I takt med at Xbox fejrer sit 25-års jubilæum her i april 2026, giver Ed Fries, en af de oprindelige arkitekter bag den første konsol, os et fascinerende indblik i, hvordan Microsofts vision for gaming er nået hele vejen rundt. Det rygtede Project Helix, som siges at udviske grænsen mellem konsol og PC, minder nemlig slående meget om de oprindelige planer fra begyndelsen af 2000'erne.
I et friskt interview i podcasten The Expansion Pass forklarer Fries, at den første Xbox-konsol aldrig var tænkt som den maskine, vi rent faktisk endte med at få i butikkerne.
"It's very similar to what the original Xbox plan was. Not the Xbox we shipped, but the original plan was that it was going to be a PC running Windows, and it was basically just a PC that looked kind of like a console, and pretended it was a console, but it was really a PC underneath. And what we shipped ended up being somewhere in between, you know," siger han.
Ifølge Fries var den oprindelige idé at bygge en maskine, der i princippet var en PC, som kørte Windows, men pakket ind som en konsol. Arkitektonisk delte det endelige produkt ganske vist meget med datidens computere - med processorer og grafikkort, der var tæt beslægtet med PC-komponenter - men virkeligheden indhentede drømmen.
Årsagen til, at man blev tvunget til at skrotte Windows-idéen og bygge et mere specialtilpasset operativsystem, var ressourceknaphed, især hvad angår RAM-hukommelse. Hver megabyte, som operativsystemet krævede, var en megabyte, som spiludviklerne ikke kunne bruge på at gøre spillene bedre, hvilket førte til, at man skar næsten alt væk, der ikke vedrørte selve spiloplevelsen.
"It still architecturally had a lot in common with a PC, you know, the CPU was a CPU you could have put in a PC, the graphics card was a graphics card that could have been in a PC, for that original Xbox idea to work, the reason it didn't work, is because we were still really constrained on system resources - in particular, RAM - and any bit you had allocated to the operating system was a piece you couldn't use in a game, and game developers desperately need every little bit they could get."
Det står stadig hen i det uvisse, hvad Project Helix præcis ender med at blive, men Ed Fries' fortælling minder os om, at Microsofts rødder i PC-verdenen altid har været en del af Xbox-genetikken.
<social>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhMdMnW-EXU</social>