Back in 2002, Dean Takahashi’s Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft’s Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution took an insider’s look at Microsoft’s first foray into the video game console arena. His second book, “The Xbox 360 Uncloaked: The Real Story Behind Microsoft’s Next-Generation Video Game Console” is now on sale in e-book and paperback on spiderworks.com. I talked with Mr. Takahashi about the book, the state of game journalism, and Microsoft’s chances in the next generation.

Kyle Orland: My first question is: Why Microsoft? Why didn’t you do a book on Sony or Nintendo or any one of a billion other subjects?

Dean Takahashi: I didn’t have the access to anyone else the way I did with Microsoft. I did the first book and that helped pave the way for this one. I live on the West coast and I get up to Seattle pretty often, I’m pretty well connected to Silicon Valley, but I can’t really get over to Japan that much and so that kind of cuts out the chance to do a Sony or a Nintendo book. This one seemed like a good story to tell.

It’s the same pattern as the first one. I didn’t really set out to do a book, but when I found out enough good stories that I thought merited a book then I dove into it.

KO: Why do you think we haven’t seen more books, like this, that deal with the recent history of Sony and Nintendo?

DT: This book in particular is a combination of a lot of years of work in the industry. I tap into business reporting expertise, tips in technology and video games. There aren’t as many people who try to focus on all those things. I think the industry is relatively young, as well, compared ot the movie and music industries, where there are books coming out on figures and the big celebrities in those industries all the time — this one is still catching up.

KO: Do you think we’ll see an increase in the number of these types of books as the industry gets older?

DT: Yeah, definitely. As it becomes a bigger and bigger part of mass culture, people will want to read about it more. My hope is they turn on the Xbox and they’re curious about what’s inside it and they go and find out how it came together.

KO: You say in the book’s introduction that you had a bit of trouble finding a publisher for this second book. Why do you think there was so much resistance?

DT: The first book sold well enough, but it wasn’t a barn burner. A lot of publishers are conservative, they won’t take another risk on something like that. The way I pitched it initially was as a story about all the console makers. That didn’t really come together…

KO: Because there wasn’t as much interest?

DT: For some reason they weren’t as interested. I think publishers have that same “old media” problem as well, where there aren’t a whole lot of people playing games in the office, then maybe they would say, “What’s the point, this is just an industry about toys, only kids play these games, why would kids pick up a book about the industry?”

KO: They just don’t get it?

DT: Yeah…

KO: What audience, specifically, were you thinking of when you were writing the book?

DT: I just had a bunch of circles. The core audience is people in the industry, people working at Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, or video games in general. People who want to break into the industry, younger people. From there it broadens to people who are interested in technology, business readers, and then maybe gamers and people who are interested in reading a book about a very specific project.

KO: So gamers were sort of at the end of the line here?

DT: They weren’t necessarily at the end of the line… they weren’t necessarily the ones who were going to automatically pick it up. Gamers are the people who are going to pick up a game guide or a controller first, right?

KO: Too busy playing games to read, right?

DT: Right.

KO: Was it hard to manage all these different audiences while you were writing?

DT: I tried to just make sure that I wrote in a layman’s language and tried to explain everything that I needed to as I went along. There are parts of the book that dwell on chip-making technology that different audiences aren’t going to be as interested in. There are probably going to be, for those readers, sections they’re going to want to skip over. It takes a while to get to the games.

KO: So it’s not meant to be read straight through?

DT: It is meant to be read straight through, but if they’re not going to do that, I’ll take what I can I guess.

KO: You mentioned that you tried to write in layman’s language. How do you think the games press in general does at avoiding jargon and making their writing accessible to a general audience?

DT: They generally target the language to the hardcore gamers. In the first line of a story you’ll see the worrd “RPG” and it won’t be explained. They write assuming a certain level of knowledge, and that’s fine for their audience. When you step back and you’re writing a book, you have different ambitions, you have to write in a way that will keep people interested for hundreds of pages.

I didn’t mention it yet, but the inspiration for what I try to do is “The Soul of a New Machine” by Tracy Kidder — a book that came out in the 1980s, won a Pulitzer prize. It’s a story about the making of a mini-computer at Data General. Two teams have competed against each other and how the engineers went blow by blow and all the decisions they made. You feel like you’re a fly on the wall as you watch these meetings happen. That’s always sort of the model for the “you are there” kind of book.

KO: Did any other books inspire you — gaming history books perhaps?

DT: I wouldn’t say game history books inspired it. I think it fits in with a group of books, though, that are trying to chronicle the history of the industry like Steve Kent’s The First Quarter, Game Over by David Sheff, Smartbomb, Masters of Doom by David Kushner — all these books are trying to retell this history.

KO: Overall , do you think they doing a good job so far?

DT: I think there’s room for more …

KO: In quality or quantity?

DT: Both. The Nintendo book is getting pretty dated at this point. There was a Japanese book called “Revolutionaries at Sony” about the making of PlayStation, but there haven’t been books out of Japan about the latest at Sony.

I’d like to see a lot more journalistic approach to covering the industry. There’s enthusiast press and then there’s the mainstream press that stands back a little bit more and tries to be objective and investgates and doesn’t necessarily just regurgitate everything the companies are saying. I think the enthiusiast press has its place. They’re very good at knowing the games — playing the games all the way through and reviewing them and being able to tell when they’re being snowed by a company about the quality of a game. But the business of the industry is something that business or technology reporters should be good at — looking into and finding stories and investigative projects.

KO: Do you think there’s something endemic to the enthusiast press that makes it too close to give that wide berth the mainstream press gives, or can they improve?

DT: I think that’s the danger for any journalist, to get to close to the subject. You want to step back a little and understand all the different points of view beyond the one that you’re immersed in. That’s even true for someone like me who ’s a beat reporter who covers games and covers chips every week. I often have to step back and look at it the way that a reporter from Time magazine would that doesn’t cover every single development in the industry. Any one of these people, if they’re good enough at what they do, can find a great story to tell and tell it in a way that lots of readers would want to read.

KO: Any enthusiast outlets or journalists that you feel do a particularly good job at this?

DT: I’ve been stunned at the explosion of how many sites are out there, how many blogs and magazines are out — it’s just too much to keep up with. If I have some favorites it’s only because they’re bookmarked. Gametab is a nice place to soak everything in, Gamespot, Gamespy, GamePro, 1up — a lot of the big sites. I look at things like Rahul Sood’s blog at Voodoo PC. It’s good to have a variety. The more sources of media you get the better. Gossip sites too, like Spong, to find out what the rumors of the day are, or Kotaku, right?

KO: You also mention in the book’s introduction that you haven’t had as much time to play games while you were writing this book. You called it “the curse of being a writer who loves games.” Was it worth it?

DT: Yeah…

KO: You sound kind of resigned there…

DT: I’m tired, y’know? I’ve been working pretty hard. I’m glad that it all came together. Even as recently as two weeks ago I was still finishing up pieces. Since it’s an e-book they can turn it around so fast — that was the only way it was going to get done in this really compressed time period. I did work on collecting the information for maybe four years since my last book came out, but I didn’t get a publisher until August, and I didn’t get the first interview with Microsoft until December. Since that time I wrote bout 400 pages so it’s been busy. Yeah, I miss the games. I finally got around to playing Ghost Recon Advanced Warfare a few nights ago. It’s pretty fun.

KO: It’s going to be an e-book and published book, right?

DT: Yeah, a paperback available at spiderworks.com.

KO: Will it be available in stores as well?

DT: That depends on how well it does. It’s available on amazon.com as well. If it does well enough at this launch then they can get it into store .. I don’t know a date when that can happen yet.

KO: What do you expect the split to be between e-book and paperback sales?

DT: I would expect it would probably be more paperback sales. The people that are really anxious to read it are going to read it as an e-book — some people might not want to wait a week.

KO: The book deals quite a bit with the branding of the Xbox, whether or not Microsoft and the Xbox 360 are considered “cool.” Where do you think that stands now going into E3?

DT: I think they have done a pretty good job in a couple of the regions and they’ve done a lousy job in Japan. In Japan the problem was not waiting for the great games to be finished before the launch. Once you launch and do poorly you’re no longer cool. It’s a huge uphill battle to fight to re-establish the brand. That might come with great games but it’s kind of iffy.

KO: How much of their Japanese problem has to do with the fact that it’s an American company and Japan is rather insular society?

DT: Well I’m told the iPod has done very well there so I think if you have the right product then you can get past that problem.

KO: So the implication for the Xbox 360 is…

DT: I think they actually do have the right product. They designed it as well as they could, but they just have a very tough nut to crack with Sony having 80 percent of the market there. They also have the problem of the games. If they had a blockbuster lineup going in to Japan that would make a big difference.

KO: The book also deals a bit with the treatment of games as an artistic medium. Do you think games are capable of producing art?

DT: Yes, and I would agree with people like Stan Lee that if William Shakespeare were alive today and he could look around at what he could do, he would strongly consider making games because they combine so many different art forms — music, cinematic film-making, graphics, beautiful art. It’s hard to argue that they’re not an art form.

KO: How important is the realism of the graphics in this debate?

DT: Toward the end of the book I get into the debate about the trend line on creativity and how that’s not in sync with the trend line in better graphics. This year at E3 we’re going to see it all play out between Nintendo’s choices and the Sony and Microsoft guyus that are goig for the better graphics.

KO: Any predictions on that front?

DT: Everybody has a good argument. MS and Sony say these things aren’t mutually exclusive and that the better technolgoy will lead to more creative things that you’ve never seen before in games. Nintendo also has good arguments about keeping the price of the console low so people can afford it, and giving them an option that doesn’t require them to buy a $2000 TV set, sort of putting their foot down and saying we’re not going to go crazy on graphics. Emphasizing this different kind of controller in the biggest possible kind of gamble they can make.

KO: How important would you say Halo 3 is to the success of the Xbox 360?

DT: There’s a lot of pressure on it because it’s the only piece of IP that’s a guarateed Microsoft blockbuster. They have to use it as the silver bullet in the gun. They have to launch it at just the right time and not rush it. It’s critical to them. I don’t think it has to come out at the same time as the Halo movie, but I think they’re gonna launch it when it stands out as something above all the Halo-killers.

KO: Was there anything you learned in reporting for the book that you weren’t allowed to use?

DT: Nothing that I wasn’t allowed to use. There were things I couldn’t verify, there were people I didn’t reach because I didn’t have time to do it or ran into roadblocks in getting to them. The difference between this book and the last one is that I could talk to a fewer number of people last time and be confident I had gotten 95% of the story. This time I feel I was talking to a very small statistical sample of the people involved. There were hundreds or thousands of people involved — it’s much bigger, more corporate. I had to settle for talking to as many people as I could — I did talk to over 100 people for it.

Even with 30 or so interviews with Microsoft people, it’s not enough. There were large numbers of developers and publishers I didn’t reach. I think what I tried to create in the book was this sense of being an insider. So you could look at the public events that are transpiring and always get some point of view that was from the inside. That’s what I worked for — I worked to get to enough people to present a picture to the reader of what’s happening on the inside.

KO: Most of the book is straight reporting, but in the end you start to give a little analysis of Microsoft’s situation. Was it hard to keep your opinions from coloring your writing for most of the book?

DT: My publisher was pretty good about advising me to keep a single voice in the book. I had really not set myself up as being the very opinionated gaming expert. I had really set this up as being the objective journalist trying to see what’s going on. For most of the book I stay in that cloister.

I did receive criticism last time around that you still have to conclude your book, you still have to tell people at the end what it all means. To the best of my ability express my opinion at that point about what it’s going to take for whoever it is to win the console war, what’s the future direction of games and where they should go and what Microsoft has to do in order to do better.

KO: Is it hard to put events in historical context so soon after they happened?

DT: Yeah, it is. The bigger problem with that is just getting to the right people in a timely manner. The nice thing is, through a lot of the events as they were happening, I knew I was writing a book. I went to Amsterdam, I approached it not just as a newspaper journalist but as a book writer who’s going to save these notes and make use of them later. The easiest time to try to collect all the relevant information is as it’s happening. It’s much harder to go back after a few years and try to extract it from the memories of people who have by now forgotten what happened.

My great wish is to be a fly on the wall and just watch these meetings happen. Microsoft and its concerns about its own trade secrets prevents that from happening.

KO: Did you ever worry about making a source mad and losing access?

DT: I think Microsoft understands what I do and who I’m working for. In that sense they approach it in a practical way. They know that if they severely restrict who I can talk to, I just might talk to other people to get the same story. They have to balance that with other issues like having enough time to devote the PR resources and the executives’ time to deal with someone like me.

KO: What was the coolest interview you got to conduct, or the coolest event you got to attend?

DT: I had the most fun in Amsterdam — it’s pretty easy to have fun there. It was a place where people were very chatty. It’s also the place where I caught up with Peter Moore and asked him if he would green light the access for the book. He said “Send me an e-mail” and he approved it. Up to that point I had been getting “No” as an answer.

KO: Who would you say is the most interesting character you talked to for this book?

DT: The first time around clearly it was Seamus Blackley. This time around it was Ed Fries. Ed had the very difficult balancing act of trying to balance art and business. He had to make sure that the Halo 2 people had enough time to finish their game. At the same time he was getting a lot of pressure from everyone else that they needed to finish their game in order for Microsoft to synchronize all the schedules it needed to synchronize in order to get the 360 out and get it out with good games coming in real fast That tension that always exists in the art business, it really came to a head in the things that Ed had to deal with.

KO: One final question: Can we expect a book on the Xbox 720?

DT: My only commitment is to try to go out and find good stories as a journalist for a newspaper. If at some point they turn into a book that’s great.