Exactly 20 years ago Microsoft announced to CES its intentions to enter the gaming and consoles with the project Xbox . To celebrate the anniversary Bloomberg has reconstructed that period by interviewing the managers of the plans on Xbox and, among the many information that emerged, the most interesting ones concern Redmond’s attempts to acquire Nintendo , unsuccessful.

Laughter like crazy from Nintendo to Microsoft

Kevin Bachus , who was in charge of third party relations at the time, admitted that Microsoft met with Nintendo executives before launching the original Xbox. However, the Japanese did not even for a moment take Microsoft’s proposal seriously . Here are the words used by Bachus: “Steve he asked us to meet with Nintendo to see if they would consider taking over. They just laughed out loud. For an hour they kept mocking us “.

A classic reaction Japanese to a decidedly infeasible proposal. At that time Nintendo, along with Sony, was the undisputed queen of the console market, while Microsoft had no experience in the sector. Before the launch of Xbox, in other words, no one would have bet that the Xbox project could last for twenty years, as it did then. What Ballmer meant was anything but plausible .

Ballmer proposed a joint venture, in which Microsoft would take care of the hardware and Nintendo of the games At that time Nintendo was refining the development of GameCube , which later turned out to be one of the least commercially successful consoles for the Kyoto house (albeit much loved by enthusiasts). tendo had difficulties especially with optical media and leaned towards a proprietary solution that was unable to read DVDs , which would soon be very well received by the market. Furthermore, the miniDVD owners of Nintendo could only store 1, 46 GB of data, much less than a normal DVD.

Bloomberg also wanted to hear from Nintendo and reached out to the president of the American division Howard Lincoln , who responded in a much more diplomatic way. “Nintendo does not publish confidential discussions with other companies. In any case, nothing came of these discussions” Lincoln said, indirectly confirming information from the ex-Microsoft.

In reality, the Redmond house actually came into possession of a very important resource for Nintendo, the British software house Rare . The latter, until that moment, had edited very important exclusive series for the Nintendo world such as Conkers Bad Fur Day, Banjo-Kazooie and Perfect Dark , then all switch to Xbox. After 20 years, Microsoft and Nintendo continue to be rivals in the console world.