2023-06-07 14:45:02
Game News “You can consider me a gamer”: At 67, Bill Gates considers himself part of the great video game community
When we talk regarding Microsoft, the first words that come to mind are “Game Pass”, “Cloud” or even “Xbox”. In the late 1990s, what best qualified the Redmond firm were “Windows”, “Office” and “Bill Gates”. It is precisely the co-founder of Microsoft that we are going to talk regarding today.
For the love of the game?
For a long time, it was complicated to know whether or not Bill Gates was really a player. Of course, there are articles explaining that the co-founder of Microsoft spent long hours on video games such as Minesweeper or certain sports games. Admittedly, the Redmond firm has been publishing games since the late 1970s, and it launched the Xbox on the market in the early 2000s. Despite this, it would be misleading to call Bill Gates a gamer. If he launched his game console, it was above all to counter Sony who assured that his PlayStation 2 was going “replace computers”. The Xbox project embarked on adversity, but also on lies.
The Xbox was indeed sold to Bill Gates as a game console running Windows. Unfortunately, the engineers realized that it would not need such a complex operating system. When Bill Gates realizes this, he yells at his teams: “It’s a fucking insult to everything I’ve done for the company. Why are you trying to kill Windows? You lied to me, you took me for an idiot”. Yes, the co-founder of Microsoft didn’t like the idea of letting Sony control the living rooms, but according to him Xbox was “the antithesis” of what his society was. In other words, what interested Bill Gates with the Xbox was the business, not the video game as such.
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Bill Games
Although Bill Gates was present at the launch of the Xbox and intervened during certain E3 to discuss Windows, he did not seem to be part of the big family of gamers. “Am I a player? For a long time, I would have said no” explains Bill Gates on they are blog. He keeps on : “but when I was younger I loved arcade games and was very good at Tetris. And in the last few years I started playing a lot of online bridge and games like Spelling Bee and several variations of Wordle”. Before concluding : “the definition of a gamer is becoming broader and more inclusive, and it might be fair to start calling me that”.
In his article, Gates notes the great qualities of the book “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin. He sees in this novel “a great metaphor for human connection” and explains that the story reminds him of what happened between him, Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer. “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow resonated with me for personal reasons, but I think Zevin’s exploration of partnership and collaboration is worth everyone’s reading.” he declares
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