Gates unveils Xbox at consumer electronics trade show

May Wong

Saturday, Jan. 6, 2001 | 12:45 p.m.

After several years of development and with a little stage help from a WWF superstar known as The Rock, Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates unveiled the highly anticipated Xbox gaming console Saturday at the Consumer Electronics Show.

"There's a revolution about to take place in game consoles," Gates said in introducing the device, due to roll out later this fall.

The "breakthrough" machine will "liberate" game developers of performance constraints they now face in other devices, he said. "The Xbox puts the power in the hands of the artist."

The sleek black machine with a big lime-green Xbox logo is touted to deliver three times the graphics performance of rival products. That is enough computing power to feature real-time shadows, facial emotions, and images that were previously only possible in movies like "Toy Story."

A demonstration of two games brought whistles from the standing-room only crowd. In one game called Malice, in near 3-D-like graphics, a little red-haired girl named Alice moved around to squash insects in a warehouse, her shadow following her to a tee and glares reflecting off her eyes.

In a promotional video, game developers lavished praise for the Xbox.

"You'll see musculature that you've never seen before. You'll see sweat dripping, blood flowing through veins. You'll even see goosebumps if that's what the game calls for," one of them said.

The Xbox represents Microsoft's first foray into the gaming world - an arena previously occupied by industry leader, Sony, and followed by Nintendo and Sega.

It is also part of larger campaign by the Redmond,Wash.-based software giant to develop peripheral products and programs that will make the personal computer more of a central media unit for households.

Gates gave snippets of that vision. He demonstrated a sort of clock-radio that is wirelessly connected to the PC and could switch between weather, traffic, news headlines and music content from Web sites at the push of a button.

He showed how a compact flash filled with compressed music could easily move from the PC to portable players to a home stereo system.

Gates also demonstrated a personal digital assistant that was able to use voice recognition technology to receive commands and data then automatically organize and file the information in the correct files.

But the Xbox stole the limelight, along with The Rock.

"Xbox is like The Rock," the wrestling champion said. "It's cutting edge, powerful and exhilarating"

The Xbox features four game controller ports, a DVD tray, and an Ethernet port for Internet access, allowing users to download new versions of software or games. It also has a built in "rumble" feature to increase gaming realism.

And with 64 megabytes of memory, an Intel 733-megahertz processor, an 8-gigabyte hard-drive, Microsoft claims the machine is the most powerful of any gaming console.

The machine is designed to also work with high-speed broadband connections and high-definition television.