total.pardo

Major Nelson emerges as face of Xbox | Technology | Reuters
By Scott Hillis

REDMOND, Washington (Reuters) - Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and sporting unkempt graying hair, Larry Hryb looks like just another guy in Microsoft’s corporate headquarters.

But Xbox 360 players know Hryb by his alter ego, “Major Nelson”, the endlessly energetic and unusually frank voice of the Xbox Live online service that serves as a sort of social networking community for hard-core video game players.

Hryb’s business card describes him, rather blandly, as “director of programming” for Xbox Live. In fact, he runs a mini-empire of Xbox-related media: blogs, podcasts, text messaging and social networking sites that potentially reach some 8 million users in what could be called Xbox Nation.

Hryb is their Walter Cronkite — someone who gamers can turn to for the straight story on all things Xbox.

“His blog gets hit up pretty substantially. He’s kind of delivering the information that gamers are usually left in the dark about, so users really enjoy that,” said Erik Brudvig, Xbox editor of gaming Web site IGN.com.

A long-time gamer and former programmer with radio broadcaster Clear Channel Communications, Hryb’s media output combines elements of TV news reports, video game fan sites, corporate press releases and customer support.

Xbox LIVE Holiday Performance - Xbox Live’s Major Nelson

the letter:

Dear Xbox LIVE Members:

During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox LIVE records. This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service.

As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox LIVE issues over the holiday break. While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance. I would like to take this moment to thank you each and every one of you for your patience and understanding as our team has worked around the clock to return the service to a stable state.

At the same time we would like to offer a token of our appreciation to all of you in celebration of record success for the service. And as a thank you for your loyalty during this holiday period, we will be offering all of our Xbox LIVE members around the world access to a full Xbox LIVE Arcade game that will be available to download free of charge. In the coming weeks we will be sharing the specific details of this offer with you.

Thank you again for helping make Xbox LIVE everything that it is today!

Sincerely,

Marc Whitten

General Manager, Xbox LIVE

Gamertag: Notwen

the real:

we screwed up, did not plan for such rapid growth, and to “compensate” all the people who wanted to play, we are going to throw some poorly selling, overpriced, POS arcade game at you to keep you from calling live support.

great - great confidence i have now in this service. $50/year for this kind of crap. and the fact that it took 13 days to even obtain an “official” response is deplorable. rantings from major nelson’s twitter page don’t count. of the four or so days i could have played, i was able to logon but had a very difficult time matchmaking. oh well, all the kiddies are back at school, all the morons have spoken. hopefully lag free gaming will begin soon.

A tropical sea turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata) valued as a source of tortoiseshell. Also called tortoiseshell.

hawksbill