Joystiq

Alex St. John breaks Washington State laws by smoking onstage
Alex St. John, the creator of Microsoft's DirectX API and founder of Wild Tangent, delivered a bizarre, and borderline unbelievable, PAX keynote yesterday. With equal parts alien spaceships, hostage negotiations, enormous 10' vaginas (courtesy of GWAR), Bill Gates embarrassing promotional video career and, of course, Microsoft's Julia Child's Wine Guide CD-ROM, I'd be doing a serious disservice to Mr. St. John if I attempted to encapsulate his performance.

What a performance! The keynote began with St. John tossing out large balls (that later took on an infamy all their own), mini glow-in-the-dark frisbees, and ping pong balls before he began his sordid tale. St. John began playing with decaptitated moose heads in Alaska as a child and ended up being the creator of DirectX at Microsoft as they entered the increasingly lucrative video game space. Of course, this journey was wrought with crazy situations (see aforementioned 10' vagina) and a fair amount of trepidation on the entire software community's part (a Windows blue screen at a developer's event was met with chants of "DOS, DOS, DOS!"). Despite these difficulties, the successful launch of the DirectX-Box means that Alex St. John has left an indelible impression on the gaming industry.

Here's our question: instead of doing keynotes and running software companies, why isn't this guy writing a tell-all book to prove that gaming has its own wild, rockstar tales?

[Thanks to Philip Palermo for the classy pic]