'Xbox Game Room' and 2010 Project Natal launch leaked in CES interview
[Update, 5:30pm: And off comes the rumor tag! Microsoft may have pulled the post but the original video is still live on its own servers, which you can find right here! We'll scrub through it for more information. Update, 5:47pm: Full transcript after the break.]
Microsoft's Channel 9 developer community site accidentally posted a video interview with Robbie Bach, President of the Entertainment & Devices Division, several hours before the company's annual CES press conference. Initially tweeted by @ch9, the video was pulled, as evidenced by this tweet from none other than @microsoft: "Sorry, spoke too soon, or, tweeted too soon. This video later tonight."
Vigilant tipster Iced_Eagle wrote us just after the video was pulled, giving us a quick breakdown. "Go to the 11:53 mark in the video to hear them start discussing Game Room," our tipster writes. "They aren't totally concrete on the details, but they talk about how this is supposed to bring back that retro fun to gaming." That sounds an awful lot like that consumer survey we spotted in October for a virtual Avatar arcade, one of the potential titles of which was "Game Room." You don't say ...
Iced_Eagle also unsurprisingly reports, "In the video they confirm Natal is on for this year." Considering everyone from Ubisoft's Yves Guillemot to Microsoft's own Steve Ballmer have alluded to a 2010 release, we're not the least bit surprised. But if they're still calling it Project Natal in this video, that means we're probably looking to E3 for an official reveal, with branding and all.
Microsoft's CES keynote begins at 9:30pm Eastern and we'll be delivering all the news straight from Las Vegas.
[Thanks for the great tip, Iced_Eagle!]
Bach on Game Room:
Well, Game Room in some ways is sort of a retro approach. And it's interesting, there's a generation of people -- sort of my advanced, mature age [laughs] -- who grew up with a set of games like Centipede. They look almost like casual, fun games today -- at the time they were high-end, edgy games -- and so Game Room is the idea of bringing that back to the market. And bringing that to a very broad audience. And I think what we're gonna find is that when people can get 30 or more of these games, they're gonna love it for the experience. And it's not just you and I who are gonna love it, even the people who would call themselves "hardcore gamers" are gonna say "Oh wow this is fun!" In a retro way. It's sort of like my daughter going to watch Journey. I'm like, this is a band that was playing when I was growing up. And she thinks it's a cool band and I like the music. And I think you're gonna have the same phenomenon with Game Room. We're gonna enjoy the games and they're gonna think it's cool. I think that's very powerful.
When asked "What's 2010 look like?" Bach responded, in part:
And then you look at what we have coming in the Xbox space, with Project Natal, which I think is going to revolutionize how people think about the gaming business, and actually turn into ....
