Today marks 25 years since the launch of the original Xbox. CEO Asha Sharma marked the occasion with a new blog post looking back at the legacy of gaming at Microsoft and teasing what the future might hold for some of the biggest challenges big-budget game development now faces. Sharma never says the words “artificial intelligence,” but it’s hard to imagine what else she could be gesturing at.

You might think Sharma’s retrospective would start with how Halo: Combat Evolved famously forced everyone to take Microsoft’s DirectX box seriously as a contender in the console gaming space, but she actually begins way earlier, back with the creation of Microsoft’s very first game. It was called Microsoft Adventure, and was released in 1979, roughly six years before Super Mario Bros.

Gordon Letwin made it, one of just 13 Microsoft employees at the time, and it was a text-based adventure for MS-DOS that looks like something you might stumble upon in an old computer terminal in Fallout. The point is that gaming, from Minesweeper to Microsoft Flight Simulator, was a part of Microsoft’s DNA long before Xbox.

Most gamers will be familiar with where the story went from there. Big console exclusives, cutting-edge tech, and the early adoption of networked gaming helped put Xbox neck-and-neck with PlayStation by the early 2010s. Sharma writes that there are 111 people still working across Xbox and its game studios who have been there for 25 years or more.

The post’s final section, titled “The Next 25,” is where things get interesting.

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