The Richter Scale^®

Microsoft certainly knows how to throw a party… The Killers - in about
ten minutes, on this stage....

The presentation’s over. Time for the reception…

Yoichi Wada, president of SquareEnix, just announced support for the
Xbox 360 and Xbox Live! Final Fantast XI was demonstrated.

This is a major deal for Microsoft, which has been courting leading
Japanese developers for some time in order to be able to better
establish a foothold in Japan.

Rob just announced that the Xbox 360 will be backwards compatible “with
the leading Xbox games”. Implication is that not all original Xbox games
may run, which is not surprising as the Xbox 360 will have to emulate an
Xbox - x86 architecture and NVIDIA graphics hardware, instead of having
native hardware compatibility.

Also announced was a simultaneous three continent release of the Xbox
360 in the Fall in time for Christmas.

It’s about a half hour late, but the briefing has started. Microsoft’s J
Allard, Peter Moore, and Robbie Bach have kicked things off.

They claim that Xbox Live! will have 2 million subscribers within 2
months, and 6 of the top 10 games out now are Xbox titles.

Registration was a mad house. Fortunately both my senior editors at TechWatch were with me. (And thanks
to Heidi too!)

Here in the Shrine Auditorium there’s an excited buzz in the air.

The briefing starts at 7:30pm and will go on for an hour. That will
apparently be followed by a party/reception - The Killers (who played
two sets during the Xbox 360 infomercial on MTV last week) are slated to
perform at 9:30pm, and The Chemical Brothers at 10:30pm. At 1:00am
there’s either a Doors revival band playing or The Doors Close to not
allow anyone in, and the last bus leaves at 2:00am. I plan on being on a
much earlier bus…

The big difference between the Sony approach and the Microsoft one is
that the latter is making their briefing an entertainment event, and
Sony made their briefing a entertaining briefing.

More later.

More details will be forthcoming on the Sony PS3 briefing once I get to
a real keyboard, but meanwhile here’s a shot of the chaos at The Shrine
Auditorium waiting to register for the Microsoft Xbox 360 briefing.

Last one…

Another photo

The PS3 revealed…