At the milestone of Microsoft’s Xbox game console celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, Bloomberg interviewed about 20 people involved in the launch of the first Xbox. In it, it is revealed that the story of the acquisition of Nintendo, which had been rumored for a long time, was true, and although he actually approached the story, it ended with being laughed at for an hour.
Bob McBreen, then head of Xbox business, confessed that the first game company he tried to buy was EA. He confessed that he had a meeting with Nintendo after being refused “No Thank You”.
In addition, third-party director Kevin Bacchus revealed that the meeting was made possible by the arrangement of Steve Ballmer (former CEO of MS). He recalled the meeting, saying, “They (Nintendo executives) were laughing loudly.” “Imagine an hour when someone laughs. It was a meeting like that.” Looking back on the experience.
However, the story did not end there, and in January 2000, Nintendo officials were invited to the MS building, and after teaching all the specifications of the first Xbox, they were asked to consider the details of the joint venture.
So McBreen said that Nintendo’s hardware was the worst compared to Sony’s PlayStation, so “Okay, you guys are much better at games such as Mario. Can you leave the hardware to us?” I saw it, but it didn’t work. 2001 was the year GameCube was released (September in Japan), and it seems that the timing was the worst.
After farewell to Nintendo, MS also offered to buy Square (now Square Enix), but the deal was too low to negotiate. And although Midway Games such as “Mortal Kombat” wanted to acquire it seriously, the story was not settled, and in the end it is said that Bungie, who developed the first “Halo”, received the proposal of MS. However, Bungie became independent of MS in 2007.
Since then, MS has frequently acquired leading game companies, and recently the parent company of Bethesda Softworks.I had successfully acquired ZeniMax..OtherThere was also a rumor that a Japanese game company was also consulting for an acquisition... Negotiations may have been smoother because of the bitter experience that Nintendo laughed at in making such acquisition proposals.
Source:Bloomberg
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