Eventually an exasperated Mikami boiled it down: 'what is your philosophy? Sony says games are entertainment, something larger, fuelled by the Emotion Engine. Nintendo says games are toys, created by the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto, perhaps the greatest game developer of all time. What do you feel?' Microsoft had no answer.
"I almost jumped out the window because we had said repeatedly over and over and over that we aspire to enable games that could be considered to be art, much like film," Bachus says, "that because of the maturity of the development tools and the APIs and the power of the technology, game developers on Xbox would be able to concentrate on the finesse features that elevated games to being something more than they were otherwise.
"So the guy who reported to me said, 'oh that's so great! I wish that I had known that.' But unfortunately it was too late."