Kevin Bachus On Xbox's "Legacy"

Kevin Bachus, one of the original Xbox team members at Microsoft, pens a guest essay this week in Dean Takahashi's blog, pontificating on the "legacy of the Xbox":

We wanted to win over the hearts and minds of developers — and by winning over the developers, we knew we could win over the hearts and minds of gamers by enabling truly wonderful new games to be conceived. [...] [W]e couldn’t help noticing that Sony and Nintendo suddenly started raising their game, becoming even more focused on developers, helping nuture the industry and ushering in a whole tidal wave of unbelievable games of their own.

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, it's nice to remember that back in the day, Xbox was the impossible dream of a group of young renegades inside Microsoft. On the other, what has Microsoft really done in the last half-decade to foster the sort of genre-busting creative new content that the original crew envisioned? That all of them, from Bachus to Seamus Blackley, left Xbox behind long, long ago doesn't help matters, either.

Guest Essay: Kevin Bachus [Mercury News]