This article is a global employee letter recently sent by the Xbox team
Dear Team Members:
Microsoft was founded on the belief that modern computing could empower ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things. And since the company’s inception, gaming has always been part of that story.
In 1979, we released the text adventure game Microsoft Adventure. The game’s visuals resembled MS-DOS, unlike early versions of Minecraft. It was adapted by Gordon Letwin, one of Microsoft’s original 13 employees, who later became the architect of OS/2. This game allowed players to explore digital worlds, collect treasures, solve puzzles, and encounter mythical creatures.
Several years later, Bruce Artwick brought the magic of flight to the 16-bit IBM PC, allowing people to pilot planes from their desks. Over the following decade, Microsoft released dozens of games, including Minesweeper, Age of Empires, and four additional versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Meanwhile, Windows partnered with companies like id Software (which joined the Xbox family 24 years later) to drive the rise of 3D gaming.
By the mid-1990s, a small team responsible for DirectX proposed a bold idea: we could use PC architecture to build the first American-style gaming console (DirectX is a technology that helps developers write games for Windows). Soon after, a secret project codenamed “Project Midway” was launched.
In 2001, the original Xbox made its debut. It was two to three times larger than competing consoles, with a huge X logo on its casing and a bright green emblem in the center. While competitors still required players to purchase memory cards separately, it came equipped with a hard drive and an Ethernet port—a rarity at the time, since 90% of households were still using dial-up internet. Its processing power was more than double that of similar competitors, and it pioneered the dual-analog stick controller.
A year later, Xbox Live changed the landscape of online gaming by introducing persistent friend lists, matchmaking systems, and a unified service for developers to build connected experiences. Bringing these innovations together was Halo: Combat Evolved—the launch title that not only defined Xbox but also validated its first slogan: “Jump In.”
Twenty-five years later, Xbox has grown into one of the largest gaming companies in the world. We have launched four generations of Xbox consoles, with the fifth generation on the horizon. Today, our games reach over a billion players annually, spanning numerous iconic franchises such as Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Diablo, Doom, Fable, Fallout, Forza, Gears of War, Halo, Minecraft, Overwatch, Sea of Thieves, The Elder Scrolls, StarCraft, World of Warcraft, and Wolfenstein.
To everyone who has built Xbox
The Xbox story has been written by generations of employees, studios, developers, and partners. Thank you all. I would also like to specially honor the 111 colleagues who have served at Xbox and its studios for over 25 years. You helped shape the history we celebrate today, and we will present each of you with a specially customized console engraved with an inscription to commemorate your contributions.
Since joining Xbox, I’ve heard many moving stories: I’ve heard of people meeting online and becoming lifelong friends; of people finding their significant other through games; and of parents revisiting the games they played as children with their kids. I’ve also heard about those who have passed away, and how the gaming memories they left behind remain deeply meaningful to their loved ones. This is why we exist.
The Xbox story has never belonged to us alone. Our fans inspire us, support us, challenge us, and accompany us along the way. We have celebrated this anniversary with special events alongside gamers around the world. Today, this celebration reaches its climax in Seattle.
The Next 25 Years
The gaming industry has always been driven by dreams. Not just the dream of bringing imagined worlds to life, but also the dream of sharing them with others. Sometimes that dream is a game, sometimes it’s a console, a character, or an entire universe. The history of Xbox proves the power of these dreams and how they grow over time.
The original Microsoft Flight Simulator was only 160KB in size, featuring 2D graphics, 16 colors, and a total of 20 airports. The 2024 version, however, utilizes over 2.5PB of data—15 billion times larger than the original. Its map covers 200 million square miles, recreating nearly every city, road, and landmark on Earth, rendering trillions of trees, and achieving near real-time realistic weather.
Although modern games have reached almost unimaginable heights in creativity and technology, their development costs, resource requirements, and risks have also surged. As a result, too many ideas never become games, and too many games fail to realize the developers' original vision. For decades, this has been an inevitable trade-off between ambition and reality. We must change this.
Throughout human history, the scale of our creations has been determined by manpower, funding, and resources. But that relationship is being broken. In the future, one person will be able to harness vast talents and capabilities; a small team can build worlds that today require hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of dollars; and larger studios can pursue gaming dreams beyond what’s currently possible, much like the leap Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 represents compared to its 1982 predecessor.
I believe the future of gaming will return to its roots, to that moment when a small team with a great idea could create something that changes how the world plays. Our mission is to continue crafting excellent games, distinctive hardware, and giving more people the opportunity to create unprecedented works.
Happy Birthday, Xbox!
Asha