After being one of the most instrumental executives atXboxfor the last 20 years, the company’s Head of Research and Design, Chris Novak is moving on to greener pastures. Novak started on theXboxteam as a Design Director back in November of 2002.
There’s been a bit of strife at Microsoft and with the Xbox team in the last few months as the teams are getting ready to reshape themselves a bit once theacquisition of Activision Blizzardwas official and had been approved by the US government. Of course, there is no indication the impending acquisition has anything to do with Novak deciding to move on, but there will likely be other changes among the teams in both companies in the near future.
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In a message Novak posted on LinkedIn, he confirmed that he’d moved on from the Xbox team but did indeed make it clear he wasn’t doing so out of any sort of anger at his longtime company. In fact, he said that he’d loved his time with the firm. He added that over the years he’s taken great joy in working with and listening to the gaming community, but now it was time for rest and reflection about the next steps.
Novak, who wasinstrumental in the Xbox Store design refreshback in 2020, also made mention of the fact that he’d meant to step away from Microsoft quite a while ago after something happened in his personal life. Now he was going to make good on those intentions. “I’m going to spend some time doing a life and design tour everywhere I can,” he added.
Novak has his fingerprints on several departments at Microsoft thanks in large part to his long tenure with the company. At one point he was a member of the first team that was working on Xbox’s virtual reality approach, longbefore HoloLens seemingly changed up its focusand direction. But he didn’t just work in departments that were more about the hardware than the software. Novak also had a hand in some of the earliest game offerings on the Xbox One.
While working as a first-party design representative for Xbox he saw a couple of the biggest games for that platform come to be. He was said to be instrumental in helping to ship games likeSunset OverdriveandRyse: Son of Rome. While Novak might be moving out of the center of the video game world at the moment, it’s unclear just what he has planned for his career post-Xbox, or when he might be announcing the eventual next step in his career.
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