Introduction

XBox Present

Twice a year the legends of Japanese video game hardware and software set out to dazzle American reporters and Japanese teenagers with the state of the art in distraction. This year Bill Gates made a pilgrimage to the Spring Tokyo Game Show to earn the respect of Japanese folk for the first major US video game console release since Atari in the early 1980s.

TGS floor

Alice in Japanese

Bill Gates walked onto the TGS stage like a distant geek cousin of the Jackson Family Victory Tour - shuffling out between green lasers and dry ice smoke. The rockstar opening didn't match his slowly delivered, plainspoken XBox Powerpoint presentation.

It's Bill!

Please buy my product

As Bill sees it, Japan is at the center of the video games revolution; one third of all video game revenues come from this island nation. He was like the kid coming to the school cafeteria with a handful of Oreos hoping to find some friends; he offered the Japanese audiences a custom controller because research and customer polling revealed that Japanese audiences like theirs smaller. Bill mentioned something about the Japanese XBox controller also having "easy access buttons" - we were stuck wondering whether that meant the American version would offer more challenging buttons.

Justin gettin jiggy

Slot A connects to receptor B...

Gates talked up the potential for networked games through the ethernet-ready XBox. He offered Japanese gamers high speed gaming: the president of the largest Japanese phone company NTT joined him up on stage to announce that they have a broadband initiative in place for the Japanese XBox launch (a DSL/XBox bundle).