Seamus Blackley is now more likely to post pictures of the beautiful sourdough loaves he bakes and his recent wacky quest to make chocolate from scratch. But Blackley's long and illustrious career in the tech industry will probably always be defined by his role in spearheading the development of video games, especially the Xbox, within Microsoft in the late 90s and early 00s.

I mentioned the origin of the Xbox's name on PC Gamer's Slack channel the other week, to the astonishment (and perhaps exaggeration) of some: since the Xbox was based on Microsoft's DirectX technology, it was internally named DirectXbox, and named the Xbox. In fact, in Brackley's words, what the marketers came up with was "garbage." So it was Xbox.

I think there has always been something utilitarian about Xbox's hardware design. The recent Series S and X are good examples of this approach to hardware aesthetics, creating a minor social media fad of creating an outer casing that makes one's Xbox look like one of those classic beige box PCs of the 90s.

Blackley saw one of these posts, which led him to share a rather remarkable photo.

"Anyone who doesn't notice that this looks a lot like the Xbox fat-kit prototype won't understand why I just inhaled coffee," Blackley wrote. If you ask me, this is a step up from the infamous silver "X" prototype shown off at CES, which has a strong Millennium vibe. It is also marked "Alpha II" on the bottom of the case, suggesting that an even earlier model exists. Only Blackley knows that it is "even more beige.

Blackley is very good at giving interviews and told Edge magazine several years ago about the process by which the Xbox project crossed Redmond's line. Part of it was to fool the boss.

"We absolutely, deliberately deceived [Bill Gates]. And I absolutely, unequivocally, told him in writing on numerous occasions that we were doing that at the time. This is a huge risk. If we succeed, he will be pleased; if not, not so pleased. But let's face it, and I repeat, let's not forget that this is a company that does not understand games, let alone consoles. This company believes that the Windows operating system is all value and that the operating system is the value of the computer. So if you were an employee of this company and you wanted to sell the value of a new platform, what argument would you use?

"That doesn't necessarily mean that as the project progresses they won't think more deeply and realize that it's not true, that Windows is no longer the value proposition in this project, that it's not the value proposition in this project. They used to think, 'Oh, just make a Windows gaming platform, because Windows provides all these values: .......' We thought, 'Oh, that's a good idea. That's garbage and not true; no gamer cares what Windows does. But to the folks in Redmond, it is true. And you are not going to convince them. I mean, have you ever tried to convince your own grandfather of anything?