"You can sell 500,000 units of anything!"

It was November 2003, and we were conducting a phone interview with James "J" Allard (gamertag: HiroProtagonist), the chief hardware architect for Xbox and current BusinessWeek cover boy--see Allard's Blue Steel photos here and here--for his stewardship of Microsoft's new Zune music player. Six months earlier, PlayStation chief Ken Kutaragi had sent shockwaves through the videogame industry with his E3 2003 announcement that Sony would enter the handheld gaming market with the PlayStation Portable. Many analysts, industry observers and journalists--including the staff here at Level Up--were predicting that PSP would be a smashing success. Not Allard.

"There's already a 'Walkman of the 21st Century," said Allard in a shot at Sony's aspirations. "It's the iPod." He went on to attack the PSP's multimedia ambitions, insisting that standalone devices were much better than multi-function ones; that a portable DVD player, an iPod and a Game Boy Advance would be far better at movies, music and games, respectively, than the Jack-of-all-trades PSP. When we politely but firmly disagreed with his analysis, he wrapped up our chat by declaring, "You can sell 500,000 units of anything!" Meaning that the PSP wouldn't sell much more than a piddling half-mil.

The following May, Microsoft hosted a small dinner at Morton's steakhouse in downtown Los Angeles for a handful of journalists attending that year's E3 trade show in Los Angeles. The Xbox side included Allard, Xbox Live marketing manager Aaron Greenberg, and PR maven David Hufford; on the media side, Game Informer editor-in-chief Andy McNamara, G4 producer Tom Russo and Business 2.0 writer and TV host Geoff Keighley were among the invitees. As the steak was consumed and the wine imbibed, the subject of Ken Kutaragi's new baby--set to be unveiled in less than 48 hrs--naturally arose once again. And within a few minutes, it was clear that our positions hadn't changed in the slightest.

So fueled by the liquid courage of Morton's finest Cabernet, we gentlemen decided on a friendly wager. The bet: whether the PSP would reach worldwide shipments of 10 million units within the same 12 month span of time it had taken the PS2, give or take 3 months. We took the pro; Allard, the con. If we were correct and the PSP hit its mark, Allard would wear a dreadlock wig for the entire month of May, including the week of E3 2006. But if Allard were right and the PSP missed our agreed-upon milestone, he would get to shave our dreads. Onstage. During the Xbox E3 2006 press conference. In front of 1,500 attendees. (Did we mention that wine was involved?)

Naturally, what happened in Los Angeles didn't stay in Los Angeles. Word spread among the folks at Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, other publishers and among a few of our fellow journalists. During a September 2004 interview with Kutaragi in his Tokyo offices, Molly Smith, then head of U.S. PR, asked us to tell her boss of our wager. We did. He chuckled. We asked him whether he thought our six-year-old dreads would be safe from the covetous Allard. He looked us dead in the eyes and said "Yes." And just ten months after the PSP's December launch in Japan, Kutaragi was proven correct, leaving our prized dreads intact.

You can imagine our surprise, then, when the month of May 2006--including E3--came and went with nary a sighting of Allard in the agreed-upon dread wig. Nevertheless, the hard-charging, mountain bike-riding, Whistler-snowboarding, hipster chic-sporting Allard has always struck us as an honorable fellow, and we have every confidence that he'll live up to the terms of his wager...eventually. (It's Man Law or something, right?) In the meantime, we congratulate the elusive Allard on his Business Week cover. And we wish him a whole lot of luck with his curiously multi-functional new gadget. Because as a wise man once told us, even though standalone devices are much better than convergent ones, you can sell 500,000 units of anything.