Seamus Blackley is now more often found posting photographs of the beautiful sourdough loaves he bakes, or his recent Quixotic quest to make chocolate from scratch. But Blackley's long and extremely distinguished career in tech will probably always be defined by his role at Microsoft in the late '90s and early '00s when, alongside others, he spearheaded the internal drive at Microsoft towards videogames, and specifically towards the Xbox.
I blew some minds (may be an exaggeration) in the PC Gamer Slack channel the other week by mentioning where the Xbox name originated: it was based on Microsoft's DirectX technology, and was therefore christened the DirectXbox then Xbox internally, the idea being that this was a working title and when launch came around the marketers would come up with something better. In fact, in Blackley's words, what the marketers came up with was "garbage." So Xbox it was.
