Xbox creator becomes first console designer to bake bread using wild yeast illicitly collected from Microsoft campus
A game designer, producer, and director who had a hand in developing games like System Shock, Terra Nova, and Flight Unlimited, Seamus Blackley is best known as the "father of the Xbox" after proposing and spearheading the creation and design of the Microsoft console's first iteration. Blackley left Microsoft in 2002, but he was recently invited back to Microsoft HQ for a visit by Xbox's new CEO, Asha Sharma.
In a recent series of posts on Bluesky describing the "amazing—and yet very bizarre—experience of going to Xbox HQ as a visitor," Blackley shared the most important thing he did during his return to the Microsoft fiefdom: Gathering some wild yeast. You know, for bread.
"Amidst the cognitive dissonance of huge buildings and thousands of employees existing as a result of what in my memory is still just a bad slide deck written on a red-eye flight, I decided to ground myself before the meeting by, of course, COLLECTING WILD YEAST on the Microsoft campus," Blackley wrote. "As one does."
While history will doubtless remember Blackley for irrevocably altering the course of the games industry and its technology, his online presence in recent years has featured a different craft: Ancient breadmaking techniques. His exploits have ranged from lengthy demonstrations on collecting and cultivating wild yeast to recreating an ancient Egyptian bread recipe using yeast extracted from 4,500 year old pottery.
His visit to the Microsoft campus, therefore, presented an opportunity to create another unique loaf. Despite his fears that security might object to, as he described it, "this strange man rooting about in the landscaping pulling jars of shit out of his bag," he was able to leave open containers of gloop on the premises for the duration of his Xbox appointment.
"The deal with collecting wild sourdough microbes is that you put a container of sterilized food (flour) out, and leave it to get contaminated wherever you think interesting microflora might be lurking," Blackley explained. "I mean, microflora? It has to be interesting. Right? Anyway nobody stole it so I took it home."
An indictment of Microsoft security's rigor, perhaps, but a success for traditional breadmaking everywhere.
After passing through airport security unquestioned while in possession of a biologically active mystery paste—raising yet more questions about security standards—Blackley returned home with his Microsoft yeast, where after a week of "thrilling" cultivation he produced a 100% whole wheat, artisanal, Xbox-campus-to-table sourdough loaf.
Yes, it looks like the Xbox logo. You score sourdough loaves to enable a consistent, controlled rise, and if you score a cross it looks like an X. That's the joke.
We can only guess what Blackley's conversation with Xbox's new CEO consisted of, but he said Sharma is "very cool it turns out"—a markedly more positive assessment than the one he shared in February, where he predicted she'd serve as "a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night."
Earlier today, Sharma announced that Xbox would be ending console development of Copilot while simultaneously welcoming four executives from Microsoft's CoreAI product division into key Xbox leadership roles. So, you know. Jury's still out.
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