ABSTRACT
The idea for an Xbox technology group was not to do pure research, but to become the world’s experts on Xbox development so that they could help developers right out of the gate. Technical artist Dave McCoy remembers being recruited into ATG because Xbox was going to have programmable shaders, which at the time were very new and advanced. ATG was in some ways, the first customer of the Xbox team. Any feature or component that was developed for Xbox was first given to ATG, which would test it and try to learn how best to use it. Drew Angeloff tells a story about the early days of the Xbox ATG. He begins his story saying, “Seamus Blackley has this whole thing planned out, of course, because it’s Seamus. “Email goes out, and of course Seamus has partially prepped this, and over in Redmond there’s somebody waiting for the email.
