I work in video games, for one of the largest publishers in the business - I can vouch for the Xbox part of that. If you have a game out there with a critical bug that makes it crash or interrupt gameplay for hundreds of thousands of players, you get direct access to the Xbox team, all the way to people behind the OS. Most intense 3 days of my life, fixing something that ultimately ended up being an unannounced change in their API behaviour that maybe looked harmless on paper but caused our game to be unplayable for about 2 million players. Basically Microsoft gave us direct line to their best teams so we got the fix in as quickly as we could.
One of my college classes was taught by someone who worked in whatever that group was/is called. One of the best classes I took and definitely had some great stories to tell as well.
He didn't have a degree so in order to have a class that was accredited his co-worker(who was also fantastic) had to be the "professor of record" and they co-taught the class(since he actually had a masters and was "qualified" to teach).
Yea that doesn't surprise me. This is how they have that unbeatable marketshare lead over practically anything else when it comes to gaming. They'd probably drag bill gates out of bed at 3am if it was important enough.
