Asha Sharma celebrates 25 years of XBOX with a message to fans and employees
We report it translated into Italian; enjoy the reading!
25 Years of XBOX
This message has just been sent to Team XBOX employees around the world.
Dear colleagues,
Microsoft was founded on the belief that computing could put extraordinary capabilities in the hands of ordinary people. The world of video games has been part of this history since the company's inception.
In 1979, we launched "Microsoft Adventure," a text-based game that looked more like MS-DOS than a primitive version of Minecraft. Made by a single programmer, Gordon Letwin, one of Microsoft's first 13 employees and later an architect of OS/2, the game allowed players to explore a digital world, collect treasures, solve puzzles, and encounter mythical creatures.
A few years later, Bruce Artwick brought the magic of flight to the 16-bit IBM PC, making it possible to fly a plane from your desk. Over the next decade, Microsoft released dozens of other titles, including Minesweeper, Age of Empires, and four more Microsoft Flight Simulators, while Windows helped usher in the era of 3D gaming with partners like id Software (which would become part of XBOX some 24 years later).
In the mid-90s, a small team working on DirectX, the technology that helped developers create games for Windows, had a great idea: to use the PC architecture to power the first American video game console in decades. Soon after, work began on the secret "Project Midway".
When the original XBOX launched in 2001, it was impossible to miss. It was 2-3 times larger than rival consoles, with a giant X imprinted on a black casing and a bright alien green jewel in the center. It came with a hard drive when competitors asked gamers to buy separate memory cards, and an Ethernet socket when 9 out of 10 households were still using the dial-up connection. It also boasted more than double the processing power of the PlayStation and GameCube and was a pioneer in the use of controllers with two analog sticks.
A year later, XBOX Live revolutionized online gaming with permanent friend lists and matchmaking, as well as a common service that allowed developers to create connected experiences. Bringing all this together was Halo: Combat Evolved, a launch title that not only defined XBOX, but also proved its first advertising campaign right: "Games will never be the same again."
Twenty-five years later, XBOX has become one of the largest video game companies in the world. We've made four generations of XBOX consoles, with a fifth on the way. Today, our games reach over a billion players each year, spanning beloved and iconic franchises such as Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Diablo, Doom, Fable, Fallout, Forza, Gears of War, Halo, Minecraft, Overwatch, Sea of Thieves, The Elder Scrolls, StarCraft, Warcraft, Wolfenstein, and many more.
To all those who have made XBOX, XBOX
XBOX was built by generations of employees, studios, developers, and partners who believed in the potential of video games. To all of you, thank you. I especially want to pay tribute to the 111 people at XBOX and our studios who have been with us for 25 years or more. You helped shape the history we celebrate today, and each of you will receive a special console engraved to commemorate what you helped build.
Since joining XBOX, I've heard stories of lifelong friendships that started during a gaming session, of people who met the person they were going to marry, and of parents who now share the games they grew up with with their children. I've also heard about people who are no longer with us and how those hours spent playing together still mean to those who love them. Ultimately, that's exactly why we exist.
The history of XBOX has never been ours. Our fans challenged us, encouraged us, held us accountable, and stood by us. We celebrated this anniversary with fans around the world and with special launches. Today, we're bringing the festivities home to Seattle.
The next 25 years
The world of video games has always been an industry driven by dreams. Not only by the desire to bring something imagined to life, but also to share it with others. Sometimes that dream is about a game, other times about a console, a character, or an entire universe. The history of XBOX is a testament to the power of these dreams and how they can grow over time.
The first Microsoft Flight Simulator took up just 160 KB, with 2D graphics, 16 colors, and a total of 20 airports. The 2024 version draws on over 2.5 petabytes of data (more than 15 billion times the size of the original game). Its map, which spans 200 million square miles, recreates nearly every city, street, and landmark on the planet, with trillions of trees rendered individually and real-world weather conditions reproduced in near real-time.
Although modern games demonstrate the heights achieved by human ingenuity in ways unimaginable just a few decades ago, the costs, resources, and risks involved in creating them have grown just as dramatically. As a result, too many ideas never turn into games, and too many games fall short of what their creators had envisioned. For decades, this has been the inevitable trade-off of ambition. We need to change that.
Throughout human history, the scale of what we could create was determined by the people, capital, and resources we could have. This relationship is beginning to break down. A single person will soon be able to wield skills that once required entire nations. A small team will be able to build worlds that today require hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of dollars. And our largest studios will be able to pursue ambitions far beyond today's games, just as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 deviates from its first release in 1982.
I think the future of video games will be more like its beginnings, when a small team with a big idea was able to revolutionize the way people play around the world. Our responsibility is to make great games, unmistakable hardware, and give more people the chance to create something the world has never seen before.
Happy birthday, XBOX!
Asha
