Building a games pad is, one imagines, similar to constructing a grand piano; just a single malfunctioned key can undermine the entire design. This was why there was an inherent danger to Alam's plan - he wanted to take a forensic look at many of the Xbox 360 controller's constituent parts and see if they could be enhanced without compromising the overall quality.
"So we interviewed hundreds and hundreds of core gamers, and through those interviews we got a list of improvements that people said they wanted.
"Then we added each one of those advancements to the Xbox 360 controller, and each time we tested the new builds on live games. In fact, we were writing actual levels of games to see how well a new feature works."
Presenting gamers with just slight enhancements to the Xbox 360 controller during each testing session made it easier to hide from participants that they were holding the beginnings of a next-generation controller.
"The final Xbox One controller may not look different on the outside, but inside it's remarkably different," says Alam.
Microsoft has spent more than $100 million on designing the Xbox One controller. It sounds like an extraordinary sum, but that includes the design of hundreds of pad prototypes, thousands of hours of user research studies, and creating new tooling and construction facilities. The project dragged on for two-and-a-half years.
"The investments in redesigning a controller go into the hundreds of millions of dollars in tooling and R&D costs. Bearing in mind we started with something that people considered best-in-class, the pressure to do it right again was tremendous.
"Honestly, some of us felt like we were putting our career on the line. We were afraid we were going to burn through $100 million and come back with an under-developed controller."
