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

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