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- May 05, 2006 16:27 PM PST
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"I knew we were going to do it and I wanted to get going," said Baker. "Ultimate TV was going away. And the lead time on things like silicon was going to be so long. We looked at the workload and had to decide what we would be able to do. If it was going to get done, it was pretty much up to us."
"I was really excited about working on it," Andrews said.
Abrash was a big help at the start because he had programmed cutting-edge games such as id Softwares first-person shooter, Quake. He had also been instrumental in the design of the original Xbox, working for Seamus Blackley in the Advanced Technology Group. He offered good ideas. One of them was to create a CPU and a graphics chip that worked together much more intimately than the typical counterparts would work in a PC. But Abrash resigned from Microsoft a month after Xenon began. He had enjoyed working with both Baker and Andrews, but he had decided to leave to work with his friend Mark Sartain at Rad Game Tools. The start-up would create software development tools to more easily generate 3-D graphics. Abrash's vision for game development had always been to create simple hardware and build sophisticated tools that allowed developers to get the maximum benefit out of that hardware. That idea would live on at the Xbox division after he was gone. While at Rad, Abrash still consulted for Microsoft, helping to define how the graphics system would work.
The 34-year-old Baker had to step up as the technical ringleader. He was a smart man who had filled his head with the knowledge of computer graphics, but he wasn't much of a video game player. The son of a metal merchant, he had grown up in Canterbury, England, the setting of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. One day, when he was around 10, Baker's father bought him an electronics magazine.
"I was hooked," Baker said.
Nick Baker, Xenon silicon architect
