LIVE Launch Team Memories:
High Points
Published November 8, 2007
On the fifth anniversary of Xbox LIVE, we checked in with some of the original team members for their memories of the high points along the way.
What has been the high point of your Xbox LIVE experience (whether from working on it or playing on it)?
Clinton Fowler: Can't choose just one … the first one is playing the MotoGP demo and racing against 15 other riders back in the fall of 2002. That's when I knew we'd built something truly magical. The other high point was shipping Xbox 360. The Xbox 360 product and the team that built it was awesome.
I love playing with (and against) our customers, although most of them probably think I'm just 'some average Joe' and don't recognize that I had something special to do with building the stuff they are using. —Jim Yagelowich
Marc Whitten: My fondest gaming memory started off as an accident. We were trying out some of the web integration in Amped 2 with XSN sports and created a tournament. I believe Ben Kilgore, J Allard, Scott Henson, Clinton Fowler, and a few others I probably don't remember were involved. We had meant the contest to last a weekend and none of us had played much Amped 2. However, we mis-created the tournament and it ended up lasting two or three weeks. The tourney was all about best trick, highest score, etc.
The best part about this is that Amped was a great social environment where you could play together while lightly competing. Join-in-progress versus matchmaking meant that we'd all end up congregating together to try to best a couple of scores. Something happened in our heads and we snapped and became super-competitive. While we had hardly played when we started, we became super good through the three weeks and played constantly.
We'd all get stuck at some plateau until one person would bust through and we'd all be off to some new high score. At the end, I recall that Scott's wife Kat had to wake him up because I was closing in on his high score with minutes to go. By this time, it was all will and he had to grind through a couple of more hours to make sure I didn't pass him. I don't think any of us played amped ever again after that tournament … we were tired, tired, tired. It was a magical experience.
For Xbox 360, I also remember waiting for them to turn the production servers on (I believe a couple of days before launch) so that I could be the first person to put up a million points on Geometry Wars.
Patrick Mendenall: The high point of working on Xbox LIVE for me was hitting one million subscribers. That was such an enormous feat for our business. When you start at zero, a million seems so far away … now we're seven-plus million in and I feel like a proud parent (of many proud parents).
That was the first voice chat from real people's home networks. On that night, I knew what we were building was real and I knew we were going to be successful. It felt good. —Lit Wong
Gary Thompson: Probably the high point of my Xbox LIVE experience overhearing a conversation in a Game Stop shortly after the beta was launched. Up to now, most of the industry press was still very skeptical about whether online console gaming was going to be viable, much less Xbox LIVE. I was in the store browsing in my best ordinary customer disguise and was eavesdropping as the clerk was raving about how awesome the Xbox LIVE beta was and how everyone just had to sign-up once it launched because it was going to be the "best thing ever." That was my first clue at just how passionately the gaming community was going to embrace Xbox LIVE.
Eric Neustadter: I could throw out any number of points in time—when we first opened the service up to customers, Xbox 360 launch, midnight madness for Halo 2 and Halo 3—but the truth is that none of those mean as much to me as the friends I've made via Xbox LIVE. I've had the good fortune to meet some amazing people in the last five years. Many of them live in North America and we've been fortunate enough to meet at events like CES, E3, and PAX, while others live as far away as New Zealand.
Years ago the Xbox LIVE team talked about how we wanted to build the "virtual couch" so that we could enable people to hang out with their friends no matter where they live—we've done that, no question, and it's been an amazing ride.
Brian Lockhart: My favorite high point is the very first time I played a racing game on Xbox LIVE against an "outsider." Before we launched we had contracted with THQ / Climax to add Xbox LIVE functionality to their current Xbox motorcycle racing game, MotoGP. They were asked to produce a demo version of their game with full LIVE features that would be on the shipping Xbox LIVE starter kit disc.
I'm a huge racing games fan, and especially the MotoGP games, so I took a personal interest in the effort. I kept installing builds on my development kit and logging into our Partner-facing development environment to see how things were progressing. I remember the first day I tried it and everything was just … working! All of a sudden the lobby started filling up with gamertags belonging to developers from Climax. "Whoah, I'm gonna play MotoGP against the guys who wrote it!" No pressure … (for the record, I held my own.)
A few months later at E3 I was working at the Xbox booth, demonstrating LIVE to showgoers using the finished MotoGP game, and yup, the same devs from Climax were logged into LIVE to play against them. Pretty cool—made for a very convincing demo. We've come a long way since then and there have been a lot of great racing games on LIVE, but I'll always remember my first 16-player MotoGP matchup against a bunch of guys halfway around the world.
John Smith: High point … 7.7M members and $150M generated in marketplace revenue to date … beat that, Sony!
Jim Yagelowich: The highest point is always when I go online to play and hear people talking about how Xbox LIVE is "The Best" online matching/gaming experience. It really makes me feel proud that I was part of making the gold standard of online game playing so easy and accessible to our gamers and enthusiasts. Hearing the positive comments from them about Xbox LIVE has always made the hard work feel justified!
I love playing with (and against) our customers, although most of them probably think I'm just 'some average Joe' and don't recognize that I had something special to do with building the stuff they are using—and I'm fine with that—I'm just happy know that they're having fun and are so engrossed in the experience I've helped make possible.
Lit Wong: The high point for me was early in 2002, when Boyd, Karen, and I brought home our dev kits, logged on to Partner Net, and we chatted on the new Xbox LIVE server and client code, using the new codec, new voice puck (Xbox LIVE Communicator) and headset for the first time. That was the first voice chat outside of our Microsoft buildings and on the real Internet, from real people's home networks. On that night, I knew what we were building was real and I knew we were going to be successful. It felt good.
Jerry Hook: Three high points:
1. Re-Volt : The primary test title for the launch of live used to test matchmaking, voice, the works. Multiple late hour races and a blast.
2. Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Again, huge team input on matchmaking and making sure the title got out the door as solid as possible. If I remember correctly, we helped them improve their engine for performance.
3. Internal tournaments with XSN sports: Rally Sport, Amped 2 … the team was all over these developing this feature and testing to make sure you were not on the bottom of the ladder.
Mike Lucero: The fact that we pioneered a global community of an amazing diversity of gamers and we started a new lexicon and gaming attitude that millions of gamers are using (Gamertag, Achievements, Downloadable Content) and that this has all gone beyond being a cultural phenomena and actually looks to be here to stay is pretty cool.
Interview by TriXie
