Offstage, Jonathan "Seamus" Blackley was worried sick. "I was under so much stress, it was remarkable I didn't explode," he recalls. The renegade program manager who was one of several co-creators of the Xbox, Mr. Blackley was a main character in an internal Microsoft insurgency that convinced Mr. Gates to spend an estimated $5 billion to $6 billion to enter the video game business. This was Mr. Blackley's spotlight moment. He and a small band of fellow renegades had convinced Mr. Gates that Microsoft had to field a non-PC box that didn't run Windows, that the company had to go into the money-losing hardware business, and that it had to defeat Sony's PlayStation 2 game console or surrender any hope of controlling technolog

The pair sat at the Microsoft booth at the end of the show, as workers were busy dismantling the exhibits. Mr. Blackley was mentally packing away his dreams. He had produced hit games before, and his intuition had never let him down, but now he worried that his career was ruined.

Back then, he met with Johnny Wilson, the editor of Computer Gaming World magazine. Mr. Blackley's highly anticipated game, Trespasser: The Lost World, had just met with terrible reviews and lackluster sales. The game, which he undertook for Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Interactive, had been expected to propel computer games forward as an art form, but instead it became yet another example of the inferiority of games to movies. The gray-bearded Mr. Wilson was a kind of elder statesman among game journalists. He saw Mr. Blackley as an ambitious genius who had tried to break new ground, yet his magazine was one of those that panned the game.

He stood out in another way, too. A year earlier he'd been at the same trade show--but under much different circumstances.

Mr. Ballmer then hammered the team on its na�ve business model, but he offered a lot of encouragement in his own fashion. Once, when they were standing in line at the company cafeteria, Mr. Ballmer sneaked up behind them and bellowed, "It's the Xbox guys!"

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