I've been busy making Bill Gates look good.

At last I have the time to blog again...and can finally tell you exactly what's kept me away.

At the end of March, it was decided the project I work on would be unveiled in 6 weeks at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo). That meant we had a LOT of work to do. Then it ratched up a notch when we found out that Bill Gates was going to be the special guest presenter. A rather big deal, because Bill had never appeared at E3 before.

So in the last 6 weeks, I've put in about 2 months worth of work putting together various demos. Some to sell the concept to various people higher up the chain, and then of course the actual stuff we'd have at the show.

Yesterday at E3, Microsoft announced the Live Anywhere vision. Basically it's a shared gaming and entertainment space across Xbox, Windows, and Mobile phones. The cool thing is that you'll have one gamertag, one friends list, one message center, and one set of game achievements regardless of which platform you're on. It was really cool that the part that I worked on got a big round of applause from the press-only audience.

I worked on the mobile phone portion of that vision...and had the time of my life doing it. It included a lot of art directing and managing people that I'd never done before. I was suprised to find that I rather enjoyed that part...who'd have thunk it?

Here are a couple shots of my work from the video: Mobile Gamecenter home page

Gamercard

Friends list

If you'd like to check out the video, go to this page and fast forward about an hour into the presentation. You'll know you're at the right place when you see Bill. E3 2006 Microsoft Press Conference