He announced yesterday that Chris Novak, Microsoft’s head of Xbox research and design, is leaving the company after nearly 20 years. The seasoned console architect is the unit’s main creative force, overseeing the creation of everything from achievements to Game Pass, a service that has upended the way many people buy and play games.
“I enjoyed my time on Xbox,” he wrote on LinkedIn yesterday. “Building an end-to-end experience for gamers is a privilege. There are few things in life that elicit this passion from people all over the world.”
Novak’s trajectory at the company was marked by the peak of the Xbox 360 days and a rebuilding phase of the company’s repositioning around subscription games. He joined Microsoft back in 2002, a year after the original Xbox, when the tech giant was still trying to gain a foothold in a market dominated by Sony and Nintendo. Super Mario Sunshine just came to the GameCube, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Dominated on PlayStation 2. The console port for the Xbox is The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and an exclusive sequel jet radio But other than the year before, no killer Halo: Combat Evolved.
Image: Microsoft
Things changed over the next few years, with Novak going through ups and downs, first as design director and later as design architect for the Xbox One, with honors beginning in 2003 Gotham Racing Project 2 by 2016 quantum break. Novak’s team pushes for expansion after learning of Xbox Live achievements Gotham Racing 2 Rewarding players for things other than driving fast, he told us polygon in an interview. This lesson in more open-ended gaming is a clear line for today’s Xbox.
In 2016, following the Xbox One’s struggles, he took over as head of Xbox research and design, overseeing the player experience for everything from Xbox Live and Game Pass to xCloud (now Xbox Cloud Gaming) and Xbox Series X/S. The culmination of this period was the ability to stream hundreds of games to your phone via touch controls for $15 a month.
“How big is the challenge when you’re trying to build the experience of an entire game on a device that’s never been designed for? That’s the challenge at hand,” Novak told polygon“As part of the xCloud work, we spent a lot of time tracking this down with the xCloud engineers and making sure all the technology allowed us to render this output to any device.”
Nowak said he is now focusing on a “reflection and rest period” after leaving Microsoft and before starting other projects.
