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E3 2010 Coverage
Interview With Microsoft Canada

Today I had the pleasure of chatting with Craig Flannagan from Microsoft Canada about some of the E3 Microsoft goodness for this year. It certainly looks to be an exciting year for the jolly green giant; a new way of playing and some fabulous exclusives topped the list of things that my piqued interest. Let’s let the interview speak for itself…

[ After introductions and an initial bit of confusion about who I represented (Craig thought we were the Toronto Sun - thank God for modern phone technology being so clear) ...]

JF: What are the big-ticket items for E3 this year that you can talk about? Obviously Natal the big one…

CF:  Xbox 360 Kinect.

Is that what is now?

Yup Kinect for Xbox 360. That’s what we announced today.

Last I heard from the Interwebz, you were trying to distance yourself from the actual Xbox 360 name and move towards the Natal name. Obviously this is bogus.

Oh, the interwebs. They’ll say many things

[Both chuckle.]

So tell me a little bit about Xbox 360.

Yeah! This is the 10th anniversary for Xbox. It’s my 5th E3, so I was here for the launch of the Xbox 360. But this is a crazy E3. It’s probably the biggest E3 press briefing that I have been lucky enough to a part of. We opened the show with some crazy core games. We took a look at Halo: Reach, Gears of War 3; we took a look at Metal Gear Solid [Rising], which was some awesome action; if you haven’t seen that, it’s got a good amount of gore so you have to check that out.

MGS is typically a Sony title. You guys must be pretty excited to have it on your side of the fence now, too.

God, yeah. This is built on something called Zan-Datsu, which is basically a game system involving cutting and removing; and there was a lot of cutting. It’s a great looking game and you should really make sure you take a look at that. So that’s how we opened the briefing, and we finished the opening with Call of Duty: Black Ops which is coming this November. The cool thing is that for the next three years, the first place that you will be able to play expansions to Call of Duty is the Xbox 360. It will absolutely be the first place you get to play any Call of Duty expansion.

Cool.

Yeah. We crossed a wide spectrum of gaming and entertainment experiences today.  We transitioned to Kinect. Now, Kinect is something that is so intuitive. Really what we’re going for with Kinect is letting people who otherwise may not have enjoyed gaming to do so. So we’re really transforming the industry with this.

So you’re pretty much aiming to take market share away from the big N. You’re expanding a niche market that they opened up, right?

I think it’s bigger than that. I think it’s transformational. We’re bringing in people who before they get a chance to experience this, may not have been considered people who would be into gaming. Fun is universal; it didn’t take a lot of research to figure that out. But that’s what this is. It’s amazing. I have got to experience Kinect on the Xbox 360, and it’s pretty incredible to step in front and realize that it really is intuitive. If you know to do something in real life, you pretty much know how to do it in the Kinect games.

Nice.

We did talk about some games on stage; we talked about Kinect Sports: a fun little collection of sports which includes track and field, bowling, table tennis, boxing, beach volleyball; a lot of really cool experiences that use your entire body. Those look really great.

That’s a good way to start.

The core gaming audience kidna gasped when we showed them Star Wars for Kinect. Thanks to Lucasarts, this is coming; you will be able to use your light saber; you’ll be able to use the Force all with just your body. No controller. It’s pretty amazing.

That sounds awesome.

We also did announce some interesting Xbox Live stuff with Kinect. We have something called Kinect Video; this is a type of video chat that works with every Xbox 360 around the world and MSN Messenger; no headset required. And this just shows that all you require with Kinect is you. Because Kinect has a multiarray microphone, we can use it (along with the camera) for a pretty cool video chat experience.

[I was pretty impressed with the interoperability with MSN Messenger.]

We ended the briefing on a real high note. We talked about a new form factor for Xbox 360; it’s sleek it’s whisper quiet; it’s got built-in Wi-Fi N, so the fastest wireless in the market. The strange part is that it’s $299 in Canada and it’s shipping to retailers today.

That’s excellent.

Quality is our guiding light with this. Canadians will get to experience this new Xbox 360 because the trucks are rolling to retailers right now. Basically for the current price of an Xbox 360 Elite you can get into this guy.

The portable gaming market; any plans to expand into this?

Nothing to announce here. I think broadly speaking you will see something. We did talk about a Windows phone in our briefing, and about how a lot of your Xbox live and Windows gaming experiences will appear on Windows phone when it ships later this year. Most of the experiences we were talking about this year, though, tend to occur on the best screen in your house.

It’s an obvious question to ask, though, given the long reach you have. You permeate a number of markets, like PCs as well as gaming, and some hand-held devices. But that’s awesome.

It is.

Thank you very much for your time. It sounds very exciting. Take care and enjoy the rest of the week.

You too, Jorge.

All in all, it was nice to chat with Craig. The hopes with a new form-factor is that the RROD issue has been properly addressed. Given Microsoft’s focus on quality, I would say that this is probably not going to be a problem anymore.  When I asked Craig about the “lag issue” seen in video footage before E3 2010, you could practically hear him smiling on the phone when he told me that I had to see it to believe it.

Posted in E3, Events, Interviews, Kinect, News Bytes, Xbox 360 |