Dude who founded Xbox Live has left Microsoft
I know, I know. You think XBL, you think slurs and adolescence. I get it. But still — imagine being the motherfucker who conceived and implemented the gaming juggernaut online service bonanza (at least last generation)? Boyd Multerer is that dude. And he’s outtie-5000 from Microsoft.
The engineer who led development on Xbox Live and the XNA game development tools for Xbox, Boyd Multerer, left the company this month after 17 years at Microsoft. Multerer announced his departure from the Xbox team on Twitter today.
“Goodbye Microsoft. It was a good run. Xbox was Great! Time to do something new,” Multerer tweeted.
Multerer joined Microsoft in 1997, according to his Linkedin profile. In 2000, Multerer was hired to lead development on the online component of the original Xbox, which was called Xbox Online at the time. Multerer was responsible for hiring the Xbox Live development team and led the design, direction and implementation of Microsoft’s online gaming service. He was the first person on Xbox Live, he has said, and emphasized security and anti-cheating measures.
Later, Multerer would go on to be product manager on XNA in order to meet “the pent-up demand of independent game developers” and build “the first open marketplace on a console.”
Most recently, Multerer served as director of development for Xbox. He was part of the Xbox One team and oversaw technical design and development of the current generation console. Multerer promoted the Xbox One’s cloud-based computing power at the system’s unveiling last year.
“The last one, the box was fixed,” Multerer said during a technical roundtable discussion, explaining that Xbox One can access “a growing number of transistors that are not that far away” that will allow “for bigger worlds, and take some of the things that are normally done locally and push them out.”
Later, dude. May your travels be sweet, your sleep restful, and your next venture fruitful.