LARA CROFT BOXING CLEVER
Copyright 2000 www.tombraiderchronicles.com

[ October 26th 2000 ]

According to a report by the international news agency Reuters, Lara Croft may have boxed clever an idea first conceived at 33,000 feet as being Microsoft's entry into the game console market. Seamus Blackley, a freshman at the software giant Microsoft, was toying with a new laptop during a flight, teasing it's graphics and looking for a way to improve it's visual element, and realised that Microsoft could make "a machine that had much higher performance than anything else in the industry."

Three colleagues were enlisted, and Blackley set to work designing a platform that would utilize the power of Microsoft's DirectX. and a prototype, something merely a jigsaw of cards and processors, was developed. Coincidentally, at the same time and unbeknown to Blakely, Microsoft had already decided that it wanted to venture out of the desktop market and into the console arena.

Several weeks later Blakely and his ensemble met with Microsoft's co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates, where he demonstrated a device that would boot within three to four seconds, and would successfully play Eidos Interactives Tomb Raider. Research and development continued, culminating in a March announcement that Microsoft would release a games console named XBox.

And so when the XBox hit's the shelves, entombed in the latest technology from the worlds largest software company, spare a thought for Lara Croft, who at one point, and in front of America's richest man, boxed clever on nothing more than a bare wire.