The creator of the original Xbox, Seamus Blackley, made a colorful analogy before the console came out in 2001. He compared playing games to touching yourself. This went over about as well as you’d expect with his bosses at Microsoft. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were apparently on the brink of giving Blackley the boot.
Twitter worked itself into a tizzy after a seemingly random quote by journalist Dina Bass attracted a certain amount of attention. “Gaming is like masturbation,” she said. “Everybody does it. Nobody wants to talk about it.” Bass quickly pointed out that she was “quoting something Seamus Blackley said to me in the fall of 2001 a few weeks ahead of the original Xbox launch.” The journalist explained that “gaming is now mainstream where it was a bit more hidden back then.”
When he noticed the conversation taking place, Blackley jumped right in with a couple of interesting reflections. “This quote nearly got me fired from Microsoft," he noted. Blackley went on to say that "some conservative spouses of executives read it and… I was summoned to building 4 shall we say."
Blackley has been quoted about the analogy before. Thanking fans of the original Xbox in 2019 prompted Bass to ask “what about those of us who got to interview you as you expounded on your theory of how gaming is like masturbation?" Blackley replied that “it was an argument for multiplayer gaming online which Xbox was a pioneer in.” He added that “Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates were very upset at me about those comments.”
Blackley wasn’t fired after all. He actually helped the company turn the Xbox into such a success that Microsoft could buy Activision Blizzard for almost $70 billion. Sometimes a bad joke is best overlooked.