Don Mattrick Didn’t Have Any Faith In Xbox, Xbox Creator Reveals

While Phil Spencer has been working hard to revitalize and rejuvenate the Xbox brand over the last few years, a lot of its problems are inherited from the tenure of Don Mattrick, under whose leadership Xbox steered away from an exclusives driven strategy to focusing on media and Kinect.

Mattrick led Xbox for a few years before eventually leaving and ceding the position to Phil Spencer. However, the irony of the situation is that when he used to work at EA Canada before joining Microsoft, he flat out had no faith in a Microsoft created console ever working. Seamus Blackley, one of the creators of the Xbox, recounted on Twitter how when Microsoft had tried to speak to EA Canada to pitch the console to them ahead of the very first Xbox’s release, Mattrick had tried to block them, believing that Xbox would never work.

Of course, Mattrick would then head (and nearly sink) the console he didn’t believe was possible just a few years later; thankfully, Spencer came around and turned it around. Xbox, in spite of Don Mattrick, finds itself in a pretty good place today.

I’ve never talked about this before, but the irony of Don Mattrick as Xbox Chief was huge for me: when I first came to EA Canada to present the idea of a Microsoft console, he nearly blocked me from addressing the company because he didn’t believe it was possible. It was tense. pic.twitter.com/3pqRq4rGBL

— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) March 4, 2019