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This year’s Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle opened last week with a keynote presentation by Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, which focused on five video games that had influenced him and his career. The gaming industry veteran also shed light on some behind-the-scenes details on decisions he made that could’ve changed the course of video game history.

The presentation was anchored by Andrea Rene, a producer, podcaster, and on-camera host who’s known Spencer for over a decade. The theme of the presentation was “The Games That Shaped My Journey”: several video games that had had a major impact on Spencer, professionally and/or personally.

“[Gaming]’s been part of my life since I was a young kid,” Spencer said. “As a kid who wasn’t a jock at school, who was kind of an introvert, I found my own space in the worlds of video games. Then, as the community grew, as I found other people who played through school, it has been a formative part of my life.”

Spencer’s list consisted of 1982’s Robotron 2084, 1983’s One-on-One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird, 1997’s Ultima Online, 2006’s Gears of War, and 2014’s Destiny.

That carried the conversation through Spencer’s early years, when he was a regular at his local arcades in southern California, to his time working under Ed Fries at Microsoft, to his current position as the head of the Xbox division.

Spencer describes Robotron 2084 as “the greatest game of all time,” and “the beginning of my love for what games could be.” When he was a college student at the University of Washington, Spencer would frequently spend his nights at a 7-11 near campus playing its Robotron machine. In a real sense, the ’80s arcade scene was Spencer’s first experience with a community built around video games.

“When I think about where video games started for me, it was going into arcades, playing games, talking to the players there, and the anticipation of what new cabinet was going to come in,” Spencer said.

At home, Spencer regularly played the Commodore 64 basketball game One-on-One, picking Julius Erving to go up against his father’s Larry Bird. While Spencer himself wasn’t much of an NBA fan or basketball player at the time, it was his first time seeing a person from the real world reflected in a video game, as well as his first experience with gaming with a family member.

“It showed me that games weren’t just about my friends, but also something that we could do as a family,” Spencer said. “I do think watching children make choices in video games is a great learning experience. …It’s a safe way for kids to see what choices mean. My daughters are much older now, but we still play Sea of Thieves together.”

Spencer also played Dungeons & Dragons, which led him to the D&D-influenced PC RPGs of the ‘80s and ‘90s. That, in turn, got him to check out the beta test for Richard Garriott’s groundbreaking MMORPG Ultima Online in 1997, which was Spencer’s first exposure to the concept of massively multiplayer online games.

That led Spencer to participate in a different sort of community than his arcade days. While he never joined a guild or made any real-world connections with his fellow Ultima Online players, the knowledge that other players existed in the game’s world, and could change it, had a significant impact on Spencer.

A few years later, Spencer was on a team at Microsoft working on the Xbox 360 video game console. Around 2002, he first heard of a game that was under development at Epic under the codename “Warfare.” That project eventually became Gears of War, a “killer app” for the 360 that started one of the Xbox’s tentpole franchises.

“Gears is actually the first game that my team signed,” Spencer said. “I had inherited a lot of games coming in, like Fable, that I was in charge of seeing through, but Gears was really the first big decision.”

It wasn’t an easy call, however. Gears of War had a high budget for a video game production at that point in time, so signing it was seen as a significant risk. However, Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 software was rapidly gaining popularity with game developers, which made it crucial that games made with Unreal were seen to be successful on the Xbox platform.

That led to Microsoft collaborating directly with Epic on the 2005 Xbox exclusive Unreal Championship 2, which Spencer considered a stepping stone along the way to getting Gears of War.

“The thing is, when we actually got to the point of signing Gears, I remember going into Ed [Fries’] office,” Spencer said. “There were two games that we could sign, and I couldn’t afford to sign both of them. Ed just turned to me and said I should make a call.”

Spencer ended up going with Gears of War, due to its focus on cooperative play and the “passion” of its lead designer, Cliff Bleszinski. Due to its high-end graphics and its status as a system exclusive for the Xbox 360, that led Spencer to argue in favor of redesigning the console.

“This was actually a game that drove our memory decision for 360,” Spencer said. “The choice was going to be to have a smaller RAM footprint. We all got together – J. Allard, Ed, Peter [Moore], all of us in a room – and we brought in Gears to show what we could do with the extra RAM we could put in the 360.”

Spencer continued: “The cost was really significant. The bet was that you’re going to go sell tens of millions of these things, and every incremental dollar that this extra RAM [cost] better pay off. I think it did.”

Gears of War led to an ongoing collaboration between Microsoft and Epic that created three more games in the series. Subsequently, Microsoft bought the rights to Gears from Epic, which was moving its focus to the project that would become Fortnite, and turned Gears over to the studio that would become known as the Coalition.

The discussion of his history with Gears led into a story about another opportunity that Spencer had had. This time, however, he’d passed it up, and in the process, potentially changed the history of the American games industry.

Bungie, headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., had been acquired by Microsoft in 2001 before the launch of the original Xbox. It subsequently redefined the first-person shooter with Halo: Combat Evolved, and the Halo series became the cornerstone of the Xbox console.

After producing four games in the Halo series, Bungie subsequently bought itself back from Microsoft and became independent in 2010. A few years later, it went looking for a publishing partner for the launch of the original Destiny.

“There’s just so many mixed emotions for me around Destiny,” Spencer said. “Obviously, Bungie was part of Microsoft when I started at Xbox. I shared a floor with Alex Seropian and Jason Jones in the building we were in in Redmond. I learned a ton from just being around Bungie, about how to build games.”

The pitch for Destiny did come across Spencer’s desk, but he passed on it, noting that the combat in Destiny didn’t click with him right away. Bungie would subsequently partner with Activision to release Destiny in 2014, before moving to self-publishing the series in 2019.

Along a similar vein, Spencer got an early pitch from the Boston-based studio Harmonix, but rejected it, citing cynicism in the idea of a game that required special controllers. Harmonix would go on to create the popular cross-platform Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises.

Either of those series being Xbox exclusives could’ve been potentially seismic for the 7th generation of gaming consoles. Guitar Hero was a legitimate sensation despite requiring its own specialized controller, and its first installment in 2005 was a PlayStation 2 exclusive. Destiny and its sequel were both famously platform-agnostic, to the point where both games initially had exclusive content based upon what the user was playing them on.

While Xbox currently doesn’t subscribe to the system-exclusives model that’s defined the console market up to this date, it’s possible that exclusive versions of Destiny and Guitar Hero/Rock Band might’ve changed that. It might also have limited either franchise’s overall success. Either way, it could’ve changed the direction of the Xbox project over the course of the last decade.

At the close of the presentation, Rene asked Spencer to comment on his hopes for the next generation of video games.

“When I started playing video games like Robotron, I had no idea there was an industry I could work in. Now it’s an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people and has huge conventions like PAX. You can actually build a livelihood,” Spencer said.

He continued: “As kids, you start to ask, ‘What does it take? What do I need to do?’ I get asked that all the time. The cool thing is now you can be a writer. You can be an artist, you can be a programmer … there are so many things to do. Games today are true forms of art with so many different disciplines that come together to make something special.”