expand its manufacturing to include various systems customers can choose from according to their individual needs.

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