Remarks by Bill Gates
Game Developers Conference
San Jose, California
March 10, 2000

MR. GATES: Well, good morning. It's very exciting to be here today and have the opportunity to announce a whole new platform, a platform that all of you are going to take in directions that we can't even imagine. The software industry has been built on having these wonderful platforms. It goes back to the original kit computer, where hobbyists would get together and think about what software could they build for that machine.

And we've had a lot of great milestones: MS-DOS, the graphical user interface with Macintosh and Windows, and now we have all these machines connected across the Internet. We're thinking about a broadband world with digital music, digital video, and the empowerment that comes out of this is going to be amazing. But one key element that is crucial is making it fun, making sure people are entertained by what they do.

Well, Microsoft has been involved in this. I thought I would bring up and remind you that -- well; this audience has a good memory. That's a 1980 game offering, actually created by Tim Smith, published by Microsoft, and ran on the Apple II, did very well, sold 80,000 copies. And the graphics was so amazing that we weren't sure people would know that was a phone pit, so we put right on there "phone pit." And we think in the future that won't be necessary. So, games are really coming into their own.

Now, Microsoft's vision is a very broad and ambitious one. It's about empowerment. And historically that vision was very centered around the PC. We loved the PC. The PC is growing, it's getting better and better, and I'll be talking about that today. But the PC won't be the only device that people are using to get onto the Internet and to be entertained. There will be new devices in the living room. There will be devices in your pocket, the cell phone with the screen that will let you get the latest information, whether it's messages or schedules or travel information. There will be a computer in your car. There will be tablet-type devices that will be readable enough that you can think of them as electronic books, and just as good as reading off paper. So, all those devices will be out there.

Our goal is to create a platform that allows wonderful applications to be built for all of them. And, in fact, in many ways, those devices need to work together. If you have preferences. If you have communications, you don't want to have to manually move that data around. You want that to happen automatically because of the platform.

And so Microsoft's vision statement talks about great software anytime, any place and on any device. And so the announcements we're making today really fit into that "any device" vision. Now, if we look at the game market over the last few years, the growth has actually been pretty impressive. This is U.S. game software sales. What I did is put together both console sales and PC sales, both of those have been going pretty healthily. In the past the game console things tend to have ups and downs, but the basic trend line is up where the PC line has been just a steady growth over the years.

Now, we believe that this reflects the fact that the games are getting better and better. And even the definition of what you think of as a "game" is going to become a lot broader. If you can educate somebody while you're entertaining them, we don't think that's such a bad thing. If you can let them get out to the Internet and get the latest information and somehow involve that in the game, that would also be a wonderful thing. So, the whole notion of what game categories are is going to expand quite a bit, as the platforms enable new things.

If you think of the different categories, the Windows platform has been strong for the intellectual-type games, role playing-type games. The consoles have been very strong where you just sit down on your couch and get a very visceral social experience. And both platforms have been strong for the action and adventure-type games. These categories will expand and every one of them, we think, is going to be very, very strong. Now, what does it take to get gaming to its full potential. Now, what kind of platform would allow the business to, say, be four or five times as big as it is today.

We've spent a lot of time, particularly in the last year, going out and talking to game developers, trying to understand their dreams, what would they like to see. You know, on the artistic side, where do graphics need to go. What do they want to see to get the emotion and personality in there, what kind of tools would be helpful. We found that audio is a very key issue for developers. That's something that really was clear and something we're now giving a lot of attention to.

Game developers want to have an immersive experience where you can just be involved in the game and have the game have a depth and richness that goes on and on, and that's one area where we think the Internet can come in, in a big way, have the games be adaptive, bring in other players. We've seen online gaming really explode, and we expect that a high percentage of games will have that online component. So, there's plenty of room to do a great job.

Now, I want to focus on two things this morning, they all fit under this theme, The Power of X, X of course standing for DirectX and something else I'll mention later, it's a secret, it's a very deep secret. But, first, for DirectX. We are very committed to continue to evolve Windows as a great game platform. And one of the great things about the Windows hardware is that every year it gets better and better. In the sense of trying out, you know, how can you use speed synthesis, how can you use speech recognition, how can you use a camera that recognizes what the game player is doing. Those kind of breakthrough advances in gaming will absolutely come on the PC because the PC hardware evolves continuously. And we'll see now the capacity of the disk, the percentage of broadband connections really are creating a lot more headroom here. So, whether it's the Internet, or just connecting up people in the home, PC gaming will tackle the new frontier.

There's a wide range of tools and there's a real benefit that you have when the PC development environment and the customer environment are one and the same. Now, as we've been in touch with PC game developers, we get a lot of feedback, making the installation easier, making sure that it always comes up. We go through and talk with game developers about their support costs, and they are much higher on the PC, and so we're tackling that, and I think we've made a lot of progress, but there's still quite a bit that we can do.

The PC also brings the challenge that you have this variety of hardware, and we attempt, through the Windows platform, to hide those differences as much as we possibly can. That's what DirectX has really been all about, and it's gone through many generations. In fact, the generation that's out today, DirectX 7 is incredibly successful, and now we're on the verge of coming out with DirectX 8.

DirectX 8 will have some things that are really quite amazing. Every time we improve the basics, which have to do with the ease of installation and addressing all the devices, and we bring in rich new functionality, for DirectX 8, we've got DirectMusic, and so this is the ability to synthesize music interactively. We make it very easy to do audio scripting, and we're striving to be at a level of motion picture quality.

DirectPlay, there's a pretty dramatic advance here because we have DirectPlay Voice. So as you are playing across the Internet you can talk to different people, and we abstract out the different microphones that different PCs have. We expect that all PCs over the next few years will have very high quality microphones. We think getting voice into that experience will be pretty important. Over time, we also expect the camera to be a standard part of the PC, and I really expect some people to start doing some neat things with that, and we'll make sure DirectX abstracts out whatever variety there is.

We're also moving to new levels in terms of the graphics, the real time photo-realism, and this is where we bring in programmable shaders that let you get at some of those new hardware accelerations. So, a lot of activity in PC games, and a lot still that can be done.

I wanted to demo a few hot PC games. And I would like to ask Steven Guggenheimer to come out and show us some of the latest things in the world of Windows gaming.

MR. GUGGENHEIMER: Good morning, Bill.

MR. GATES: Good morning, Steve.

MR. GUGGENHEIMER: Before we start, one of the things that you talked about was DirectX. It's always great to see how people are putting DirectX to use. So, what I would like to do first is show a video of one of the most talked about titles for the next year, Black and White, by Peter Molyneux, and let him talk a little bit about what he's doing with it.

(Video shown.)

MR. GUGGENHEIMER: We want to thank Peter for taking the time to put that together and show what he's working on.

Now, one more real quick, since we've got the videos going, the guys from Digital Anvil have been working on a new title for next year, Freelancer, and they have another hot looking video to take a look at. So why don't we bring that up real quick.

(Video shown.)

MR. GUGGENHEIMER: A truly spectacular video. I have the distinct feeling, though, the people in this audience might actually like to see a little bit of the game. So, the Digital Anvil guys were nice enough to bring along a prototype. So, for the first time, we can actually bring it up and show it to you. So, I'm going to go ahead and bring this up. What you'll see come up on the screen on my right, first, is actually a view from my cockpit of the ship. And even though the game is a little less than a year away, we still have a lot to show. That's going to be my cockpit. What's going to come up in the middle is going to be an external camera, an observer camera that's going to follow us throughout our lives today.

MR. GUGGENHEIMER: There's clearly more going on than in our little segment. If we actually look at this server ship, it's moved over to another part of the galaxy, and I believe that's the marauder vessel that they were talking about. I see the bay doors, are they opening? No. There it is, that's what I was afraid of. That's a fighter. Now, wouldn't it be cool if we could actually go up and have another player in this game as the fighter on the third screen, and instead as opposed to have an AI --  (inaudible) -- wouldn't it be great to have another person. Well, that's the case. I actually have Chris backstage, who is going to play with us, the designer of this game. Let's bring him up on screen, and see what he's up to.

CHRIS: Good morning everybody, let's have some fun.

MR. GUGGENHEIMER: That's where the term fighting for your paycheck comes from. I think in terms of multi-player, multi-screen, graphics -- phenomenal, it's easy to take a look at. And you can imagine getting this online in a couple of years and a thousand people in the same universe going toe to toe.

MR. GATES: I would have loved to have seen your face if you got blown up there.

MR. GUGGENHEIMER: That's probably something a lot of people would love to see over time. I think it brings up a good point. Why don't we bring up the last machine? And what I want to do is the guys in research have actually been working on that capability. What I have here is something from our research division on face modeling. And what it allows me to do is to use any ordinary camera hooked into the computer, take a model of my face or anyone's face, and from that create a three dimensional image. In fact, Bill, we took a little video of your face earlier this week, so let's show how we put this together. The first thing we do is we just take a very straightforward video of someone looking from left to right. He does that well. And then what we do is we take two images from that video and mark five points on the face. And you may not see the fifth one but it's on the nose. So there's five points off of two images, and from that we can actually go and reconstruct a 3D model.

And so we're creating the skin, the overlap, so now we actually have all the references for a 3D model. And if we show the 3D face, what we have is three-dimensional Bill. So this is Bill as the fighter pilot now, and we have the ability to control it for emotion. So, for example, that was Bill shooting me down, and this is probably if I had been shooting Bill down. And if I just happened to be playing bridge he could be thinking about it. Now, of course because we're in space gravity, we might not be used to the G-forces there. So we can actually deal a little bit with the deformation. And that could be ET Bill. We'll go ahead and put it back, we'll reset. Now we can add things to it, so in this case we can add your glasses if we wanted. I was thinking next time we might put an earring on, go all the way out.

One last thing, I know a lot of people ask, and since we have a chance, people ask what's going on inside of Bill's head? What do we see? Well, I thought we could take the opportunity, since this is a 3D model, to go inside Bill's head and see what's there. So I'll put you back, and with that I think you've got a pretty good idea of what people are working on.

MR. GATES: Thanks, Steven.

MR. GUGGENHEIMER: Thanks, Bill.

MR. GATES: It will be fun to see that personalization showing up in Windows games.

Now, let me talk about consoles. And people often, when we start talking about consoles, have a simple question for us, a Microsoft console? What's this all about? And we had some guys at Microsoft who came and said, we should do a console. And at first we were saying, wow, that sounds like a real challenge, could we really make a contribution, could we do something that's over twice as good as anything out there, could we do something that's really explosive. And so we went off and studied that, we talked to a lot of partners, we talked to a lot of game developers, and they came back and said, yes, there's really an opportunity, because of the Internet, because of leveraging some things on the PC, because of some breakthroughs, to do something that is dramatically better.

Now, this is not simply taking your PC experience and putting it onto a new device. We're talking about a device here that has no boot time. Do you like that? No software installation, what we're talking about here is a real console. And it took us a long time to come around to saying; this is absolutely necessary to drive a whole new generation of entertainment software. But, as we saw the opportunity we got very, very enthused. And so what I want to go through here is my excitement about this new product, and to make it clear the incredible commitment that we have to this product. So I'm announcing the X-Box, which we're modestly titling.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: The modest tag line here is "the future of console gaming." So this is the device for the living room. It's a device that will come out in Fall 2001. We're here today announcing it for a simple reason, we need your best efforts to take what's in this platform and create amazing game products around it. Now the X-Box is quite an amazing product. I want to go through a little bit here what actually is inside the box. Keep in mind, this is a traditional game console. It will look great in the living room, it will be priced like a game console, it's got the traditional software royalty model of a game console.

We've got a few partners who are helping us. Intel is providing the CPU. It's a Pentium III product, a piece of custom work. And that will be a processor running at over 600 megahertz. So a reasonably beefy CPU. Now, to complement that, we've got another breakthrough part, which is a graphics processor that is being provided to us using an nVidia design. We've been working with nVidia, coming up with some special requirements for this game console. And we're really pleased to have them as a partner doing the graphics chip here. The operating system will come from Microsoft, of course. It's a reasonably different kind of operating system than we've had on other devices.

In the X-Box itself it's really just the Windows 2000 kernel, it's really just the very basic things that get the machine up and running, and going. It's a very rich platform, so if you want to do multi player activities and things, that all is very simple. But, the actual runtimes, most of those, come on the DVD, which is how the games are shipped. And the beauty of that is it gives the software developer incredible control over exactly what the software stack looks like. So between the software developer and the hardware, there is very, very little that could possibly slow you down or get in your way.

The memory approach we've used here is a very important part of the design. We've got 64 megs of memory, and it's a unified memory approach. And it uses this DDR capability, so we have 200 megahertz of bandwidth to the memory, from the memory to the GPU and the CPU. We've heard that the audio is very important; in fact, game consoles historically have not done a good job on audio. And so we've got a 64-voice capability, with an I3DL2 audio processor. Last night I was being educated on what I3DL2 means, that's there for you to do, the best audio that's ever been done in game type products. We do have a hard disk, that's a new thing. We have a hard disk in every single unit of the X Box. What that means is that when you design your game you know that the hard disk is there. So whether it's streaming audio, or having add-ons that are downloaded, the hard drive is very important.

And it's a DVD drive, you can stick in a DVD movie and get automatic playback. We've got the game ports, we've got Ethernet, a 10 and a 100-megabit and that's because we see this as a device really for the broadband Internet generation, and we've also got custom AV connector. What that allows us to do is take the incredible resolution of our graphics chip and let you get all the new display devices that are being done. The resolution we've got in this box actually goes beyond HDTV, and so as we're seeing these new LCD projectors, and wonderful display devices, this box is able to exploit all of the richness, all of the resolution that people are going to have there.

MR. GATES: A lot of how we describe the power of this graphics processor, well, they kept giving me number after number, and they're all just so impressive but there's one number I think that really sums it up. This graphics processor can do one trillion operations a second, that's not a billion, it's not 10 billion, it's not 100 billion. That's one trillion operations a second. And that's where you can get photo- realism. That's way beyond any product that exists today. In fact, this is three generations beyond the best graphics chips that are shipping inside the PC right now. It is leveraged off of the great work that's being done in the PC arena, but it's a whole new level of capability.

So, let's dive into that. Why is this earth-shattering performance? Well, it's a 300-megahertz clock, and we can do 467 floating point operations. So that's 140 gigaflops. The polygon throughput is really quite something. We have this notion of micro polygons, over 300 million triangles per second. If you are texturing and lighting, 150 million triangles a second. We've got a flow rate that's pretty unbelievable. If you just think of the resolution and how many times you want to update the screen every second, you have no limitation here in terms of creating movie-like experiences.

And so we've really combined an amazing general purpose processor with this specialized graphics processor, and those two things went in parallel, so what's appropriate for the graphics engine, the hardware shader models, the vertex operations, all those things are done on the graphics processor, which leaves your general purpose CPU available to do everything else you want to do in terms of the richness of the game experience.

I really want to emphasize the breakthrough nature of having a hard drive. You can't during an interactive game ask the player to pause while you go out to the DVD, while you seek the DVD and read the information off of that. So, it means, in terms of the richness of the scenery and the audio that you can have in one level of a game, you're really constrained by the RAM that's on that machine. And you can see that. It's a real constraint in designing these games. Well, when you put an 8-gigabyte disk drive on here, you can stream in new information interactively, so the user doesn't even notice that you're going out to get those extra capabilities. It's as simple as saying, can you do audio commentary during a sports type game and have it be appropriate to what's going on in the field.

So the Internet generation of games, we say, requires this disk. And it was one of the hardest decisions we had to make about X-Box. It's dramatized. There's a Wall Street Journal article that talks about a meeting where some of the X-Box guys came in and told me, we have to have it, we have to have it. And I was sitting there saying, wow, it costs money, doesn't it. But we decided that that was something absolutely worth doing. We think there's going to be incredible, persistent, online worlds that are created because of what you can do with that disk.

We think that having saved games, new levels, you know, going out to the Internet to get what's new. We also think that when you're using X-Box and you think that, hey, there's a new game that I've heard of, what you'll do is just connect up and get the trial version that you can download onto your hard disk and try it out. So, people will buy more games because they'll be able to get that experience, and it will be easier for you to market the breakthrough games where you do because trying out those trial versions will be very, very simple.

It's as easy as saying that, given this disk, we think people are going to take it in directions that we don't even expect. We'd seen that with every new platform we've ever come out with, and this one I would say it's more true than any. So there's room to grow in some unbelievable ways.

Another key point here is, we're going to make it easier to do the development. You know, first and foremost, people say to us, why is X-Box going to be successful? The answer is simple; it will have better games. That's what this business is all about, that's what the customers want, and that's what we've got to get to. We are going to make the tools for this a lot more straightforward than anything that's been seen before. You've got the familiarity of the Windows API set, the DirectX extensions where we build off of DirectX 8. The familiarity of the X-86 type CPU. So you'll be able to share work between the PC and the X-Box.

The actual disk that you ship will be different. The X-Box title will have the special authentication and things like that, but you'll be able to share the learning and the development work in a very deep way. The tools will be very broad because we're draw on what we've done on Windows and some new work that we're building. And we give you headroom, headroom in terms of storage, headroom in terms of graphics, headroom in terms of memory. Basically, when you've got that 64 Megs, you can use it any way that you want. It can all be textures if you want. And no limitation there.

And a final point that I think is critical here is that X-Box, like the traditional game console will be a stable platform. That is that over a period of four years, the X-Box will stay the same, so that as you're building games, you'll know exactly what it is that you're targeting.

Well, the best way to understand this is to see it in action. We don't have the real thing here, but we have some early work, some early prototype work that can show you how amazing this is going to be. So I'd like to ask Seamus Blackley to come out and give us a look.

MR. BLACKLEY: Hey, Bill.

MR. GATES: Let me help you to accessorize a little bit here. We don't have the box, but we do have the leather jackets, so we're ready to go.

MR. BLACKLEY: Well, we do have one box. This is our show box. This is the box that we take to trade shows. Currently inside it has an nVidia N15 processor, which has about 10 percent of the final performance of the X-Box. But, I can show you some examples today that really serve to illustrate and highlight some of the points that you made earlier.

I'll start out with this demo. Some of you may have seen this demo before. Actually, to be quite honest, when you saw this demo you may have looked at it a little bit more like this. This, obviously, is the sparkler demo. It has all of the features of the other demo you may have seen. It has the Gap commercial mode, very, very important. Ours does some cool things, it shoots colors, it will go around in a circle, it will go around in a circle and it will shoot colors at the same time. All of this is pretty neat. I mean, you know, whatever. The most impressive thing, though, is that this took a developer an afternoon to create, an afternoon. And the reason that he did that is he had all of the DirectX tools, all of the PC tools, and a well understood architecture. He spent all of his time making the demo cool, and none of his time fighting the machine.

Another great example of that is the water demo. Now, this is a little bit of a joke on the research guys, because what we did is put a pond of water in the middle of a Microsoft research building. In this case the architecture is really, really good. You see here there's ripples on the surface of the water. Now, the CPU is actually computing the surface of the water, and totally independent from that the graphics processor is computing the lighting model of the water. And it's very complicated, actually. And you see if I head up that there's a specular highlight from the light source, there's a reflection, there's refraction at the bottom. And in fact, if I go all the way up, you can see that there are caustics reflected on the bottom of the pool. And this makes a very realistic water scene. But, it's very, very difficult to do if the architecture isn't supporting it well. And the nVidia architecture and the DirectX 8 architecture is ideally suited to doing effects like this.

This demo took, I think, a day to get running. And I cannot underscore the importance of that enough. This takes X-Box from being a programmer-driven console to being an artist driven console, and a design driven console. And that's really at the heart of the entire program.

What I'm going to show you now is an example of advanced lighting techniques that are possible under DirectX 8. I've heard that lighting is important in a scene. I've heard that people enjoy shadows, and they enjoy seeing objects which look realistic. And in order to achieve that you have to be able to do a number of effects. One of them is obviously really good shadowing. You can see in our cheesy little desk toy here that the shadows are operating very nicely.

You're getting complicated shadows drawn across very complicated objects. There are reflections, there's environment mapping going on, and all this is happening at full hardware rates. You're not making millions of passes through the graphics chip; you're not slowing the thing down. In fact, in this demo the CPU is doing almost nothing. The graphics processor is doing almost all of the work. And that's central to the message of X-Box. X-Box is designed to solve the kinds of problems that you run into when you're trying to ship a real game, instead of making you try to solve them yourself.

In fact, I can show you an even more dramatic of the lighting, if I zoom in on this tank and turn on the overhead light you can see the shadow of the airplane actually cast a shadow across that complicated tank, and the tank is shadowing itself, too. The tank has the feature, which is I think my favorite of all the demos, which is the LED in its barrel and you fire. That's just the coolest thing.

The other cool thing, aside from all the lighting I'm showing you, and this is kind of neat because you can see that these are real environments updating in real time, and they have reflections underneath these and it's crazy. It scares me as a programmer to see that happening. We have a huge amount of resolution here, you can see you can read the NT Server 4 book, really nicely. And, in fact, I think there's a picture here of somebody. Oh yes, there's your resolution there.

The next thing I want to show you is a demo that we'll actually have pieces of available later on in the Microsoft booth. In my high school physics class I was scarred with the image of chain reaction as demonstrated by the old ping pong ball and mousetrap demo. So I felt it was only appropriate that I would scar all of you today with that same image. I'll let it speak for itself. I'll launch the ball. Now, that's a lot of stuff going on at the same time. Again, a great example of the CPU doing all of this collision, all of this physics, at the same time as the graphics processor is rendering the scene for it.

In fact, this thing has a lot of technique that it turns out at 120 hertz you have to employ to make the scene look realistic. One of them is motion blur. I can slow time down and show you this ball, you can see that it's fuzzy, that's because it's getting some good motion blur. Of course, it didn't hit anything, it did. Typically it really screws me there and doesn't actually hit anything. So the thing to think about here is the fact that the CPU, completely independently of the graphics chip, can do all of this physics and all of this stuff very, very easily, and you don't have to worry about contention, you don't have to worry about bandwidth, it just happens. This has the gap mode, too, the gap mode is very, very popular. So that's ping pong.

(Applause.)

MR. BLACKLEY: The final thing that I want to show is kind of an example of some of these techniques drawn together. And as you can see, it has a reflection, has animation, it has what I would call a truly irresponsible amount of texture memory, which I think is important. You can see that's pretty impressive. It has bump mapping everywhere in the scene, just some very, very high resolution, just a very nice looking scene. What's that? What's going on up there? Some bugs in here. Oh, they're butterflies, but they all have shadows. They're kind of scared of the camera, we'll look up and see. Oh my God, there are a lot of them, and they all have reflections. I thought this demo was really cool, and then I realized that, in fact, the butterflies are big supporters of X-Box, as well. And I'll let them speak for themselves.

(Applause.)

MR. BLACKLEY: In fact, the butterflies were so enthusiastic about X-Box that they took some spelling lessons, and I think they got a little carried away. It's kind of fun to fly through the O, but I'll let you do that later. And here's the thing that really blows my mind, when we first started working with this chip we were very, very with the speed and performance. But, I just don't understand the number of things going on there. That's just out of control. I'm still impressed with that.

So this is a great example of a group of talented engineers who know the PC architecture well saying, hey, we have this insane idea for a Japanese garden with butterflies flying all around it and being able to execute on it and create a demo that's enormously cool. And that's really at the heart of X-Box. As I said before, we want to make it an art-driven process. We want to make it the console that says yes, the console designed by software engineers for software engineers. We kind of said, hey, what would we have for our ultimate console. And then we went to the hardware guys and said, gosh, you know, do you think could build that, do you think we can actually do that. And it turns out they said yes, and Bill said yes, so it's all good news.

The final thing that I want to show you is -- I didn't want to disappoint you by not showing you a demo that wasn't running at the full X-Box rate. So we took a simulator and we put a team of very talented artists on it, and we wanted to show what was possible at the kind of performance levels we're talking about, because it really does change the way things look.

Let me introduce you to Carolyn and the team.

MR. GATES: I don't know, for a calculator that's not bad.

MR. BLACKLEY: So I want you to understand that demo represented about 550,000 polygons, one shadowed light source, similar to the one that you saw in the desktop demo, and about 51 megabytes of uncompressed textures. That represents, if you look at our stats, about a quarter of the X-Box performance. I wanted to show you something that was easily achievable on the X-Box architecture, so that in your imagination you could start to think of the things that you're going to be able to do with the full performance of the X-Box architecture.

And that certainly excites me a bunch. And we've been out talking to a bunch of partners, and actually they're very excited about it, as well. And I wanted to share with you some of their reactions to our plans.

(Video shown.)

MR. BLACKLEY: So those guys are pretty excited, and it turns out that there's one developer in particular who is just really, really excited. And so excited, in fact, that they wanted to have one of their spokes people actually produce a video for us. So why don't we take a look at that right now.

(Video shown.)

(Applause.)

MR. BLACKLEY: So that was Afro Thunder from Ready To Rumble, one of the most popular games on another console.

So, Bill, thank you very much.

MR. GATES: Thanks.

We're very enthused about the partnership support we're getting on this box. And between now and the time the box ships there's a lot that we'll roll out about what we're doing with this partners. But, the key thing we're kicking off today is our appeal to the great games developers to join up and start their work. Our commitment to your success comes in many dimensions. This is something that's very, very important to Microsoft. I couldn't be more enthused about what we're pulling together here. Its' the superior platform, you've heard a lot about that, it's the developer support tools, which you'll get concrete information about that, as we're building up our web site information, getting those development kits out there. But, as this program goes forward, we're also committed to great execution, getting the machines out there in incredible volume, and an outstanding marketing program. We've put quite a budget behind this one, and we're going to breakthrough in a very big way. And that all comes together for the big fall '01 launch.

What are the next steps here? Reasonably straightforward, we want you to design superior Windows and X-Box titles. Relative to the PC, you've probably already got DirectX 7 so we'd like to have you start working on DirectX 8. We've got the first beta of that coming out in April. In terms of X-Box we'd love to hear from the people who are interested, we've got a Web site, and there will be continuous communication as this whole thing is coming together. So this is a huge milestone for us. It's a new platform for the industry. And I'm looking forward to seeing what you're going to be able to do with it.

Thank you.

(Applause and end of presentation.)

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