Eric Engstrom, RIP
Dean Takahashi (via Hacker News):
Eric Engstrom passed away this week, leaving friends in mourning for one of the renegades of the Microsoft empire and a brilliant tech innovator.
Engstrom was known as part of the “Beastie Boys,” a trio of evangelists who paved the way for Microsoft’s expansion in games in the late 1990s and early 2000s with DirectX. The expansion eventually enabled Microsoft to launch the Xbox (X signified DirectX) video game console — an enterprise that generated billions of dollars for Microsoft and made it a major player in the game industry.
Update (2021-01-01): Edge (via Hacker News):
Edge magazine investigates the dramatic origins of the original Xbox and how an internal team ‘hoodwinked’ Bill Gates into launching Microsoft’s first console.
