Elain Brown Culture 06.20.2022 01:Jun AM EDT

Xbox Wins a Daytime Emmy for Its 'Power On' Documentary

Xbox's 20th anniversary documentary, "Power On: The Story of Xbox," received another award, the Daytime Emmys.

The documentary follows a small team of rookies as they attempt to persuade Microsoft that it is high time for the company to enter the game console market. The documentary provided many behind-the-scenes looks into the history of Xbox that had never been seen before, as well as details on how Xbox almost did not come into being.

At the time, Microsoft was fighting to become the dominant player in the living room; however, this endeavor was not without risk or significant expense.

Everyone will be transported to the rough origins of Microsoft's video game system throughout the course of the six-part series. This is the untold narrative of the folks behind the box, along with all of the bugs and problems.

Xbox's Daytime Emmys

Xbox's six-part series documentary, "Power On: The Story of Xbox", has now made the team behind it an award-winning team after recently winning a Daytime Emmy.

According to VGC, the series was the recipient of the award for Outstanding Single-Camera Editing. It made its debut on YouTube in the previous year and contained interviews with all of the important personalities from throughout the history of the platform.

The program included a huge quantity of historic film, some of which came from the Microsoft vault and had never been seen publicly until this initiative.

As reported by Eurogamer, the idea for the series as told by head of programming for Xbox, Tina Summerford, started from asking the question, "Is there a compelling story behind the history of Xbox?"

The Xbox head answered, "The answer, it turns out, was yes, absolutely. So we partnered with an Emmy award-winning documentary film team to really dig in and help bring the story to life.

Summerfold added, "At its core, it's a story about how Xbox started as a passion project from a small group of gamers within Microsoft and grew to become a source of joy for Xbox players around the world."

'Power On: The Story of Xbox'

This Xbox documentary series touched base on the rich history of Microsoft birthing Xbox into reality with the DirectX team who are behind the gaming console. Microsoft's gaming console was first named the DirectX Xbox and was later changed to Xbox.

"Power On" highlighted the small team of Xbox, in Microsoft, Otto Berkes, Ted Hase, Seamus Blackley, Kevin Bachus, Nat Brown, and later on, many more. The original small group of people were regular workers at Microsoft, working on technology to help developers create games for Windows.

The DirectX team had an idea of creating a gaming console that would rival the dominance of Sony's PlayStation. The documentary shows how the Xbox almost did not come into fruition. Microsoft during the 90s was, and still is, a behemoth in the industry. The corporate structure was vast and wide, and the team struggled to pitch the idea to the right members of the company.

It was seen as an absurd idea to invest a huge portion of money from Microsoft to create the gaming console. There were doubts and pressure on getting the hardware to be successful. The documentary also unearthed the interview Bill Gates had with Larry King on CNN in which he denied making hardware.

Gates also Stated that "if you want to be a great software company you have to only be a software company"

However, after multiple meetings and pitches, Bill Gates agreed and favored the team DirectX to create what is now known as Xbox.

The documentary can be viewed for free on a variety of platforms, including but not limited to IMDbTV, Microsoft, YouTube, Redbox, and The Roku Channel, Redbox.