Taking Fun Seriously
One of the things I’m hoping to do in this blog is chronicle the history of DirectX before the stories and adventures associated with creating this revolutionary technology get lost to the mists of time. To that end I’d like to invite old friends and colleagues reading this blog to feel free to contribute their own stories and memorabilia.
Link to Taking Fun Seriously Document
To kick things off I would like to share a document that was the most complete snapshot of the state of the game industry and Microsoft’s position in it at the time that Microsoft decided to make gaming a strategic focus. Not everything shared here is as sanitized and self-glorifying as I might like to remember it, but it’s the truth warts and all. By way of advanced apology I was much younger and far less refined in my approach to just about everything at that age… which isn’t very refined even today I’m afraid. Years later I wonder if DirectX would really have succeeded if I or any of the folks on the early DirectX team had applied the restraint or judgment to our actions that we would consider appropriately professional today.
Taking Fun Seriously II is actually two documents in one. The first is Taking Fun Seriously attached as an appendix. I wrote this document in 1994 with extensive input from Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom as a proposal to make gaming a strategic focus for Microsoft. Taking Fun Seriously II was written a year later after the WILD success of the first Game SDK and early Windows 95 games including DOOM II from ID, Pitfall Harry from Activision and many others. At this point our (my) ego might reasonably have been said to have gotten well out of control. In my defense I will assert that it was pretty hard to survive at Microsoft in that era without rhino hide and I definitely had it. There are a lot of things about these documents that are fascinating to look back on years later because they contained many brazen predictions about what the success of DirectX would mean to Windows as a gaming and consumer platform. Recall that at the time, Microsoft’s dominance in the home was still far from well-established.
Over the coming months I hope to write extensively on this subject but as advanced reading material presented here for the first time, in its entirity is the original and unembellished Microsoft secret strategy to take over the world of gaming…
Alex, glad to see you are back to writing. Can’t wait to read your insights, commentary and stories!!
Alex, great to see this write up nearly 20 years later. You guys were/are brilliant.
Thank you John, very kind of you. I’ll be sure to recount the many management challenges we subjected you to. 🙂
Glad to see you back online Sir. Just seeing the list of names brought back so many memories. I have several items of nostalgia if you’d like me to post them for this – including an unopened bottle of Microsoft Brainwash soda.
I learned so much with you and had such a great time despite all the stress and sleeping at MSFT 7 days a week. I still have so many friendships with the great people I got to meet around the world.
And the best RPG campaign in history – with Craig Eisler, Adam and Karen Waalkes, Jason Stine, etc Your fall to Undeath – and subsequent subversion of the party and eventual fall. Great times.
Hey Jason, if you have pictures of memorabelia and stories you want to share I’m happy to post them. For our reading audience, Jason was the 2nd Game Evangelist at Microsoft I hired to manage the many relationships we had. One of Jasons great achievements was persuading Blizzard to make Diablo a Windows 95 DirectX game.
Funny stuff. 🙂 And some good predictions in there!