The underdog that redefined the industry

“When you think about what Xbox LIVE was when [Xbox] 360 came out, that was just a dashboard,” said, not without some nostalgia, Call of Duty vice president of production Daniel Suarez in an excerpt. from a long interview given to the Polygon website. And disagreeing would be difficult with Microsoft Consulting firm.

After all, in addition to the inclusion of avatars and relatively limited connectivity resources, what there was at LIVE at the time was not much more than a social platform in a germinal state — even if it had enormous potential. Nevertheless, between the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2015, Microsoft's pioneering idea began to offer an entertainment center that not only added new services, but also extended to other platforms besides the Xbox itself.

“Look at where the thing is today and where it started,” continues Suarez. “Everything has evolved from a social network to something beyond, including the competitive components that make it possible.” In other words, if today you can turn on your Xbox 360 or your Xbox One to meet some friends online, it is certain that the simple choice is probably also due to the fact that there are “movies, TV, music, pop culture, etc.” sharing the same ecosystem.

“[Xbox LIVE] has become the destination for anyone who wants to consume media content”, continues the developer, noting that, in the beginning, the thing was not seen as anything more than a “gaming machine”. As Microsoft itself insists on reinforcing this new mantra in marketing videos, the integration of a “dark horse” gaming system into a network device has ended up redefining the way video games are played today.

But this did not happen overnight, of course. In fact, it's likely that some of the genes behind the way Microsoft's online platform developed into what it is today go back to a much longer period than an unsuspecting Xbox fan would believe. After all, it is a story that has its first movements in the 1990s, with a plot set to work by a mixture of genius and a sense of opportunity.

An inspiring read

At the beginning of 2000, when it was launched, Xbox LIVE had 300 servers, through which the first online functionalities of the service were generated – which, at the time, was still rehearsing its first steps on the first Xbox. Seems like a lot? Perhaps. However, just remember that the current version of the network has 300,000 servers. However, this growth dates back to a period before Microsoft's bet on the niche of dedicated gaming consoles.

The whole thing is said to have started when James Allard found the novel “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson. Written in 1992, the book was about a kind of crazed pizza delivery ninja who, by night, became a combatant in the still germinal terrain of the internet.

However, the background seems to have been what impressed Allard the most: there was a whole universe focused on the virtual/immediate interaction between human beings. In Stephenson's world, people could cross oceans using fiber-optic cables to make a quick visit to a distant friend. Naturally, for a young computer genius, the sight of this “unified world” made ideas boil.

To: Bill Gates (From: James Allard)

When Microsoft started planning its Windows 95, the internet was still relatively restricted. It may seem comical today, but it is conceivable that most people still had no idea of ​​the colossus that the great network would become in the not too distant future.

Nevertheless, there was a pioneer whose genius had recently been bombarded by the ideas of Neal Stephenson's fiction (above). James Allard is said to have sent an email to Bill Gates, in which, through an equally didactic and ecstatic text, he reinforced the virtues of the internet — particularly, reinforcing how the network should become something determining in a few years.

And Windows was supposed to become the “killer app” of the new shared era. All Microsoft needed to do, according to Allard, was to include Internet connection software in Windows 95, to make the next generation of the operating system ready to browse as soon as it was installed. Well, Gates heard the call... And the result of that couldn't be more obvious today, although there was one more variable.

DirectX: a handy toolbox

The true PC gaming boom in the mid-90s is largely due to one of Microsoft's best breakthroughs to date. By releasing DirectX, Bill Gates' company allowed developers to build just for the API, without having to re-engineer their software for every piece of hardware available at the time; it was enough to have DirectX as a focus, and communication was guaranteed.

Together with Allard's Internet connection package, Microsoft's new tool was able to transform the new Windows 95 into a perfect product for gaming and using the Internet. Naturally, from this it was already possible to clearly perceive the bet: the entertainment market should focus on the software industry directed to the virtual environment of the internet.

The underdog that redefined the industry

In fact, Microsoft was taking several steps towards electronic entertainment as early as the early 1990s — as it made its Windows users kill dozens of hours of work with Solitaire and Minesweeper. However, it wasn't until the mid-1990s that the company seriously considered a bigger bet on video games.

It is true that, with the arrival of the 2000s, the competitive landscape of electronic entertainment was not the most inviting. After all, SEGA and Nintendo were still established names, and the market had watched the first PlayStation with their jaws dropped. However, none of the companies possessed Microsoft's particular know-how; basically, where specific knowledge about games was lacking, there was plenty of experience with service provision and online connectivity.

And it was precisely this knowledge that paved the way for the arrival of the highly unlikely first Xbox. Named after DirectX, the console represented equally monumental and accelerated engineering work; less than two years separated the initial concept from the delivery of the finished device. And that with a very questionable differential for the time: the support for broadband connection.

“Broadband is the future”

In 1999, broadband internet was still a technology that needed to prove itself. At the time, the thing didn't go much further than a costly curiosity for more affluent internet users - so anyone who wanted to launch a device with internet support should consider, by default, the good old dialup modem (the same , whose connection noises turned into ringtones shortly afterwards).

It was at this point that the CTO of Microsoft's electronic entertainment department decided to make another risky gamble. “We wanted to create a gaming experience that was great for the user, and there could be no restrictions,” said James Allard, justifying the controversial choice at the time to include a broadband connector in the first Xbox.

He continues: "With an online strategy as ambitious as the one we had — with graphics, audio, controls and content — [the dialup] connection just couldn't live up to our commitment to gamers and the industry." In fact, it was this choice that allowed Microsoft to take the first steps towards selling content in a strictly digital format, an undertaking that, at the time, took the name of “Project Orange”. But that would just be the beginning.

The birth of Xbox LIVE

The first moves to produce an online network for Xbox came in August 2000, when Boyd Mutterer was called upon to lay the foundations of what would later become Xbox LIVE — at the time, the name used was simply “Xbox Online”. In an interview with Polygon, Mutterer remembers being approached by James Allard, who gave him a very rocky mission.

“Allard told me, 'Okay, we put an ethernet port in the box. Go find out what she can communicate with,'” the executive told the website, bursting out laughing when he remembered what had happened. “That was basically the mission,” he recalls. “I can say that I was the first person on LIVE. I hired everybody, the whole development team.”

Currently, what you see when you enter the Xbox Operations Center is, as Polygon put it, a huge theater that looks a lot like NASA's Mission Control, the American space agency. There are dozens of people, all with three monitors available — one for the Microsoft network, one for the Xbox network, and the third with varying functions. Something far from the beginning in 2000, therefore.

The Second Generation Challenge

If the launch of the first Xbox and the foundations of Xbox LIVE were sponsored by the knowledge and also by a certain sense of opportunity of Microsoft, with the arrival of the Xbox 360 the system really reached another level - whose challenge extends, reaching the brand new space multimedia social available on Xbox One.

But that certainly wasn't easy. After all, one generation had already been enough for Sony, for example, to fix a certain mismatch in relation to its online infrastructures — since, let's face it, access to the large network never came to fruition with the PlayStation 2. Of course, there was the advantage that the new consoles would already have Xbox LIVE properly integrated — forming a single product with Xbox.

“In order to make the Xbox 360 show what it came for, you had to be connected; that's where his friends were,” the iconic Larry “Major Nelson” Herby recalled to Polygon, outlining what Microsoft's bet for the future would be. “I remember all those times when we would update the system and new games could come out and we would struggle to keep everything running.”

“Xbox LIVE was one of the first systems where people paid us for services provided by Microsoft,” says Herby. “I believe we've set the tone for paid services for the entire company,” he adds, alluding to a practice that has become increasingly common across the company.

In fact, far from its modest beginnings, Xbox LIVE today not only adds many features and services, but is not even restricted to Xbox. One can imagine what the next steps of the “underdog” will be.