Albert Penello, the former Xbox marketing exec who shepherded the launches of the Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One, has died of cancer at age 53.
Former Xbox colleagues Mike Ybarra and Larry Hyrb were among the first to share the news on social media, and were among many praising Penello not only for his accomplishments but his friendliness and good spirits. “He was an incredibly sweet, enthusiastic guy who loved games and loved building consoles at Xbox,” wrote IGN senior executive editor Ryan McCaffrey.
“Albert was quite simply a good dude,” wrote former Xbox One TV group program manager Ben Smith in a post on LinkedIn.
Penello began his career as a product manager at Electronic Arts in 1994, with his first credited title being the 1995 sci-fi flight simulator game Shockwave Assault. He joined Microsoft in 2000 as director of marketing, authoring major marketing plans for global platform initiatives on the Xbox, Xbox 360, and the Xbox One family of consoles.
In 2009 he also became senior director of product planning, compete, and user research at Xbox. After leaving Microsoft in 2018, he joined Amazon as a senior product management manager on Amazon Luna. In 2024 he stepped away from Amazon’s video game business and became a principal technical product marketing manager for Amazon Web Service’s automotive industry division.
While at Xbox, he became a regular spokesperson for game developers, laying out the company’s strategy for the Xbox Kinect and Xbox One X in conversations with Game Developer (then Gamasutra). “I think the developer was as much in mind in how we built this machine as the consumer was,” he said in 2017 when describing the company’s first-ever “mid-generation” console refresh. “We knew we were introducing a new concept of doing a mid-generation console leap in performance, which hadn’t been done before… we needed to figure out how to make that process really easy for developers.”
Penello is survived by his wife Dara, and his daughter Lily. Hyrb shared that friends, colleagues, and well-wishers who want to share their memories of Penello or send words of support to the family can send an email to [email protected].
