Xbox creator Seamus Blackley nearly got fired after saying gaming is like touching yourself

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were furious at these comments.

Original creator XboxSeamus Blackley, made a colorful analogy before the console came out in 2001. He compared playing games to touching yourself. This went as well as you would expect with his bosses at Microsoft. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer seem ready to give Blackley the boot.

Twitter went live on its own after a seemingly random quote from a journalist Dina Bass attracted a certain amount of attention. “Playing games is like masturbation,” she said. “Everybody does that. No one wants to talk about it.” Bass was quick to point out that she was “quoting something Seamus Blackley told me in the fall of 2001 a few weeks before the original Xbox launch.” The journalist explained that “gaming is now mainstream, where it was a bit more hidden at the time.”

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When he noticed the conversation going on, Blackley jumped right in with some interesting reflections. “This statement almost got me fired by Microsoft,” he noted.

Blackley has been cited for similarity before. Thanking fans of the original Xbox in 2019 prompted Bass to ask “what about those of us who interviewed you as you explained your theory about how gaming is like masturbation? ?” Blackley replied that “it’s an argument for the massively multiplayer online gaming Xbox is a pioneer in. ” He added that “Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates were very upset with me about those remarks.”

After all, Blackley wasn’t fired. He really helped the company turn Xbox into a success that Microsoft can buy Activision Blizzard for nearly 70 billion dollars. Sometimes a bad joke is best ignored.

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