XBOX

But Mr. Blackley had only pressed the Pause button, and he finished the demo without a hitch. The enthusiastic crowd showered him with applause.
             The shiny box that Mr. Blackley had helped midwife from conception to delivery became Microsoft's weapon to take on Sony and Nintendo in the video game business and to make games the company's premier entertainment medium.
             "We've put quite a budget behind this one, and we're going to break through in a very big way," Mr. Gates concluded to the audience of game developers. More than the marketing promises from the world's richest man, however, it was Mr. Blackley's demos that made this proposition credible.
             The X-Man .
             Until the Xbox, few people outside the industry knew much about Mr. Blackley, but he was a familiar figure to many at the Game Developers Conference. Easy to spot in a crowd, Mr. Blackley is in his early 30s, stands 6 feet, 2 inches tall, weighs 190 pounds, and has the build of a linebacker. He has close-shorn red hair and wears studs in his ears. Raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he has mastered an eclectic mix of topics including cars, physics, jazz, and history. A friend describes him as "one of the first cool people I met among the geeks" in the games business.
             He stood out in another way, too. A year earlier he'd been at the same trade show--but under much different circumstances.
             Back then, he met with Johnny Wilson, the editor of Computer Gaming World magazine. Mr. Blackley's highly anticipated game, Trespasser: The Lost World, had just met with terrible reviews and lackluster sales. The game, which he undertook for Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Interactive, had been expected to propel computer games forward as an art form, but instead it became yet another example of the inferiority of games to movies. The gray-bearded Mr. Wilson was a kind of elder statesman among game journalists. He saw Mr. Blackley as an ambitious genius who had tried to break new ground, yet his magazine was one of those that panned the game.