“We learn from mistakes”. This is a phrase that could well describe Microsoft’s trajectory since its inception. Especially in the nineties, where the technology sector evolved dramatically, causing companies to adapt to change.
Among all these changes, videogames were gaining more and more prominence, especially with the move to 3D, and everyone wanted to join that bandwagon, including Microsoft. It is curious that one of the most iconic ‘blue screens’, and that Microsoft wanted to forget forever, had to do with the launch of the Lion King video game.
The Lion King, from box office success to disaster on PC
In 1994, one of Disney’s most successful films, The Lion King, was released. Given this success, it was to be expected that the work would also be adapted to other media, including the video game. So it was, a title that reached multiple platforms, including PC.
As a way to promote the consumption of video games on PC and highlight the virtues of its innovative WinG programming interface compared to DOS, Microsoft was eager to see the success it would reap on its platform as well.. But the reality was very different.
The Lion King would mean for Microsoft the key to consolidate Windows 95 as an operating system that also performs well in games. During its promotional campaign, an entire line of Compaq computers with the WinG version of the game pre-installed was released. Everything indicates that no one checked the operation of the equipment, since when starting this game, a blue screen prostrated itself in front of the user.
The magnitude of this disaster was of colossal proportions, causing a rejection among the public and the industry towards Windows 95 and the WinG programming interface for game development.
The ‘Manhattan Project’, a ray of light for video games on Windows
However, as we mentioned in the first paragraph, you learn from mistakes. In November of that same year, it was the trio of Alex St. John, Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom, who they laid the foundations of a Microsoft committed to the video game industry through their manifesto “Taking Fun Seriously“ –Taking fun seriously-. Here there was talk of “killing DOS once and for all” and using the Manhattan SDK to solve compatibility problems for PC games.
By then, Microsoft was taking only 1% of the pie from the video game industry, compared to 87% for SEGA and Nintendo. The company remained focused on the concept of “multimedia” in general, with standards such as QuickTime impossible to dethrone.
That “Manhattan Project” evolved into what is known today as DirectX, a series of libraries that allowed developers to adapt their titles to multiple systems, solving most of the compatibility problems. However, it was difficult to sell internally, to such an extent that Engstrom and company had to secretly hire programmers to develop it.
DirectX was a huge success, and it solved many of the problems that made the PC a ‘nefarious’ platform to play with. To this day it is a set of libraries that is still used, and also laid the foundations for the creation of a console by Microsoft that bore the same X in its name.