Xbox creator becomes first console designer to bake bread using wild yeast illicitly collected from Microsoft campus

At least one Xbox culture is thriving.

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.

"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.

An indictment of Microsoft security's rigor, perhaps, but a success for traditional breadmaking everywhere.

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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.

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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Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept.

Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.

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