Author Dean Takahashi’s book, [Xbox 360 Uncloaked|http://www.spiderworks.com/xbox360], is an in-depth study of people and stories behind creating this next-generation gaming console the Microsoft’s Xbox 360.
In doing the research on this book Dean talked to a lot of people at Microsoft and in our discussion we cover gaming consoles, what it is like to work for Microsoft and some general talk about being a journalist.
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! Dean Takahashi
[dean_takahashi_300w.jpg| Our Guest,
Dean Takahashi, is a staff writer at the San Jose Mercury News, where
he writes about video games, semiconductors, and other technology
stories. He has been a journalist for 18 years, most of that time
covering technology news. He previously worked at the Red Herring
Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the San Jose Mercury News, the Los
Angeles Times Orange County Edition, the Orange County Register, and
the Dallas Times Herald.]
He’s an avid game player and lives in the San Jose Area with his wife
and three kids. Dean is originally from Sacramento. He got a bachelors
degree in English at UC Berkeley and a master’s in journalism at
Northwestern University. He published Opening the Xbox, a book about
the making of Microsoft’s first video game console, in 2002. And He
has written The Xbox 360 Uncloaked, a sequel that covers the making of
the Xbox 360.
Dean wrote his original Xbox book over 18 months, from August 2000 to March
2002. He formally started work on The Xbox Uncloaked in August, 2005, but
drew from more than four years worth of notes, gathered while covering the
video game industry, picking up from where his first book left off.
The book is an independent journalistic enterprise. Microsoft isn’t paying
Dean or pre-approving the book. They granted Dean access to top executives
and key players, but he supplemented the reporting with his own
investigations, using a wide array of sources and years of experience
covering games, business and technology.
Dean’s premier episode of GeekSpeak was August 8th 2002, in which we discussed his first book, Opening the Xbox.
