NEWS - Friday, October 13, 2000
Seamus Blackley
Wednesday night Microsoft’s Director of Advanced Technology for Xbox was recently at Stanford University discussing everything XBOX. The peeps over at TheGIA were there taking lots of notes. Several key issues were discussed ranging from piracy measures as well as some interesting topics regarding the much shrouded controllers for the box. Here’s a link to check it all out and the usual blurblage.
But Blackley seemed reluctant to discuss the hardware at all. "When people ask me why the Xbox is better than the PS2," he said, "they’re always surprised that I don’t reply with numbers and statistics. But console gamers don’t care about that ... they just want the games." And Xbox seems to be listening to what console gamers want. We asked Blackley if Xbox was serious about courting support from Japanese developers, and not just U.S. PC developers. Blackley responded that he had personally been to Japan 13 times in the past year, and that Microsoft had a team of thirty people in Japan working fulltime building developer relations.In an interesting anecdote, he mentioned that some developers were considering online games that provided PC and Xbox players with different roles; for example, in a chariot racing game, the PC player could steer the chariot while the Xbox player stood in the back and fought off rivals. He also mentioned that the Xbox would support extra controllers such as driving controllers, fishing controllers, "dance pads," and, perhaps, even the special Densha de Go! controller.
That’s good stuff!
Source: http://www.msxbox.com/
