“The thing that I personally think, if you’re going to tell a story like this, is it works because everybody’s actually having a pretty good time. And that’s what sustains you, that and the passion to build something. But if you can’t stand the people you work with, you’re not going to be able to do it.” -Eric Engstrom

Both Alex St. John and James Plamondon came from unorthodox, backwoods backgrounds. Eric Engstrom also came from rural Orville, Washington and never graduated from high school. Craig Eisler was a Canadian from Waterloo and well educated. Where St. John was completely non-religious—“my parents were classic hippies who attended Berkeley in the 1960s”—Engstrom’s parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and he even had to go on “missions” knocking on people’s doors at one point, and both Eisler and Plamondon had very religious parents. When Eisler joined Microsoft, he was already famous in the tech world for writing Watcom’s 32-bit DOS extender.

In addition to weight lifting, which they regularly enjoyed together, all three were, according to St. John, “100% D&D playing computer nerds, all big board game Diplomacy, Axis & Allies strategy game players.”

And there was one more quality that they shared: a conservative tendency. According to St. John, “Many of the evangelists had conservative/religious backgrounds (that most but not all had rejected by the time they reached Microsoft). I wasn’t religious but I was a conservative. Many were Ayn Rand fans. Big believers in free-market capitalism, competition, etc.  Basically a lot of folks who had rejected religion (and liberalism) in favor of rationalism/conservatism. They were all very independent thinkers and inclined to reject whatever people wanted them to believe by that point in their lives. They also had an innate understanding of the power of influencing people’s beliefs.”

Even before the Lion King debacle, St. John recalls how he, Eisler and Engstrom had started working together to infiltrate and fix problems in the Multimedia Group, initially by moving Eisler over there after completing WinG. St John describes Eisler as “our secret agent engineer over there that could actually get things fixed.” When it turned out that Eisler was spending most of his time in “firefighting mode fixing the group’s shit,” they approached Engstrom, saying “Eric, can we sneak you over as a manager into Microsoft’s multimedia group so that you can run political interference for Craig… so he can actually get some shit done on graphics?”

At the time, Engstrom was working in product marketing for interactive TV. “That was a big mistake. I’m not a marketer. Then Alex and Craig came and got me and said, ‘Would you be a program manager for this games thing?’ Craig was going to do the development. Alex was going to be the marketing guy. ‘We need someone to do everything else.’ So the program manager will figure out what exactly needs to be built and manage all the building schedules and all that kind of stuff. Craig was the guy who wrote all the code. He’s god’s gift to writing code. It just flows out of him like he was playing a concert violin or something. It’s amazing to watch. And so I designed the API, Craig built it and Alex sold it.”

Engstrom ditched interactive TV and became Eisler’s heat shield. “He was great at that,” says St. John. “You ever see those scenes in the movies where the monsters are chasing a group of people and the hero goes, ‘OK. I’ll lead them off,’ and runs in a different direction, and bang, bang, bang go the monsters? That was Eric’s job. He’d get them all engaged and distracted and entangled with themselves somewhere else, and we’d get work done on fixing the graphics.”

This was the start of The Manhattan Project and the Manhattan Game SDK, AKA DirectX, but nobody really knew it at the time, other than St. John, Eisler and Engstrom. Why call it The Manhattan Project? According to Engstrom, “We named it The Manhattan Project, which was derived off of the movie War Games. ‘Shall we play again?’ The kind of secret, build a bomb thing really resonated with game developers, so we got lots of immediate attention. They didn’t believe that it would go fast, but they were willing to try because they were losing basically 70% of their revenue in installation and support costs and that sort of thing. So they were highly motivated to help us.”

Part of finding an answer to their questions involved research, but when the Consumer group refused to share their research data, St. John admits to stealing it and turning it into a weapon against them, using their own data to show that their approach, which ignored games and focused on “stupid shit,” was flat-out missing the point.

The Fine Art of Listening

In addition to stolen data from the Consumer Group, St. John had done his own research, going directly to the source—the game developers themselves. His approach was, from a Microsoft perspective, novel. St. John describes the standard evangelism model as “whatever the operating system guys hand us and told us to talk some poor sucker into adopting is what we sold.” But what St. John wanted to do was just the opposite. He wanted the developers to tell Microsoft what they wanted. His goal, as he describes it, was “to define a platform whose sole function is to be crack for developers.”

The majority of game developers hated Microsoft, viewing them as an evil empire, with St. John himself being an incarnation of Darth Vader, which St John made fun of. But what set him apart, and ultimately solidified his relationship with the game development community, was that he clearly was asking them to define the product they wanted. “I’d walk to game developers and I’d say. ‘Yeahyeahyeah. I know you hate Microsoft. I know you hate us. I know you never want to use anything we make, and I think your reasons for feeling that way are probably totally valid. But just hypothetically, what could Microsoft possibly make, that you could not escape? If Microsoft made X, you’d fricking have to use it. Doesn’t matter how you feel. If you don’t use it, you’re out of business. You’re just done. What would it be?’” This was how DirectX began. “DirectX was started as an initiative to design a new type of technology virus whose sole definition is, ‘What is it that game developers have to use?’”

“I think I came in for the first or second DirectX design preview in late ‘94,” says Morris Beton, who eventually became St. John’s manager. “There were maybe 50-60 in the room. Craig and Eric did a really good job of laying out what they were talking about to the developers. There was tons of feedback about what was needed, and I was really impressed at the degree to which the feedback was taken, noted… how much effort these guys put into understanding what the developers needed, and then I believe there was a follow-up to that where they incorporated a lot of that feedback and then played it back for the developers. I thought the process was fantastic. It was like a poster child example of how to do developer relations.”

Taking Fun Seriously

 “Alex took over on gaming with Windows 3, and what you could do there, and never looked back.” -Cameron Myhrvold

Right after completing the shipping version of WinG,  St. John, Engstrom and Eisler began work on their manifesto, a white paper dated 11/18/1994, which was titled, Taking Fun Seriously: or ‘How to own PC games in two years, and take a bite out of the home game console market.’

Taking Fun Seriously was a radical manifesto on the importance and strategic value of games—radical because almost nobody else at Microsoft, other than Tony Garcia’s EBU, took games seriously at the time.

The Roadmap to Games

Taking Fun Seriously went on the attack from the first sentence: “The term ‘Multimedia’ among DOS game developers today is a euphemism for ‘Poor game technology…’” What followed were detailed recommendations for how to win the consumer space by empowering games through well-thought-out Microsoft technology—technology that had yet to be developed—and in doing so turn games into a weapon against Apple.

“It’s worth remembering that Microsoft was just paranoid about QuickTime, and multimedia in general, because it was clearly the way computers were going, and Microsoft just wasn’t able to dislodge QuickTime as the de facto standard,” says Plamondon. “And that played into DirectX and the eventual approval of the DirectX project because it took the competition to a different place. And this is all Sun Tzu right there. You don’t attack their fortified cities. You do not attack the place where they’re strong, which is QuickTime. You attack them in games, where Apple… all the personal computers were weak in games.”

Taking Fun Seriously presents a roadmap to the technologies proposed to make Windows a dynamic and competitive platform for the games that the game industry actually wanted to make—as opposed to what many at Microsoft thought of as games or multimedia. In addition to the pilfered statistical data, the document describes specific problems and the solutions that their proposed Manhattan Games SDK would address, such as how to eliminate the overhead that Windows adds to the system, slowing down the performance of high resolution/high bandwidth applications like games. Another problem they set out to solve was the issue of working with different hardware and achieving device independence.

Here is a section taken from the document (including typos), further detailing problems they sought to solve:

•        No major new technology innovation or standards for DOS games. Without device independence, hardware advances in DOS have been extremely slow and limited.

PC joystick model is antiquated, game developers code to it directly to get best possible performance from it, but this action prevents hardware vendors from introducing new joystick hardware architectures because it is difficult to get all of the individual game companies to support it.

Video hardware with graphic functionality substantially better than 320x200 Mode X in standard VGA has been available and in the installed base for sometime, yet games were not written to take advantage of it until VESA set standards for SVGA modes.

Most games don’t bother to support sound cards beyond SoundBlaster. Although there are better cards with new sound technologies, they continue to support the installed base.

•        Windows is an inadequate solution because it severely obstructs access to precious hardware functionality necessary to making PC games possible. The technology driven game market cannot afford to back up for Windows. Windows needs to support;

• -Direct control of palette

• -Page flipping
  

• -Vertical blank synchronization
  

• -Tight sound mixing
  

• -Tight synchronization of sound and video events
  

• -Raw blting performance
  

• -Ability to set graphic mode
  

•       o       -Windows consumes enormous valuable resources (RAM) for functionality games don’t need
  

•       o       –Socialist* OS model design is in direct conflict with needs of full screen real-time dedicated applications.”
  

*Using the word “socialist” was a slightly tongue-in-cheek way of describing the way that Windows distributed resources to active applications and didn’t allow one application to use all resources, which was necessary to achieve the highest level of game performance.

Solutions proposed centered around key aspects of the Manhattan Games SDK, including DCI 2.0 (Display Control Interface), DirectDraw, 3DDDI, improved networking, and new input and sound driver models.

Here’s another section from Taking Games Seriously that describes what DCI 2.0 and Direct Draw were intended to accomplish:

“Liability: Too much overhead, and lack of important functionality

Solution: DCI 2.0

DCI 2.0 and the associated Direct Draw interfaces define ways to get device independent access to hardware with very little overhead

• o       Asynchronous blting
  

• o       Transparency
  

• o       Translucency
  

• o       Page flipping
  

• o       Vertical blank synchronization
  

• o       Video memory to video memory copies
  

• o       Video hardware Display Contexts
  

• o       Palette Control
  

• o       blt ordering
  

• o       Antialiasing
  

• o       Color space translation
  

• o       Memory management, and hardware mixing of multiple video streams from 3D-DDI,and VFW.
  

Having looked at several internal Microsoft documents, I’ve noticed that humorous or very informal remarks and expressions often appear among otherwise very dry and serious facts, statistics, proposals, and analysis. Here is my favorite from the original Taking Fun Seriously (emphasis added):

ACT

• “o      Creates a loyal community of content generating ISV’s on our platform and establishes credibility for Microsoft as a game technology provider. The cost to MS of evangelizing this market cold turkey when ACT is ready with new solutions will be enormous without very early efforts to get these companies to start regarding MS as a game technology provider today.”
  

• “o      Establishes a community of knowledgeable real game ISV’s who aren’t DOS bumpkins to collect feedback from, and involve in new technology role outs, and beta programs. On DOS these guys are low hanging fruit for anyone who wants to introduce a new game console, or superhighway solution, early harvesting by Microsoft will leave nothing for the Apple Maggots when they come into season. (I’m sorry, I really couldn’t resist this metaphor.)”
  

Don’t Ask Permission

Taking Fun Seriously was completed only weeks before Christmas. They showed it first to Rick Segal, whose initial response St. John describes as, “Uh huh. Thanks but, you know… meh.”

Then came Christmas and Lion King. As the dust was settling from the Christmas disaster, Segal approached St. John and asked, “What would you do?”

St. John handed him the white paper again, saying, “Rick, I’ve written this huge strategic document. I did the market analysis. This is what Microsoft needs to do in multimedia, and I just can’t get any support for it. I don’t know what to do.’

“And I remember very vividly, Rick saying something to the effect of, ‘Do you believe that this is the right thing for Microsoft to do?’

“And I go, ‘Yeah.’

“And he goes, ‘Well why are you asking for permission?’

“I go, ‘Well, don’t I need permission?’

“And he goes, ‘The answer will always be no. If it’s worth doing, then it’s worth risking being fired for.’

“And I don’t recall the exact words, but that’s what he conveyed very clearly to me. I have to say that until he said that to me… Let’s just say that there were transition zones where I went from crazy to crazier, and that was one of them. ‘OK Rick. Don’t ask permission.’”

“I designed the API, Craig built it and Alex sold it.” –Eric Engstrom

St. John had been trying to be a well-behaved Microsoft citizen, at least when it seemed feasible. He was trying to ask permission, get support and resources the official way if possible. And that’s when Segal told him, essentially, “Fuck that. Just do it, Alex. Do it and risk getting fired if it doesn’t work.” And so St. John got Eisler and Engstrom onboard, and the three of them started the Manhattan Project. Since they couldn’t get resources or official support for what they were doing, St. John started using dozens of DRG contractors to help build the first prototypes for the SDK—what ultimately became DirectX 1.0. “So we started the Manhattan Project by funding it out of DRG, but managing it from the multimedia group. So we had them running it as though it was part of the systems technology group, but it was actually DRG budget that I was spending without permission to pay for it all.”

When he needed new contractors on the project, he would go to HR and tell them that he had authorization from his manager. They never checked. “It would have been pretty extraordinary for somebody to lie about something like that.” St. John also explains that DRG had an unspoken permission to shoot from the hip, encouraged by management, and put things on their credit cards that would be overlooked by the accounting department… things that nobody else could justify. And the cover for their activities went all the way up to Cameron Myhrvold. St. John claims that he managed to spend $1.2 million in unauthorized money to provide contractors for Eisler and Engstrom as they worked on their Manhattan Project.

Even though St. John had developed relationships with many game developers, it didn’t mean that they had stopped hating Microsoft, and hating Windows even more. What St. John needed was a way to gain their cooperation and good will. He did so, in part, by organizing a distinctly un-Microsoft marketing campaign. Not only did he use the Manhattan Project name, but he told PC game developers that “the reason for the name was because we intended to take out the Japanese consoles that had permeated our living rooms with Windows PC games.” St. John also designed T-shirts that featured a glow-in-the-dark nuclear cloud and the words, “SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?” Only 35 of these were printed, and they were handed out late in 1994 at an invite-only party at which Eisler and Engstrom introduced their plans for what would eventually become DirectX. It was the beginning of a long-term “anti-marketing” campaign.

St. John also worked hard to convince game developers that what they were doing was not from the typical Microsoft “We’ll build it and you’ll use it, whether you like it or not” attitude. He listened to their input and promised to build something that they would want to use. He positioned himself as their advocate and, in some ways, the enemy of the corporate Microsoft.

John Miles

One of St. John’s original missions still remained: to counter Apple’s dominance over video on home computers through its popular QuickTime application, and in fact the whole Taking Fun Seriously manifesto and the Manhattan Project were a part of that strategy. As of Windows 3.1, the Microsoft approach to video was just bad. As St. John puts it, “It was so bad that people have erased the memory of it.” In addition to using a single 8-bit color pallet for the entire video, which could lead to frames displaying a paltry four colors, the audio tended to drift out of synchronization the longer a video ran. This even affected games, as St. John came to realize while porting DOOM. “As you played the game, when you pulled the trigger on the gun, a bang would happen a few seconds later. And there was nothing you could do about it because the OS just had no capacity to synchronize sound.

“The problem was that Windows 95 had the same sound APIs that Windows 3 did. So Windows 95 had the same problems running WinDOOM that Hess had. So we could not make DOOM work without a replacement for the Windows 95 sound system.

“Everybody in the industry pointed me to John Miles, so I did a contract deal with him.” St. John contracted Miles, who hailed from Austin, Texas, to port his Miles Sound System to Windows, which was used to demo the next attempt at porting DOOM to Windows. Meanwhile, using Miles’ work for inspiration, one of Eisler’s engineers, Geoff Dahl, began writing a Windows API for sound, which ultimately became DirectSound. All of this occurred during the early stages of the Manhattan Game SDK. Meanwhile, St. John told Miles that if he would port his sound system to Windows and let Microsoft use it in their port of DOOM, then he could license it to everybody else. St. John even promised to help promote the Miles Sound System. “It was kind of an informal—hey keep the code. I just to use it for DOOM, but I’ll pay you as a contractor to actually spend the time to make it work under Windows.”

Scratching an Itch

As head of the internal games group, Tony Garcia was aware of what was happening with the development of new APIs for Windows, and the promise they offered for more robust Windows game development, but he had to work with the system as it currently existed. “There was a delta of time between what they were talking about doing and releasing, so what we had to do was find games like Golf and Flight Sim… and Microsoft Arcade. These were all games that didn’t necessarily require a lot of graphics processing power.”

Microsoft Arcade, which was released in 1993 with sequels in 1996 and 1998, consisted of five classic Atari arcade games: Tempest, Battlezone, Centipede, Asteroids and Missile Command. Garcia hired a contract developer to recreate those games from scratch. “We saw them as a good way to bridge between the early Windows games days to the DirectX days.” But, according to Garcia, these little games were not trivial. In the early days of Windows, and were actually turning a profit. “Microsoft Arcade was just a huge hit. There were a lot of people who were coming into computing for the very first time. Getting into business, being set in front of a machine running Windows… these people were just like everybody else, they would get bored. But they didn’t know how to get out of Windows into a soft prompt and load up a memory manager and all this crap you had to do to get a good DOS game running. So we leveraged that. We embraced that. Even though the games might not have looked as good or been as deep, they scratched an itch that a lot of new computer users had.”

Garcia draws a parallel to the mobile games market. “A lot of people didn’t want to do it at the time. They felt like it was not worth it, that the real market was the DOS players. Similar cycles have happened now on the mobile side where there was a lot of skepticism early on. A lot of people were just rolling the dice and investing in these new platforms, which ultimately won out because they unlocked a brand new set of users that weren’t there before. So you can draw a corollary there, easily.”

In retrospect, it’s helpful to realize that in the early- to mid-1990s, video games were not really mainstream. Many people considered them “kid’s stuff” and not suitable for adult consumption, and many adults who did play games didn’t generally admit it in public. Things have changed a lot since then, but the introductions of these innocuous games from a company like Microsoft on a major platform like Microsoft Arcade very likely helped to legitimize video games to some people who for various reasons had not tried them, or at least it made them more accessible.

Meanwhile, Garcia observed that the work of the DRG was definitely consistent with his team’s goals, and that St. John kept them informed about the goals and progress of The Manhattan Project.

Slipping the Hooks in

Using DRG budget, St. John had been supplying the manpower while Eisler and Engstrom were working to implement the elements of the Manhattan Game SDK within the multimedia group. With the intention of gaining easier access to the Chicago code, they both managed to maneuver their way into the OS group under Paul Osborne, who was, according to St. John “a nice, affable guy that we just ran roughshod over.” Remembering Osborne, St. John told me, “I have a lot of guilt in my old age. I mean, I’m sorry I made you look bad or embarrassed or humiliated you, but we just had to win.”

Following the Lion King debacle, Rick Segal started supporting the early DirectX efforts quietly. Taking Fun Seriously started to gain some attention, and Alex, Eric and Craig—the weightlifting buddies—were getting more and more serious.

According to St. John, “Windows 95 was done. It was shipping. You weren’t supposed to be touching shit or making features for it anymore. So there was no putting DirectX into Windows 95. It was too late. So what we did was we touched it a little bit in the guise of fixing bugs. We put hooks in Windows 95 to make a hole for DirectX. So Windows 95, you could think of it like this: We treated it like a stencil, and we’d snip out a gap that we expected to inject DirectX into.” Thinking about it from a project management standpoint, what they were doing was incredibly risky and would have gotten them in big trouble if they’d been discovered.

Of course, St. John had already been working on the sly, implementing AutoPlay for instance, but that was just the beginning. They put in hooks that would let them suppress the threading kernel and drivers to allow games to use all the system resources instead of sharing them with other applications. “We wouldn’t tell anybody; it was undocumented—but we put in mechanisms to suppress the Windows kernel, and we put in mechanisms to lock RAM in place to prevent the OS from paging. And we put in hooks like KillGDI to literally shut off the Windows 95 graphics subsystem so it was possible to replace it. So we kind of mined Windows 95 with dynamite in anticipation of DirectX.”

DirectX was designed to be its own standalone multimedia architecture. When a game was installed, DirectX would call its secret hooks to shut off the graphics subsystem, lock memory, reschedule the operating frame systems to put more processing emphasis on the game, and many other things. “It would all be set up so that if you installed a DirectX game, Windows would basically shut down and let our media operating system run. Nobody knew that but us.”

Licking the Cookie

Chris Phillips came over to Microsoft with the acquisition of SoftImage, and was working on the business side to license technologies for DirectX APIs, such as acquiring licenses for MPEG and MIDI. He was also working with Eisler and Engstrom to figure out what APIs they would need in the future, and made sure they laid claim to those technologies even though they didn’t really exist yet—what he calls, “licking the cookie.” “You know, when we originally did DirectX, we kind of licked the cookie on a bunch of APIs that didn’t exist. We just basically said we’re going to have DirectMusic, we’re going to have DirectSound, 3D, 3D sound, DirectInput… blah blah blah. Right? And DX 1 only did D-Draw. We didn’t have D3D, even though we said we would. So we presented a roadmap, but we didn’t necessarily have all the DLLs written.”

WinDOOM

St. John hadn’t given up on developing a working port of DOOM for Windows. In fact, he says that DirectX was designed specifically to make DOOM work under Windows 95 better than it ran in DOS, and it was the lessons they’d learned from Hess’s failed attempt that led directly to DirectX.

To complete the Windows 95 port of DOOM, St. John hired an engineer named Fred Hommel. “He just looked like a drugged-out hippie.” Hommel was an odd character, a Scientologist with bad hygiene. But a fine engineer who worked hard. Working with early versions of the game SDK that Eisler and Engstrom were creating, Hommel managed to produce a version of DOOM that played nice with Windows. This version of DOOM shipped in September of 1995 as DOOM II. St. John says, “DOOM 95 worked because DirectX was designed to make it work. The version of DOOM Fred worked on was the very first TRUE DirectX game.”

St. John has many stories about Hommel, whom he used to tease a lot because of his Scientology beliefs, his hygiene (or lack thereof), and the time when Hommel witnessed a Microsoft manager having sex with his wife in the office across the hall. What Hommel admitted to St. John later on is that he had been sent to work at Microsoft in order to convert St. John to Scientology, with the ultimate goal of getting to Bill Gates. He obviously didn’t do much of a job as a Scientology evangelist, but he did most of the heavy lifting on porting the version of DOOM that finally shipped. (Sadly, at the time I was writing this book, Fred Hommel died from a long battle with cancer before we could complete arrangements for an interview.)

Going Public

In the aftermath of the Lion King disaster, St. John, Eisler and Engstrom accelerated the pace of their development. They were working on solutions for graphics, video, networking, sound, and input simultaneously, and although they internally kept the name Manhattan Game SDK, at some point the project officially became the Windows 95 Game SDK. With Segal’s permission to proceed without (official) permission, they put the efforts into high gear, and as the 1995 Game Developers Conference approached, they were ready to start introducing people to the beta version of the SDK, and St. John was getting ready to put the “crazy” in overdrive.

The Tar Baby

As they prepared to launch the beta version of the SDKs, St. John wanted to be sure that their efforts wouldn’t be wasted, and that involved making sure that Microsoft “owned” the collection of APIs they were creating. Referring to the famous Uncle Remus story about Br’er Fox and Br’er Rabbit, he describes his strategy. “I did something evil on purpose, which is that I went to the press and said, ‘Microsoft is announcing a new API for gaming and Windows 95 codenamed The Manhattan Project. It’s a feature of Windows 95. It’s almost as though it was built into the OS on purpose.’ So I glued DirectX to Microsoft right out the gate. I totally tar babied it.” This was not the first time St. John had used the idea of tar babying to stick someone with an idea or project. It was just one of many tricks in his DRG arsenal.

The ploy worked to perfection, of course. Every major game magazine covered the story, and despite the fact that he had been told not to link the project with the radiation symbol they liked to use internally, St. John happily provided the symbol along with the story. And the press didn’t stop with just the radiation symbol, but went nuclear—quite literally, at least graphically. There were nuclear cloud images on magazine covers and images of B-52 bombers flying over Nintendo and Sony. “Oh yeah,” says St. John. “Microsoft’s PR went apeshit after me over that. But Rick was running heat shield and I didn’t care. I needed to sink that fishhook so deep into Microsoft’s hide that they couldn’t escape it. And so with Craig and Eric, we decided we’re going to make a harpoon that we’re just going to embed in this company. And, as we all know, it stuck. But boy did it get us in trouble.”

Ground Zero

St. John had made waves throughout his career, and his amazing talent for disruption had already provided a roller-coaster ride of recriminations, censure and opposition, followed by accolades and promotions. In the months before the Computer Game Developers Conference of 1995, St. John, Eisler and Engstrom, along with small team of contractors, were busting their asses to complete the first beta of the Manhattan Game SDK—officially called at the time the Windows 95 Game SDK, but unofficially still called The Manhattan Project.

St. John wanted to make a big impression on developers at CGDC, which occurred earlier than usual, in April that year, at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The problem was that they weren’t working on an official Microsoft product, meaning that St. John had no budget for a developer conference. Worse still, CGDC rejected all of St. John’s proposed speakers. He remembers, “I was in serious trouble. I had no real company support for the product, no venue and no budget.”

St. John’s solution was typically over the top, and if the conference wouldn’t cooperate with him, he would have to do something on his own. It happened that the Santa Clara venue was right next to the Great America amusement park. This fact might not have meant anything to most people, but most people are not Alex St. John, who decided to hold a massive event at the amusement park to promote the launch of his project. Pitching it as a giant party he managed to get sponsorships from a variety of hardware and software companies, receiving pledges totaling $1.2 million.

Not everything was rosy as the date approached. St. John had been unable to get many games using the new SDK, and had substituted several WinG games to round out the field of games to be presented. Eisler and Engstrom were exceedingly pissed off about it. They were busting their butts to complete the SDK and thought St. John had failed them.

The day arrived, despite the tensions, and conference attendees flocked to the park. Everything was free. The rides, the food… everything. There were three developer tracks in the theme park’s theaters, each of which was capable of holding 1500 people.

The event was called “Ground Zero,” and all the promotional materials featured the radiation symbol that the team had chosen to represent their Manhattan Project. Anyone with a CGDC pass was welcome. On entrance they received a Ground Zero radiation badge and a t-shirt St John had designed depicting a radiation symbol and the eerie green glow-in-the-dark image of a skeleton seemingly being blasted by an unseen force. At the top it read, “Windows 95 Game SDK,” and below it read, “You’ll be blown away.” And, of course, it also had the Microsoft logo. There were also cans of “radioactive” green slime and glow-in-the-dark Frisbees. Meanwhile, all of the Microsoft developers were dressed in lab coats that featured the radiation logo and the slogan, “Shall We Play A Game?” on the back.

Attendees were packed into the largest of the three theaters to kick off the event, and while people were still filing in, they had an executive from Viacom—a major sponsor of the event—talk about and demo their upcoming game based on the Beavis & Butthead cartoon. St. John remembers what happened next. “I peeked through the curtains to watch the demo on one of the many giant projection screens and much to my horror the game crashed and the infamous blue-screen-of-death was emblazoned across every screen. The theater roared with laughter and the developers began to chant… “DOS! DOS! DOS! DOS! DOS!” The Viacom executive was casting around widely for help.”

The original plan was to fill the theater with a green “radioactive” fog at the end of the Viacom demo, and for St. John, Eisler and Engstrom to appear on stage as the fog cleared. That plan went out the window in a millisecond. “I grabbed three random people, told them to throw on lab coats and told them to run out on stage in a panic and ham it up like a bunch of circus clowns as though a terrible nuclear accident had just occurred. ‘Quick, go pretend that crash is on purpose; make a big fake show of trying to fix it! Joan turn on the fog machine!’ A minute later as the ‘radioactive’ green fog poured forth, three Microsoft folks ran out and tore the failed Viacom demo computer apart, ripped out its cables, tripped all over themselves and, thankfully, the audience began to laugh.”

Then Eisler and Engstrom, veteran evangelists who were used to speaking to crowds, took the stage and first assured the audience that they were safe as long as their radiation badges didn’t change color. Then they began to introduce the new technology—the first public glimpse of what DirectX could do.

Engstrom remembers the moment when everything shifted. “As we walked out on stage, 1200 DOS developers were chanting “DOS! DOS! DOS!” At the time, DOS games used a 320 by 240 pixel resolution. Windows games at the time were 640 by 480, but they were slow. Really slow. The display on the screen as Engstrom and Eisler walked onto the stage was a beautiful 640 by 480 image, and once it started moving, everybody naturally expected it to be glacially slow, like always. “That’s why they were kind of laughing at the whole thing, but there was free food,” observes Engstrom. “And then Craig started it running while I was standing up there with people yelling at me, and when it motion blurred there was a big gasp that went through the crowd. The first question asked was, ‘How do I do that?’ The fastest evangelism moment in technology I’ve ever heard of. It was just as fast as we could go.”

What they showed was a customized version of Accolade’s Super Bubsy at 640x480 resolution in 24-bit color, running at 60 fps. Just for fun, they then turned off the vertical blank sync and the game became a blur, running at 500 fps. Engstrom explains, “It was an Accolade title that they gave us the art to. We fixed it up so that literally all it did was run sideways. It wasn’t a game. We just made it show what we could do.” But as St. John remembers, “The audience went wild; nobody had ever seen graphics like that on any platform of the time, let alone a PC.”

Following Super Bubsy was WinDOOM running in 640x480 at 60 fps with multi-channel stereo and even a force-feedback joystick. And synchronized sound.  Engstrom says, “Literally, in DOOM, put it on Windows, the gun would flash, come up, go back down… then you’d hear the boom of the rifle or pistol. It was terrible, and we managed to make it perfectly in synch.”

Engstrom encouraged me to start my book with the story of this moment. To him, it was a “Steve Jobs” moment. “That’s like if you’ve seen the Jobs movie where he says, ‘I’ve got a thousand songs in my pocket,’ where he’s introducing the iPod. And then everything else is retro? That’s the moment for DirectX. Everything after that was fun. That was the moment where it happened. Everything else was written after that.” And he has a point. It was at that very moment that Windows gaming replaced DOS in the hearts and minds of developers—at least the 1200 or so who were present for this special moment. DirectX went on to be wildly successful, and it’s not a stretch to say that Windows gaming might have been set back for years if it hadn’t been for this moment, and Xbox might never have happened. One thing leads to another…

After snatching success from the ashes of the blue-screen; after the wildly euphoric demos, St. John and his partners were once again a happy team. And to top everything off, St. John had one last gift for everyone—a fireworks show that he got for only an extra five grand from Great America.

Of course, there were no written contracts between St. John and his sponsors, a detail that he had left for the event group to sort out after the fact. Getting it done was all that mattered at the time, and once again he figured he’d get fired once the bill made it to the accounting office at Microsoft. And once again, St. John dodged the bullet as Microsoft was able to recover at least a million dollars of the money pledged. So instead of being canned, St. John was given a great performance review and a promotion.

From April until September a team of engineers, led by Eisler and Engstrom, worked on completing the suite of Direct APIs, but there were still a few non-technical details to iron out.

Direct Gets its X

The Manhattan Game SDK enjoyed a brief period of being called the Windows Game SDK. For a while, Paul Osborne wanted to call it WinG 2.0 because somewhere along the way he had inherited the WinG project. The WinG option was unacceptable to St. John for a couple of reasons. The first of which was the association with the Disney Lion King disaster. But probably the biggest reason was that calling the new technology WinG 2.0 would mean that Chris Hecker would probably be involved, and St. John wanted to be sure that Hecker was nowhere near their project. He says, “In this case, I wasn’t just being mean, because the guy was just making a mess. So he has to go. I need Craig to own this, not only because I can work with Craig, but because he can get it done. So I said, ‘Look, the WinG brand is problematic. We should put that behind us.’”

In the end, after several battles, St. John got his way, and the WinG name was never used again. Ironically, WinG didn’t ever truly go away. It lives on in Windows as an API called CreateDIBSection.

Whatever you called it, the software they were creating for the SDK was simply a collection of APIs with names like DirectDraw, DirectInput, DirectSound, DirectShow, DirectPlay, and so forth. People have different versions of how it got its final name, but according to Chris Phillips, the name was suggested by a journalist during an interview. “We’d go through and we’d say, DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectInput… and somebody finally said, ‘Well yeah. Ok, DirectX.’ And we all just laughed. And we went, ‘Oh yeah. That is so brilliant. We love that. We’re using that.’ And that’s actually of how the X got on.”

According to St. John, the first time he heard the name DirectX mentioned was from Eric Engstrom one day. Whatever actually happened, the name caught on quickly and DirectX remains today a key Microsoft technology.

The Politically Correct Logo

Microsoft corporate had already told St. John to ditch the radiation symbol in promoting their project, but he had persisted. It helped establish his anti-corporate cred. But eventually through persistence, they got him to comply—by adding another “leg” to the radiation symbol, essentially turning it into an X. James Plamondon remembers that the DirectX logo wasn’t quite as simple to design as St. John likes to make it sound. “When we were trying to design a logo that included an X, he was having the hardest goddamn time with it because no matter what he did, it ended up looking like a swastika. You try to put something to make it look like it’s active, like the X is moving, well that means something like putting wind turbulence behind. And a lot of the early designs of the DirectX logo were chucked immediately because they looked so much like a swastika. I love the solution they came up with, which was putting it on a 3D ball and rotating it slightly, so that it still looks like an X, but it doesn’t look like a swastika because it’s off center.”

At the same time they changed the logo, St. John leaked to the press “that the poor DirectX team was being pressured by its evil corporate executives to change its VERY popular logo.” Again, St. John’s strategy worked, and developers were coming on board to support the new project, and they were all eager to attend any new events or parties that the DirectX team threw. “With each new generation of DirectX I would craft a new politically incorrect launch theme, scandalize Microsoft with it and leak the scandal to the media.”

The Beasty Boys

Brad Silverberg, as the head of the Windows division, ultimately had to approve the project that Eisler, Engstrom and St. John had been working on—making it an official Microsoft project—and he talked about what it was like working with the three of them. “Craig and Eric, and certainly Alex, especially back in those days, were high energy, really smart, and extraordinarily immature. I nicknamed them Beasty Boys. As smart as they were, they kind of went out of their way to antagonize people internally, and most of the fallout for that ended up on my lap. I knew their heart was in the right place. I knew they wanted to do the right thing for the company, and for gamers, and so I put a lot of energy behind the scenes, trying to clean up some of those messes and trying to counsel them on ways that they might be a little more—I won’t even say diplomatic because that was too optimistic—but not really go poking sticks in people eyes just for the fun of it. They were brutal. They were really brutal. And they were righteous about it. They were right, but they were also righteous, which I’m sure was off-putting for a lot of people.

“I believed in the work that they were doing, so was kind of an executive benefactor and protector, and had to clean up a lot of messes and referee a lot of fights, and I had to make some decisions. For instance, I had to make the decision between work they were doing and the work that Hecker was doing. I decided correctly to choose the DirectX effort, but at the time, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, and at the time, it was a decision I had to agonize over. I made the right decision. I’m pretty sure Chris Hecker was not very happy about it, and those guys had very little respect for Chris at the time, and there was a war of words and a lot of nastiness that came out of that, but in the end… You know, sometimes when you do great things, there’s collateral damage that happens, and I was prepared for some of that.”

But if Silverberg thought his “Beasty Boys” had been beastly in the build-up to DirectX, he soon discovered that he hadn’t seen their total arsenal… yet.

Next Chapter: Table of Contents