We are at the end of 1994 and in Microsoft they are not aware of the crisis they are about to experience. Not only is the success of the launch of Windows 95 at stake, but also the future of the PC world as a video game platform. And all because of a children’s game called The Lion King.
This is the story about how the pixelated lion from Disney turned the video game world upside down in Pc and ended up causing Microsoft become an essential part of that same sector. One of those key moments in our past that, had it not occurred, might have us living in a completely different present.
The butterfly effect of The Lion King
Says the chaos theory that a small variation in an initial condition can make a big difference in the future. Perfectly exemplified by the following question, the butterfly effect shows us how difficult it is to predict what will happen in the short term.
“Can the flapping of a butterfly in one part of the world cause a tornado on the other side of the globe?”
In that Microsoft From ’94, the flutter of a butterfly was a nice platform video game that promised to reap the same success on PC as the one it had already shown in the world of cinema. The Lion King it was the key capable of opening a new future for the brand.
Not only was it important because it equated the platform with the consoles that were taking over electronic entertainment, it was also the first big leap in development in TWO to development in Windows 95, as well as the demonstration of the benefits of the system WinG that they had been preparing.
That same summer they had wowed the GDC audience by showing how Doom’s port from DOS to Windows 95 using WinG worked almost as well, but although there were still a few months for the operating system to hit stores, the game of Disney was the first great trial by fire for the promising programming interface.
Like watching a train derail
“Oh, the Lion King. To this day I can’t see anything related to that product that doesn’t make me sick ”.
As Rick Segal -one of the directors of the Microsoft of that time-, collects in the book The Long Road to Xbox, the launch of The Lion King it was promised as an unprecedented bombshell. The Compaq brand had prepared a new line of computers that would carry the game pre-installed, and they had sold like hotcakes.
The only problem is that, despite being part of the promotional strategy of those PCs, nobody had bothered to take one of the computers and open the game to see how it worked with WinG. No one had noticed that as you launched the game, the system would crash and send a blue screen.
A disaster of epic proportions in which the game did not install correctly due to not being able to find the correct drivers and, as a solution, it adorned the screen of millions of children with a beautiful message on a blue background. The disaster was so great that even the Wall Street Journal wrote an article claiming that Disney had ruined Christmas.
“It was like watching a train derail. It blew up at Microsoft and everywhere else.
Think of the coincidence. First of all you have Windows 95 about to come out. Second, it’s the first time Microsoft has convinced anyone other than themselves to get great companies to make great multimedia products.
And suddenly you have Disney supporting you, and a large number of other companies supporting and creating games for Windows. And then you meet this mess in the press.
It shook Microsoft to the ground. “
The main problem he was facing Microsoft at the time it was an internal clash of egos and teams fighting for attention. Alex St. John, to whom we owe the previous words, he knew that to get out of that tremendous mess he needed help, but he was also very aware that going to other teams would not provide any solution.
Taking Fun Seriously
In November of that same year, St. John presented with two other companions, Craig eisler and Eric Engstrom, a manifest called “Taking Fun Seriously“-Taking fun seriously-, a document in which he directly attacked the rest of the teams and asked to end DOS once and for all and start working from there.
Wanted to Microsoft became a giant in the world of video games, and that it became part of the cake of 87% of the profits that until then had been Sega and Nintendo. If the solution they proposed was not approved, the company would never go beyond the paltry 1% it was putting in its pocket.
When the disaster of The Lion King arrived at the gates of Microsoft a month later, Rick Segal came over and asked what he would do. St. John’s response was to show him the manifesto that he had shared a few weeks before and to regret that no one gave him permission to take the reins, turn 180 degrees and completely change the company’s plans.
“The answer will always be no. If it’s worth doing, then it’s worth risking getting fired for it. “
St. John and his team clung to that Segal mantra like a burning nail, and given the refusal to access the information and resources used by other teams, they decided to steal it and start the project on your own.
Those data and documents extracted were enough to reconfirm that the path taken so far was the wrong one. Now it was time to go to the developers themselves to know where to shoot. Not an easy task considering that almost everyone was against a large corporation such as Microsoft.
The future of Microsoft’s video game
To win them over, St. John was totally frank. He said yes Microsoft ago X, they were going to have to use it yes or yes. And anchored in that position, he asked them what they would really like to see done. In other words, it was up to him to decide what should that X be.
Using that information, the team got to work to shape what was first known as the Manhattan Project and then led to what we all know today as Directx.
Eric Engstrom designed the API, Craig Eisler minced the code, and Alex St. John sold it internally. Once presented to the developers and collected their feedback, the strategy for Microsoft approved the project was clear.
“At Microsoft they were completely paranoid about QuickTime and multimedia in general, because it was clear that this was where computers were headed, and Microsoft was not able to supersede QuickTime as a standard.
That played a huge role in DirectX and its subsequent approval because the project took competition to a new level. A Sun Tzu roll in which you avoid attacking their fortified cities.
You don’t attack where they are strong, which was QuickTime. You attack in the games, where Apple and the rest of personal computers were weak ”.
Almost a year after that debacle, in September 1995, Directx it was launched to the public reaping great success. The library would allow developers to work with even more facilities than those enjoyed in DOS, and would offer the user a complete layer of customization so that they could enjoy the games by adapting their capabilities to the computer on which they were running.
Directx became a standard whose name we would often read by players around the world, and shortly after that, Microsoft wanted to take advantage of the success of that secret development to add another step into the world of video games.
In 1999 he would unveil a console project with the same X as the protagonist. A DirectX-box that two years later it would arrive on the market with the definitive name that we all know today.
That manifesto that could have brought ruin to its creators, finally proved to be valid enough to raise the shoulders of Microsoft in the video game world. And as in the butterfly effect, what began with the failed roar of a pixelated lion, ended up printing the word on millions of consoles Xbox.