E3: The Microsoft Xbox Conference 2006

Our detailed report covers everything you need to know from Microsoft's briefing, including Bill Gates' personal appearance, Halo 3, Fable 2, Forza 2 and much, much more, as we wrap up E3's Pre-show coverage.

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Following the success of Oblivion, Moore announced two more joint-release PC and Xbox 360 titles. FASA is resurrecting a classic FPS franchise with Shadowrun coming in January, while Alan Wake, an intense story-driven psychological thriller about a writer trying to forget his past, is also coming from the creators at Remedy. "The only thing worse than not sleeping is being awake," says the trailer for the latter.

But Microsoft had an even more encouraging way to show its seriousness towards gaming at the centre of entertainment strategy than simply having Peter Moore talk for an hour. "When we come to E3 we always try to show you something that's new. And for what's coming next, there's no better day to bring someone here, who's never been to E3 before, and no better person to present the vision of where we're taking gaming next. Ladies and gentlemen, the Chairman and Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, Mr Bill Gates."

Bill Gates came onto the stage and started talking. "It's great to be invited to E3 and see all the cool things that are shown here. I'm a heavy Xbox 360 user, kind of a PGR3 addict. For my family it's Xbox Live Arcade..." You know, we at Kikizo run a bunch of servers at a datacenter in Seattle but for what it's worth we don't pretend to be heavy users addicted to SQL databases.

"Xbox 360 is laying an incredible foundation for us, but I want to talk about where we go from here, not just on Xbox 360, but taking all of the platform work Microsoft does, across all the different devices, and being able to take gaming and this concept of Live to a whole new level." Gates spoke about making gaming attractive to people of every age, "driving the industry to a whole new size". He said that Xbox 1 was a fantastic learning experience, and described Xbox 360 as "a global phenomenon".

Bill Gates spoke in detail about Microsoft's platform strategy

Gates announced eight new countries that will be getting Xbox 360: South Africa, Chile, India, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia, bringing the total to nearly 40 countries. It will allow creators to "invest heavily and have a fantastic business", he said. By end of June, between 5 and 5.5m Xbox 360 consoles will have shipped too. "Before our competition even enters the marketplace, we will have a ten million unit head start with Xbox 360. We think that's very important - a number we only dreamed about a year ago, [funny, Robbie was dreaming much higher, something like a billion?] but now we see that we can achieve that with the pieces in place, and that creates business opportunity for our partners."

Bill welcomes Scott Henson on stage

Next up was the concept of Connection to Windows PC and to the Windows Mobile world. It's a ceoncept that unites three platforms for seamless content sharing, a unified environment in which users can choose to reveal what game they're playing or what activity they're in to all their friends online across platforms. "Windows is a very important game platform," explained Gates, citing over 150m people playing games on Windows, exceeding the largest installed base of videogames. And 1 billion game-ready cellphones is a big deal as well. "There are some very clear things that you can do that are user-centric, letting you see your achievements, awards, friends, Gamertag," began Gates. "This is a vision of taking Live to a new level, called Live Anywhere. We're announcing it today, and over the next year this is a platform that we'll roll out. It will actually be part of Windows Vista built-in."

It means you have one online community, he explained: "You can set up multiple accounts if you want, but it's easy to have the sharing as you go across those different things... to get it to critical mass, it really has to be part of the platform." He said that many different game publishers will publish across these different platforms. "The richness of what you'll see in mobile games is just...very much at the start... in fact, if we look at the power of some phones, they're equivalent to what a PC would have had three or four years ago." The idea that you can start a game on Xbox, and continue it on the phone may seem far fetched but Gates claimed that "there are things that will work that way. The vision here is that each platform plays its own role, the platform tools let people share development across these things." "We really think this is a unique contribution and Microsoft is probably the only company that can pull this off... to take [these three] platforms, and thinking of that in a wholistic way."

Gates welcomed onto the stage Scott Henson, who we spoke with in an interview in March and whose title 'this week' is Director of Platform Strategy, to provide a demonstration of how the vision might work in reality. Obviously, Gates was watching our video interview with Henson when we suggested that his employer should show more of him in public.

The 'romance dance' expands the pinata population

The idea of the demo was to show off the integration of the platforms by looking at Major Nelson [Head of Xbox Live programming]'s Vista desktop, checking his friends list showing multiple platforms, with one Gamertag no matter what the platform is. Henson actually pulls up the Xbox Live Guide on Windows Vista, and a game of Shadowrun is then possible to play with one player on Xbox 360 and one on Vista. He also demonstrated a Marketplace style service on the Windows Mobile-enabled handset.

An example of how would the Forza Motorsport team would take this canvas and use it followed, and they showed how a car can be taken from the Windows Mobile area, to Vista for tailoring and tuning the car, and then bring it onto Xbox Live and race with it. This realtime process won applause from the audience; it all looks very "integrated", and we guess that's the whole point. When we spent time with Scott two months ago he did say he was real busy, and this demo he put together kind of explains why.

The final game in the series

To close, Bill brought Peter back on stage for a quick summary of everything we'd seen, but it wasn't over before Bill said, "Actually Peter, as we walk off stage I think it would be fun to show these people a little in-game footage of something that probably they'll recognise." And with that, Microsoft's very own killer app fired up - the first ever trailer for Halo 3, apparently all based on in-game visuals. The trailer was sparse on any specific story detail, but looked beautiful, with the Master Chief emerging from a quiet desert scene as airships flew to a giant opening in the ground. "This is the way the world ends", says the voice in the trailer, sealed with the words, "Finish the fight". Chief may be about to finish a fight, but at this year's E3 at least, the fight is only just starting - and Microsoft has shown its battle plan today in perhaps the most convincing terms possible.

Adam Doree
Director, Kikizo.com

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