Former Microsoft programmer Allen Murray took credit this week for putting banner ads on the Xbox 360 dashboard, including ads he says he helped design.
The Xbox 360 may have blazed a trail in connecting console players through online gaming, but with that service came an unpopular side effect: banner ads, designed to be downloaded and updated regularly by all those online players. As the 360 tiptoes toward its tenth birthday, Allen Murray, a former Xbox programmer, used his own 10 years in the games industry to get something off his chest. Banner ads are his fault, he said, and they came after he argued with colleagues who she really didn’t want to on Xbox 360.
In a Monday Gamasutra post, Murray described his start at Microsoft in 2004 as a web services tier programmer, where he became intimately acquainted with the Xbox Live Arcade initiative – and realized how difficult it was to find the games for players unaware were from a console-specific game download store. “It was a few clicks down the UI, hidden from the player,” Murray complained, so he asked to meet with an unnamed boss to discuss adding promotional content to the dashboard in development.
According to Murray, he met with immediate resistance – “Banner ads? Like on websites?” – and was told that “gamers would hate ads”. Murray used the post to recall why his sales pitch initially backfired: “My choice of language, using terms like ‘advertising’ and ‘banner ads,’ conveyed a tone of corporate soullessness. These were games! We had to be cool and ‘fuck the man’ and all that shit.”
He eventually teamed up with Xbox Live programming director Larry Hryb to make his case; Once they got the go-ahead from the company, they created a team responsible for the “banner of the day” system on the dashboard that used a simple, Flash-like tool to schedule and serve ads .
While it’s hard to believe that only one person in a company the size of Microsoft could take on so much responsibility for advertising, the first Xbox 360 dashboard certainly didn’t feel like it was built to neatly display alerts, news, and ads , and the story sounds like a reasonable stopgap to the discoverability problems of the early dashboard. As we all know, future dashboard updates have made it easier for players to find downloadable games, as well as numerous advertisements. (The Xbox also paved the way for other forms of advertising to reach consoles.)