Vegas firm hopes to cash in on Microsoft’s Xbox

Monday, Jan. 8, 2001 | 10:55 a.m.

An innovation unveiled by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Saturday could lead to more jobs in Las Vegas in the future, a local technology executive said.

Louis Castle, one of the co-founders of Westwood Studios in Las Vegas, a designer of computer games, said his company is well positioned to design games for Microsoft's Xbox game console, which was demonstrated by Gates in his keynote address at CES.

The four-day show, being conducted at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Las Vegas Hilton, the Riviera hotel-casino and the Alexis Park Resort through Tuesday, is expected to draw as many as 130,000 people to Las Vegas.

Westwood, now a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, Redwood City, Calif., has developed games for home computers as well as established game consoles, usually played through televisions. Westwood's "Command & Conquer" franchise is one of the most successful games ever developed for the PC.

"They look like pretty neat machines," Castle said of the Xbox. He said he has seen a prototype of the unit in previous Microsoft presentations.

"It appears to be a true potential competitor to Sony," Castle said. "That's good for us. It means jobs for us."

He emphasized that Westwood has no contract with Microsoft to develop games. But Electronic Arts and Microsoft announced last month that Electronic Arts would develop material for the Xbox.

Castle, who opened Westwood with partner Brett Sperry 15 years ago, has seen the work force at his company grow to more than 200 people.

Castle said his company primarily works with the PC platform, but has developed games for "every system that's out there," including the new Sony Corp. PlayStation 2.

Sony introduced the next-generation game console last year, but had trouble putting enough units on the shelves for Christmas. Now, Sony will be joined in the game console market by Nintendo, which is developing its Game Cube unit, and Microsoft. Both the Game Cube and the Xbox are expected to be available later this year.

Gates demonstrated a prototype of the new unit at CES with his trademark style of bringing other company designers on stage to show off the merchandise.

"There's a revolution about to take place in game consoles," Gates said in his address. "People want something that's rich. They want something where game developers have had no limits on their creativity and we're going to take a look today at an incredible breakthrough that's taking place there."

After Gates demonstrated the company's Whistler and Pocket PC projects -- which he showed at Comdex in Las Vegas nearly two months ago -- the Xbox took center stage at the standing-room-only event at the Las Vegas Hilton's theater.

The unit has four game ports allowing four people to play simultaneously and the controller has "rumble" capability.

"So as you're sitting there holding it, you're feeling what's going on, you're feeling that explosion or that crash, or that intensity actually comes through the controller itself," Gates said.

With 64 megabytes of memory, an Intel 733-megahertz processor, an 8-gigabyte hard drive, Gates said the machine is the most powerful of any gaming console on the market and can deliver three times the graphics performance of units manufactured by Sony, Nintendo and Sega. The company did not announce the anticipated price.

Gates then brought Seamus Blackley on stage to show Xbox's capabilities, with two prototype games, "Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee" and "Malice." The crowd was impressed.

"If you're always worried about having to make compromises in your art and compromises in the game design because of limited technology or power in a box, then you end up with a final product that doesn't achieve the vision that you had for your game," Blackley said.

"More importantly, you're making a product that was designed by compromise and it isn't really being designed by the vision and the dream of the guys designing the games," he said. "So, one of the basic premises of Xbox is to put the power in the hands of the artists."

Finally, Gates demonstrated a World Wrestling Federation-themed game with The Rock, a professional wrestler.

Sports-themed games have been a popular genre in the industry and Westwood's parent company has made a splash on the Sony PlayStation 2 with its "Madden NFL Football" game. Castle says part of the excitement of the game is to push the system to the limit and the graphics of the football game are considered the best available.

"When people buy a new platform, they want to see and experience all the capability that it has," Castle said. "They like to see new fiction, new stories and new characters. That's one of the things that make it all more exciting."

That's not to say that a version of "Command & Conquer" couldn't surface on an Xbox some day.

"There are advantages to both strategies," Castle said. "We developed a new product for Play Station 2 because we were able to do something with this machine that no one has ever seen on a home console before. That's what could happen with the Xbox. People who will use them will like to maximize their experience and see and do things they've never done before with a game."

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