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J Allard Xbox 360 Interview
Almost anyone you talk to on the last day of E3 will tell you how much they're
looking forward to heading home. So it never feels well to have a
high-profile interview on the last day, particularly in the afternoon.
That was the position I found myself sitting down with J Allard, Corporate
Vice President and Chief XNA Architect, and a couple other members of the
press to talk about Xbox 360.
Next time I'll bring a boom mike because besides my voice and J Allard's, I
could barely hear anyone else in the room. (This was really fun interview
to transcribe!) But we chatted about the Xbox 360, the fizzle of the Xbox
in Japan, Sony's political campaign, the likelihood of seeing the Xbox still
going in 2007, and one or two items of what can only be called Game
Philosophy. Thanks for your time, J!
Q: Is there casual acceptance of [video] game's artistry?
Allard: We're not there yet. We're just not there yet. If you look at
mainstream publications and you just look at the balance of print or
broadcast or web journalism as a percentage relative to television - movies,
music, sports, books even. For crying out loud, Entertainment Weekly. I
think they put more words to review plays than they do videogames. So, I
don't think we're there yet. We gotta get there though, that's why on
Monday I was talking about "Let's go get a billion gamers and make it as
mainstream as these other art forms."
Q: Do you see Xbox 360 as a step toward that?
Allard: I think it's three steps towards it. I think that we've got several
things we have to do on our part. We have to make the device itself more
inviting. I think we've done that. A lot of people's reactions - seeing
the device for the first time - is "Finally one that I don't have to banish
to the basement." On the remote control we've put the "action" button, put
A, B, X, Y, and up, down, left, right so if you want to play a simple card
or puzzle game you don't have to be an expert gamer [to get it going].
Paraphrase: It's about easing people to the space, the online space that
will make new gamers. There's a little company from the UK called Rare that
has broader appeal titles. We have online arcade so you don't even have to
go to the store to deal with the retail clerk or read reviews or anything
else. Buy a $5 game a $10 game; it's disposable. It's a thirty-minute
experience. So I think we're paving some steps along the way and I think
certainly that Nintendo and Sony are paving some steps as well.
Q: What went wrong in Japan and what are you doing to correct it for 360?
Allard: We didn't have a team in place. We didn't have a game plan that was
rock solid. We didn't take into account their needs in terms of the brand,
the industrial design. The portfolio was very limited. We didn't have the
world's best game developers and publisher support that we needed in Japan.
And we weren't differentiated. We also had a two-year disadvantage. [PS2]
I think, launched in March of 2000, and we launched in February of 2002.
That was another bad thing. They're not getting a head start this time,
that's for sure. We've got the world's best game publishers onboard. We've
got the most creative, well-known developers onboard, which will bring more
developers onboard. We've incorporated the regional feedback in terms of
the name, in terms of the brand, in terms of the aesthetic qualities of the
box. And the capabilities of the box, especially on gaming. And we've got
a great team in place there now. It's battle-scarred but very eager to get
going.
Q: Is there a cultural acceptance of an outside company coming in and
trying to claim the market, versus the "home court advantage" of [Sony and
Nintendo].
Allard: I would grant the advantage more to Sony in the sense that Mr.
Kutaragi visits all the publishers very regularly. And [they] can have very
active dialogue, which means the people responsible for creating the
platform between the people that are creating the games. And Mr. Kutaragi
may have wanted the executives making the decisions in Japan their hitch for
the PlayStation business. The executive team from Redmond makes lots of
journeys over to Japan to make sure that we're visible and to take feedback
on our licenses there. At the same time, what has Microsoft done for them?
We don't have the background with them. We haven't helped advance their
companies. Everyone, I would say, has been very flattering
to us in terms of us advancing the industry and they like the innovation and
they like what we're doing with Xbox 360 but what have we done for them?
They are running businesses, so there is that advantage there that Sony
holds that. the good news is, that this next generation the score is zero
zero.
Indecipherable garble and J Allard asking, "Why does gaming matter?" Then a
long pause. I'll admit that even I was baffled by the question when it was
asked.
Allard: Well, because. you know, I. I think that in today's society people
are looking for an
outlet to escape, to enjoy, to relax, to be empowered with decisions, to be
presented with choice in a way that doesn't have the permanence of the real
world. I could make some really big decisions in a videogame without
physical risk. The fact I can jump into a half-pipe and never skin my knee
or break a bone - the escapism is one huge appeal. I think another big
appeal is that community has been really, really important to the Internet.
The Internet is very empowering. We've turned readers into writers and we've
connected morals in a much more powerful, powerful fashion. And I look at
Xbox 360 as a way to do the same types of things with bringing community
together in interesting and exciting ways for leisure time. The Internet
was very information focused, this is more leisure focused.
More mostly indecipherable garble and when I was there J Allard told a story
about a 47-year old mother beta testing Xbox Live - using the headset while
her kid played the game, where the philosophical bon mot from J was:
"It's about creating living entertainment experiences, powered by human
energy."
Q: What do you think about Sony's hardware?
Allard: I think they've mislead people being very specific about certain
numbers in the press conference on Monday. We're launching a product
campaign, they're launching a political campaign. They were clearly
responsive to the system that we've designed. At the end of the day, our
transistor count and their transistor count - about the same. Then you have
to dig to the next level. We have a unified memory architecture. We didn't
tell developers how to split it, [Sony] split it. Every one of our
developers might split it right down the middle but who knows. In terms of
through-put and performance, they talk about 2X the floating point
performance. That's not right. They neglected to mention that we have
about 3X integer performance. They further neglected to mention that 80% of
games construction mix is integer and 20% is floating point so when you
weight it out, we've actually tuned it a little bit better. In the end, it's
basically a wash. I look at it and say it's a wash. You can make the case
for us, you can make the case for them. We'll publish a bunch of details so
you guys can all speculate but it's basically a wash. But I can say there's
will be harder to program for. And we're going to have better software
support. Both of these machines are so sophisticated that theoretical
performance doesn't matter - what matters is how much of that performance
can be unlocked. The key to unlocking performance [of the hardware] is
software.
Q: The Xbox 360 has a lot of abilities. Are you worried about the shear
number of abilities that it might intimidate those 47-year old housewives?
Allard: We've got one button! I'm being a little bit flip but, you know,
when you're talking about the intimidation factor we didn't muck with the
controller. We took the cord off it, which makes it more approachable. We
shifted the black and white buttons into better positions. We didn't change
the configuration at all. The controller is a plus if not neutral. Take a
look at the remote control design,
we actually put the action buttons on there so they can just use the
remote control to navigate the user interface, to find their friends, to
play some Live arcade games. We've made everything very straightforward and
the advanced users will all know they can plug in their MP3 player, a CD in
the drive, rip a bunch of music to the harddrive, have an XP machine and
have Media Center and it will unify all of our music catalogue into one
library, and stream all that in real-time. We know that, the housewife knows
how to drop a CD in and it plays.
Omni: I have two quick ones. Admittedly this has probably already been
answered but I've been drinking a lot the last few days. but is Xbox 360
going to be backwards compatible with Xbox?
Allard: Yes.
Omni: I read somewhere that Xbox is going to be supported into 2007. Is
that realistic?
Allard: We're still making Xboxes today. We'll sell more of them this year
than Xbox 360s. We'll be selling them deep into next year as well. From a
software point of view you're going to have software all the way up to '07.
But this is where the publishers have brought us on. You're not going to
see any from us. First party has to do the heavy lifting to prime the pump
so the publishers can follow suit.
Omni: Will you make Xbox and Xbox 360 games for simultaneous release?
Allard: We're not doing Xbox 1 games anymore. We're done. Done. Conker
is the last one, which is in manufacturing. All our attention is on Xbox
360. There are still going to be a lot of Xbox games [being made by
publishers].
Q: Will all Xbox games run on Xbox 360?
Allard: I will never say that we're going to run all Xbox 1 games. What I
will say is that we're focused on a software solution. The way we're
tackling the problem is that we're looking at the most successful, most
popular games first then go down the list - so the most popular titles will
(probably) run no problem. PS2 is not fully backwards compatible with PS1 -
there was a problem where it wouldn't run Gran Turismo.
And then something went wrong with my tape so beyond this point it pretty
much sounded like a washing machine falling down a set of stairs.
http://www.armchairempire.com/Inter...-xbox-360-2.htm
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