Sony, Microsoft set stage for gaming's next fight

Across town at the Microsoft press briefing, the nervous optimism that bathed the Sony event was absent.

That’s because Microsoft skipped the E3 insider line last week to take its next generation console, the Xbox 360, directly to the people. Even if the nationally televised MTV special was short on the details most potential buyers would want to know ’ and way too long on B-list celebrities flailing away — the Xbox 360 still managed to capture the media spotlight nearly a week before E3 began.

The one important lingering issue, aside from pricing, was revealed early in the briefing when Microsoft’s senior vice president in charge of the home and entertainment division, Robbie Bach, announced that the Xbox 360 would be backwards compatible with Xbox titles — or at least some of them. Bach said the new console wouldn't necessarily run all of the older games, but would run the top-selling ones. Still, a heavy sigh of relief from the crowd as they discovered their purchase of the Special Edition Halo 2 wasn’t in vain.

And so the Xbox briefing was more like a frat party led by the Xbox team’s chief cheerleaders: Bach, Peter Moore, the accented chief of marketing, and Allard, whose youthful bald pate is recognizable to gamers worldwide. Although the hoodie-blazer combo Allard wore Monday night made him look a little too like Moby to be taken seriously.

The Xbox briefing, like briefings before, was primarily male. And not just male but the type of male given to wearing black T-shirts and cutting their hair in irregular patterns. This is not an insult, but a fact of life, and the Xbox team has been very diligent about nurturing their hard-core followers.

So it came as a surprise when Allard took the green-light bathed-stage at the Shrine Auditorium to announce that the Xbox 360 had bigger plans than just catering to that base.

"We used to fill the living room with kids and adults," said Allard, recalling the early days of video gaming with its cute two-dimensional characters. "Today, we seem to have one kind of consumer."

One could feel the primarily 18-to-34 male audience shift uncomfortably in their baggy camo pants.

Allard outlined a number of plans to bring the family back into gaming including a number of un-sexy (to this audience, anyway) references to arcade games and Web clickers like "Bejeweled." He also spoke of the number of ways the Xbox 360 will foster communication and commerce.

Whether the Xbox 360 reaches the billion point remains to be seen, but Allard informing the hardest of the hard-core that gaming should be for everyone was a telling moment.

The event quickly reverted back to its hard-core roots, however. There were new titles like "Quake 4" to announce and noisy techno music from The Chemical Brothers to listen to.

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