The 25th AIAS ceremony, which honors video games in all its forms, will be held this year in Las Vegas, at the Mandalay Bay Resort complex. This will be broadcast from 8 p.m. Pacific time – 5 a.m. in France – on the IGN site. And as it is about “big family” in the cinema as in the video game, it is indeed Todd Howard, the boss of Bethesda – owned by Microsoft after a first unexpected takeover – which will give the Lifetime Achievement Award to its N+1.
Considered the architect of Xbox’s revival, both commercially with the deployment of Game Pass, and in terms of ambitions first party With a binge for studios, Spencer is one of the industry’s elite. As a reminder, it is Ed Boon who will be inducted into the hall of fame this year, a hall of fame of prestige where there are game designers renowned like Hideo Kojima, Shigeru Miyamoto or Will Wright, and leaders who have contributed to the rise of video games, like Bonnie Ross or Gabe Newell.
At the head of Xbox since 2014, Spencer has risen through the ranks of the division gaming to become one of the leaders of the industry, to the point of convincing Satya Nadella to commit 69 billion dollars for the resounding takeover of Activision Blizzard King last January.
Born in California to a chemical engineer father and a teacher mother, Phil Spencer, already a fan of games and programming, moved to Washington State as a teenager. His career at Microsoft, however, did not begin in games proper: after landing an internship in 1988 as a gateway, Spencer was a programmer, then manager, on CD-ROM encyclopedias and music software. It is even found among the staff of the educational game Microsoft Dogs.
As part of the documentary Power On compiled for the 20th anniversary of the Xbox, Spencer then stood out from the hard core of the Xbox team in 2001, when he was offered to lead Studio X, the entity in charge discussions with third-party developers such as Peter Molyneux and Brian Reynolds. ““I loved the process of creating games and, probably just as much, I loved seeing how different teams could create amazing games in their own way.“, he says about this period.
Asked by Axios for a first look back at his career, at the age of 54, Spencer believes he has done everything “to have a positive impact on the people I watch who are more capable than me, more engaged than me“, in times of success as in the most difficult times. “They needed someone who could rally the troops around a common passion for gaming, and sell the idea internally within Microsoft.“, also comments Reggie Fils-Aime, former president of Nintendo of America. “And that’s exactly what he did.”
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