The Xbox Nearly Destroyed Him - EP 87 Seamus Blackley

Core Memory · Sep 9, 2026 · 1h 23m · transcript

This episode is nerd catnip unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

Ashlee sat down with Seamus Blackley, who you might know as the man who talked Microsoft into building the Xbox. Nowadays, you can find Blackley in a Pasadena laboratory making the world’s best chocolate. If you’re just here for the cacao, well, we did a video on it.

Blackley grew up in rural New Mexico and studied electrical engineering, then physics, at Tufts University. He spent years working on titles you know and love, like Madden, and ones perhaps you don’t, like Jurassic Park: Trespasser, a flop notorious enough to earn…