Disclaimer: The organizers of Power of Play paid my way to Seattle, where I moderated a talk. Our coverage remains objective.
In ilovebees, 42 Entertainment made 50,000 pay phones ring at once. Players recorded the calls and put together an hours-long broadcast on the Covenant invasion in Halo 2.
Elan Lee wants to remake entertainment by blending the interactivity of games and the passive viewing experience of TV. And he’ll get that chance by creating new interactive shows on Microsoft’s Xbox Live online entertainment platform on the Xbox One video game console.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.