Behind the Code

Nick Baker is General Manager for Xbox Architectural Design. After graduating from Imperial College London in 1990, he found his way to Apple and worked on the team that tried to create a specialized video card. He then went to 3DO where he worked on their high-end gaming system, which unfortunately failed in the market.

In 1997 he joined Microsoft to work in the WebTV team on their next generation set-top-box known as UltimateTV. It was during this time that Microsoft’s Xbox was entering its initial design phase, and because Nick and his team had already done some research at adding game-play capabilities to UltimateTV they provided some useful guidance on the first Xbox hardware design. Nick’s assistance with the initial Xbox design was seen as pivotal enough, that in 2002 he was asked to head up the team that would design the next generation hardware, which would eventually become known as the XBOX 360. It is there, that Nick Baker finds himself to this day, working hard at fine tuning the design of the system, its costs, and its performance.