Around five designers worked with eight engineers, imagining processors that didn’t even exist yet. The design team began making foam mockups, with different shapes dependent upon the next Xbox’s internal architecture.
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Eventually we get to the point where we have to make a decision. These will generally all work . . . we know they’ll cost about the same. But what we really wanna know is whether this is exciting and interesting to customers.
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We’d line up 10-12 in home visits. We talk about gaming in general, how they use their console, high-level stuff . . . then we always took measurements of their room, how far they sat from the TV, and temperature readings for a thermal study. Then we’d unveil these crude boxes . . . without much context other than, if this were the shape of the next-gen console, what do you think?
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