J Allard Xbox 360 Interview (Page 2): Interviews

J Allard Xbox 360 Interview (Page 2)

Newsletter

Be notified of site updates. Sign-up for the Newsletter sent out twice weekly.

Enter E-Mail Address Below:

More mostly indecipherable garble and when I was there J Allard told a story about a 47-year old mother beta testing Xbox Live – using the headset while her kid played the game, where the philosophical bon mot from J was:

“It’s about creating living entertainment experiences, powered by human energy.”

Q: What do you think about Sony’s hardware?

Allard: I think they’ve mislead people being very specific about certain numbers in the press conference on Monday. We’re launching a product campaign, they’re launching a political campaign. They were clearly responsive to the system that we’ve designed. At the end of the day, our transistor count and their transistor count – about the same. Then you have to dig to the next level. We have a unified memory architecture. We didn’t tell developers how to split it, [Sony] split it. Every one of our developers might split it right down the middle but who knows. In terms of through-put and performance, they talk about 2X the floating point performance. That’s not right. They neglected to mention that we have about 3X integer performance. They further neglected to mention that 80% of games construction mix is integer and 20% is floating point so when you weight it out, we’ve actually tuned it a little bit better. In the end, it’s basically a wash. I look at it and say it’s a wash. You can make the case for us, you can make the case for them. We’ll publish a bunch of details so you guys can all speculate but it’s basically a wash. But I can say there’s will be harder to program for. And we’re going to have better software support. Both of these machines are so sophisticated that theoretical performance doesn’t matter – what matters is how much of that performance can be unlocked. The key to unlocking performance [of the hardware] is software.

Advertisement

Q: The Xbox 360 has a lot of abilities. Are you worried about the shear number of abilities that it might intimidate those 47-year old housewives?

Allard: We’ve got one button! I’m being a little bit flip but, you know, when you’re talking about the intimidation factor we didn’t muck with the controller. We took the cord off it, which makes it more approachable. We shifted the black and

Advertisement

white buttons into better positions. We didn’t change the configuration at all. The controller is a plus if not neutral. Take a look at the remote control design, we actually put the action buttons on there so they can just use the remote control to navigate the user interface, to find their friends, to play some Live arcade games. We’ve made everything very straightforward and the advanced users will all know they can plug in their MP3 player, a CD in the drive, rip a bunch of music to the harddrive, have an XP machine and have Media Center and it will unify all of our music catalogue into one library, and stream all that in real-time… We know that, the housewife knows how to drop a CD in and it plays.

Omni: I have two quick ones. Admittedly this has probably already been answered but I’ve been drinking a lot the last few days… but is Xbox 360 going to be backwards compatible with Xbox?

Allard: Yes.

Omni: I read somewhere that Xbox is going to be supported into 2007. Is that realistic?

Allard: We’re still making Xboxes today. We’ll sell more of them this year than Xbox 360s. We’ll be selling them deep into next year as well. From a software point of view you’re going to have software all the way up to ’07. But this is where the publishers have brought us on. You’re not going to see any from us. First party has to do the heavy lifting to prime the pump so the publishers can follow suit.

Omni: Will you make Xbox and Xbox 360 games for simultaneous release?

Allard: We’re not doing Xbox 1 games anymore. We’re done. Done. Conker is the last one, which is in manufacturing. All our attention is on Xbox 360. There are still going to be a lot of Xbox games [being made by publishers].

Q: Will all Xbox games run on Xbox 360?

Allard: I will never say that we’re going to run all Xbox 1 games. What I will say is that we’re focused on a software solution. The way we’re tackling the problem is that we’re looking at the most successful, most popular games first then go down the list – so the most popular titles will (probably) run no problem. PS2 is not fully backwards compatible with PS1 – there was a problem where it wouldn’t run Gran Turismo.

And then something went wrong with my tape so beyond this point it pretty much sounded like a washing machine falling down a set of stairs.

(May 27, 2005)


PC \| DS \| Wii \| PlayStation 2 \| PlayStation 3 \| PSP \| Xbox \| Xbox 360 \| Retired: GBA \| Gamecube \| Xbox
News \| Reviews \| Previews \| Features \| Classics \| Goodies \| Anime \| Forums