The Xbox Secret Weapon

You know some of the reasons that games are better on Xbox. You’re familiar with the built-in hard disk and Ethernet port. You’ve heard about the superior processing power that makes your game look and feel more real. But did you know that Xbox has a special team of game experts whose job it is to show game developers how to use the Xbox to its full potential? It’s the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, and no other video game console has anything like it.

The Game Experts

"The support offered by ATG during Ghost Recon Xbox was invaluable. The advice and technical help they provided was critical in completing our title in time for Xbox Livelaunch. In many ways, we owe the success of our title to ATG."

– Robbie Edwards, Red Storm (Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon)

The Xbox Advanced Technology Group is a crack team of artists, programmers, sound designers, and design experts whose sole mission is to help game developers make better, faster, cooler, more kick-ass games for the Xbox. There are about 40 members of ATG, most of whom have several years of game development under their belts. Add up all that experience and it comes out to 218 years making games. Some of the more than 130 PC and console games that the ATG engineers and TGMs have worked on are: Age of Empires, American McGee’s Alice, Flight Simulator 95, Half-Life PS2, Half-Life: Counter-Strike, Homeworld, MechAssault,NBA Live 2001, Project Gotham Racing, Quake II, Quake III: Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Wing Commander 3.

A Dev’s Best Friend

“The TGMs I’ve met are all seasoned pros who have seen many sides of this industry—they know where the bodies are buried. That’s the kind of person most useful to you when you need some help.”

– Aaron Loeb, Planet Moon (Armed and Dangerous)

At the front lines of ATG are the Technical Game Managers, or TGMs. This is a team of seven guys who work directly with game developers, visiting the dev teams, hooking them up with ATG resources, and being the human face of Xbox. The TGMs also act as a single point of contact for developers regardless of the service being performed. If you’re a game developer and you’re getting ready to go through certification, or wondering if you can increase your frame rate, or just need someone to talk you through a particularly bad bug in your game… you call your TGM.

“This is what it means to be a TGM: We facilitate through expertise, experience, extensive networking, perseverance and just plain ole perspicacity.”

– Paul Steed, TGM

Meet the seven TGMs of ATG—a group of guys with an affinity for Led Zeppelin, mafia films, science fiction and, of course, video games.

Dan Black

Dan studied electronic music and technical theatre in college. He worked as a high school music teacher for a few years, ran sound for Chick Corea and B.B. King, and then started a video game company called Orca Games with some friends. They started out doing soundtracks and sound effects for S.N.E.S. and Sega Genesis titles and then began developing their own games. When Dan first came to Microsoft, he worked as a producer for Encarta, Music Central, and Cinemania. He also produced the interactive tutorials for Microsoft® Windows® 95, 98, and XP. He came to ATG about a year and a half ago, and served as the TGM for Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, and the recent hit Ghost Recon: Island Thunder. His favorite album is Led Zeppelin 2, favorite film is The Godfather, and favorite book is Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.

From his days developing games for other consoles, Dan remembers that “there was a complete lack of support or negative support. The tools were expensive, extremely buggy, and the support team was completely unresponsive.” ATG is the polar opposite, he says. “Nowhere in the history of console games has there been a support service that provides this level of service, much less for free.”

For Xbox developers, that can initially seem too good to be true. Dan tells a story about visiting the Montreal development house that was working on Splinter Cell. “I kept saying ‘We’re here to help, what can we do?’ and the Dev lead kept saying ‘Everything’s fine,’ but I could tell it wasn’t. I took him aside and said ‘What really are the problems you’ve been having?’ and he admitted that he had a crashing bug that he’d been struggling with for three weeks. I got on the phone with a couple of the ATG engineers—Michael Mounier and Michael Dougherty—and within thirty minutes we had it resolved. He literally teared up a little. He was so thankful.” With ATG’s input and guidance, Ubisoft Montreal was able to increase Splinter Cell’s frame rate and performance by 30 percent and fine-tune their controls.

Heather Chandler, from Red Storm says, “ATG was great to work with during the Ghost Recon: Island Thunder development. Whenever we needed any information or support for our title, I just contacted Dan Black and he got us what we needed. It's nice knowing we can quickly get information from ATG.”

And on the rare occasion that you can’t get your TGM on the phone, Shawn Hargreaves, Lead Programmer for MotoGP offers a solution: “At the end of MotoGP Live, Jon Gibson (the producer) was trying to get hold of Dan to arrange the details for the final upload, but Dan wasn't in his office. After a minor panic, we realized that Dan was actually in a race with me at the time! So I handed my communicator headset over to Jon. The really surreal thing was that Dan didn't want to stop racing, and since the MotoGP voice code only works for the players nearest to you in the game world, I had to keep racing as well, trying to stay close enough to Dan so Jon could talk to him!”

Sam Charchian

Sam was the very first TGM hired. Before coming to ATG he worked in developer relations, so he came very qualified for greasing wheels and soothing developer egos. He had the privilege of working with Digital Extremes to get Unreal Championship out the door in time for the launch of XboxLive last November. If he could tour with any band, he’d go with Led Zep circa 1971, his favorite film is Pulp Fiction, and his favorite game is Tribes. When asked what three things he’d take to a desert island, he replied, “Curly, Moe, and Larry. Sure, we’d be dead in a week, but, oh, the hilarity!”

While working with Digital Extremes, Sam made several long trips to London, Ontario. Sam recalls, “We were really pinning the launch of Xbox Live on this title. ATG was acting as a virtual extension of the Unreal team. We helped them rework their audio engine to save a ton of memory with no loss of fidelity. ATG engineers Mikey Wetzel and John Harding found optimizations that freed up more GPU cycles resulting in the ability to turn on full-screen antialiasing. Load times were halved, and dedicated hosting added.”

Steve Sinclair, Lead Programmer on Unreal Championship, had this to say about working with Sam. “It's hard to talk about Sam without getting a little misty-eyed. He was an unstoppable force that drove the project forward. I wasn't sure how he did it, but he seemed to find way of removing obstacles even in areas that seemed beyond his control. During our dev meetings, we'd often refrain: ‘OK, I'll ask Sam about that.’ Sam became part of our team during Unreal Championship, and I was proud to work with him.”

Mark Griffin

Mark grew up on the Bay Area peninsula where he used to go looking for unreleased games and cartridge stickers in the dumpster at the Atari warehouse. He then got in as a focus tester at EA testing Bulls vs. Suns andShaqfu. He formally started in the industry as a game tester at Sega in 1994. He worked his way up to production and worked on the Heat network at Sega. From there he went to EA.com, Wild Tangent, and became a TGM at Xbox last November. Since coming to ATG, Mark has worked with the developers of Enter the Matrix, Doom 3, and Full Spectrum Warrior. If he could tour with any band, he’d choose to tag along with Van Halen on their 1984 tour. He thinks the best film of all time is Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and the best game is Bomberman for the Sega Saturn. In an alternate universe, he’d be racing cars and training protection dogs. What three things would he bring to a desert island? “Ladies, a personal distillery, and a fishing pole.”

One of the many ways that Mark and ATG engineers Frank Savage and Hung Nguyen helped Shiny Entertainment with Enter the Matrix was with gamma performance, or the way the lighting changes as you move from outdoor to indoor environments in the game.

Brian Wiklem from Shiny said, “One of the areas in which Microsoft provided key assistance was with the game’s gamma performance. Our TGM and his team wrote an ‘auto-gamma’ program which we simply cut-and-pasted right into the game’s code. It worked within a matter of minutes, and shipped with our game. This wouldn’t have been possible without the support of Microsoft.”

Paul Steed

Paul is best-known in the game industry for being the Id guy, the outspoken, highly opinionated artist who did models and animations for Quake II and III. He didn’t pick up a computer mouse until he was in his late twenties, but since then he’s shipped 14 games, authored two books on modeling 3D characters for video games, and has become a frequent speaker at the Game Developers Conference. After Id, he went to Wild Tangent where he produced the Web game Betty Bad and, when challenged with the task of increasing downloads, came up with the ridiculously popular dancing girl visualizers. He was hired as an Xbox TGM in January, and worked with developers on Inside Pitch 2003, NBA Inside Drive, and Hunter: The Reckoning Redeemer before giving up TGM duties to serve as a Creative Director in ATG. One of his goals is to create an XDK (Xbox Development Kit) for artists only. “They’re scared of words and numbers,” he says. Paul’s favorite film is Braveheart, his favorite book is The Long Run by Daniel Keys Moran, and his favorite game is Galaga. He thinks Colin Farrell should play him in a movie, and in an alternate universe he’d be aPlayboy photographer.

According to Paul, being a TGM is more than just doing due diligence with your accounts. “A recent startup company in Austin, Texas, by the name of Outlaw Studios was founded by a good friend of mine named John Mueller. I see him at E3 earlier this year and we start talking and catching up. He’s frustrated with trying to make a game for Xbox. It seems he can’t get his hands on XDKs. I get back to work after the show, follow up, and about five days later he finally received notification he could purchase dev kits online and get rockin’ and rollin’ on his Xbox opus. I did all this and they were not my account… just my friends.”

Mark Subotnick

Known as “Bot” due to the preponderance of TGMs named Mark, he’s been in the games industry for 10 years. He started as a tester at Sega and worked his way up to supervising. He moved over to the Marketing and PR side for awhile before working as a producer launching the Dreamcast. He’s been involved in the launch of four different video game consoles. He would like to go on tour with Led Zeppelin, but thinks the greatest album of all time is The Beatles’ White Album. He thinks the best game ever is Madden, and if he could choose any superpower, it’d be telepathy. In an alternate universe, he’d own a bar in NYC, and if there were to be a movie about his life, the role of Bot would be played by Ed Norton.

While working with Planet Moon on Armed and Dangerous, he hooked the dev team up with a graphic performance review in which ATG engineers Bruce Dawson and Michael Austin spent two weeks with the source code, checking it out and figuring out how to improve the frame rate and other graphic elements. ATG content specialists Rod Fung and Mike Mace did a gameplay evaluation onArmed and Dangerous that generated specific feedback on controls, the feel of the game, and difficulty.

Planet Moon’s Aaron Loeb says that Armed and Dangerousis a better game for having worked with Bot and ATG, “We likely never would have bothered with the performance review or the gameplay evaluation if Mark weren’t so darn pushy about both of them—and he was absolutely right to be. Both our gameplay eval and our performance review came back with really good ideas. Many of the folks at Planet Moon have been making games for a decade or two, and they all expected these reports would be pretty weak; they were expecting ‘same old, same old.’ Console makers have been saying they’re going to offer developers better services for years.

“All of our guys were amazed at how much effort the ATG put into these reports, how detailed they were. They were definitely not same old, same old. We were absolutely delighted by the ATG’s commitment to making our game better, and it was Mark who convinced us to make use of those services.”

Mark also worked with Secret Level on Magic The Gathering. Leif Jensen appreciated both ATG and his TGM. “Working with Mark Subotnick and ATG has been great. Mark got us quick feedback and followed through with the extra support we needed in getting Magic on Xbox Live. Mark even hooked us up with lots of Xbox swag, which pleased the team. Anytime we had questions, we could either do a conference call, or in one specific case, we flew our lead programmer up to Redmond to personally sit down with several ATG engineers. We really appreciate Mark’s and everyone’s assistance in getting our project out on time!”

Mark Terrano

Mark Terrano’s first career was as a programmer and network specialist involved in every area of computing, from stock markets to oil pipelines. He worked with Ensemble Studios on all of the Age of Empires (he was the lead designer on Age of Kings) series of games, and on various multi-user experiences (MUDs to Telephone audio games). He also presented the talk “What is Life” at the 2002 World Cyber Games Developers conference. The book he wishes he’d written is TheShockwave Rider by John Brunner, the cartoon character most like him is Samurai Jack, and his desired superpower is “the power to turn any ideas into bug-free code.” He thinks the best game of all time is Chess. “It’s hard to beat a good turn-based strategy game that’s been shipping for a few thousand years and still selling well.”

Mark worked with the developers at Nerve Software on Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War. “Xbox Live was pretty new while they were doing development—so we were figuring out things together. I helped them get set up, worked through firewall issues, and creating accounts—general support issues. ATG engineer Dan Banay also conducted a network review. That’s when we check to see how efficiently the game is using the bandwidth on the network, look for problems with voice communications, and send back a report to the developer with some areas they can improve.”

After an Xbox Live enabled game ships, the work isn’t done. Mark also helped Nerve with questions about downloadable content and demos. To Mark, this is what being a TGM is all about. “TGMs are responsible for making sure the developer has a voice internally. We evaluate changes to the service, support, or procedures with an eye on impact to the dev team. TGMs also work with other internal teams to streamline the process for developers like Nerve for the fastest possible turnaround.”

Andrew Walker

Andrew started in the games industry as a programmer at Inner Workings, a small development studio in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1998, he joined the Microsoft® DirectX® Developer Relations Group and created their Graphics Advisory Board where he got some of the best minds in gaming to sit with the Microsoft® Direct3D® architects and help shape the future of the technology. From there, he joined the Xbox Live group where he produced Re-Volt, which was released as part of the Xbox Live Beta program last year. Andrew would also choose to go on tour with Led Zeppelin. He thinks that the best film of all time is Sleepy Hollow, and that a young Sean Connery should play him in a movie. His favorite book is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and his favorite game isGrand Theft Auto 3.

Andrew worked with Criterion Games on Burnout 2. This was interesting because, while it was not playable online, it was the first offline game to let you upload your scores to XboxLive. Andrew visited Criterion along with ATG engineer Chris Prince to brainstorm how they could realize their vision on Xbox. “The game was already looking pretty, but we gave them a list of ideas to improve such as increasing texture resolution and adding HDTV support. We sat and talked for a long time about how easy it would be to include Scoreboards into their title, and what kind of ATG services they would need. One of the cool ideas that came out of that conversation was to record the nationality of each entrant in the Scoreboard. Something no other Xbox title had done to date. We just thought it would be great if you could see that the top racer on a particular track was from France or Germany or the UK. We weren't sure how that would be done, so we got together with the Xbox Live team and devised a method based on our current technology to examine the billing region of each gamer. So in the end, Burnout 2 shipped as the first Xbox LiveScoreboards-only game with a new feature that no one else had to boot.”

Andrew might be regretting that feature now though. Alex Ward, Director of Design at Criterion points out, “Andrew is a really cool guy and was very professional and helpful, but I don’t think he’s number one on our Xbox Live Scoreboards forBurnout 2.”

So now you know another reason why Xbox games kick ass all over the competition. Sony and Nintendo don’t have anything like ATG or the TGMs—they don’t have anyone in there fighting for YOU the gamer, making sure that your gaming experience is as fun as possible.

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