"Retailers are mumbling, gamers are worried. The launch is looming, yet Microsoft is mute. What the hell is going on? Our behind-the-scenes report.

For a major console that's about to launch worldwide and will genuinely challenge industry leader Sony, Microsoft sure has a funny way of making everyone feel real worried. Save the controversial price point announcement a few weeks back, ever since the Electronic Entertainment Exposition 2005, Microsoft and friends have been almost entirely mute. At E3, the message from Peter "November 2" Moore and J Allard, in short, was that Microsoft had games, hardware, online services, and marketing all slamming ready to go. The message was that everything was looking great. The HD era was arriving in style and the Xbox 360 would lead the way.

Shaky Start
That was the pre-E3 new conference. The actual show belied Microsoft with a different message. Disappointment. It started well before E3. Microsoft flooded every single medium prior to the annual show with 360 news, but every single official announcement was hampered by prior leaks that deflated their impact. To date, almost every single major Microsoft announcement was broken by internal sources, leaked on the Web, or somehow weakened by its lack of surprise.

Perhaps more disheartening were the games shown behind closed doors. Displayed on Alpha Kits, G5 Macs, the games -- save Gears of War -- ran with sluggish framerates and unimpressive ideas. First-party titles Perfect Dark Zero showed some potential and Kameo looked like it had made the transition to the next generation (yet again), but Project Gotham Racing 3 was nowhere to be found, and the Epic Games title, Gears of War, stole everyone's imaginations hands-down. Only problem with that was Epic wouldn't be shipping its action-horror game until 2006. Sigh…

Long Slow Summer
Then came the summer. Which meant that….well, it turns out the summer meant nothing. The giant wave of enthusiasm Xbox 360 fans had mustered, despite Sony's excellent CGI brainwashing techniques (and a minority of realtime footage), withered away because there was nothing left to talk about. We had seen the future of HD, and it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. The truth of the matter was that the vacuum of information that created one of the dullest summer sessions in countless years. It turns out this effect was partially created by design, partially because of the late delivery of Beta Kits.

Gears of War
Microsoft finally delivered Beta Development Kits in June, several weeks after they were promised to developers. Their delay partially caused the unimpressive E3 showing, but it also meant that developers didn't have the triple-core processors to work with until well into the summer. The kits, as reported in our feature story "Enter the Beta", were unstable and difficult for developers to adjust to at first, but in time their games started showing some breakthroughs. The Beta Kit architecture much more closely resembled the final console architecture, it showed real processing power, and it gave programmers a much clearer idea of how to address the totally new multi-core processors, which game developers had never seen before." [more]