Former Xbox Chief Officer Shares More About Microsoft’s Attempt To Acquire Nintendo Many Years Ago

Earlier this month, Bloomberg published a feature about Microsoft and the Xbox, where an interesting story was shared about how Microsoft had approached Nintendo about a buyout prior to the Xbox’s creation.

During the recent Twitch roundtable with other former gaming icons, former president of the entertainment and devices division at Microsoft and Chief Xbox Officer Robbie Bach was asked whether he could share any insights into Microsoft’s attempt to acquire Nintendo.

In response, Bach shared that at the time, Microsoft was “exploring every angle” looking for partners. and Nintendo and Sega happened to be two of the bigger names they tried to approach:

“In the early days of the Xbox concept, Microsoft didn’t want to do the hard work – that just wasn’t something we knew how to do and so the idea was we were looking for partners. We talked to all the PC manufacturers, we talked to Sega and so we went and talked to Nintendo – they were the big kids on the block for sure, and by the way, they were across the street from our offices, so it wasn’t like we had to make a long trip to go see them.”

“So we had a conversation and the reaction we got was probably what we expected. You know, Microsoft didn’t have all that much to bring to the table, Nintendo was successful and has always been sort of a self-contained company – does a lot of their own content, but Bob and his team explored every angle.”

“Ultimately, we decided to go into the hardware, which was sort of the last option and I know that sounds kinda goofy, but we weren’t a hardware company and so for us to decide we wanted to manufacture hardware was a huge commitment. And we tried a lot of different ways to not do that and in the end, we had to do that ourselves.”

Bach went on further to explain that when Microsoft had exhausted their search for potential partners, it was third-party publishers such as EA and Activision who encouraged the company to design their own hardware as a third competitor against Sony and Nintendo:

“I mean ironically the number one people who were telling us we should do the hardware was actually third-party publishers. People like Electronic Arts and Activision and those guys, they wanted somebody to compete with Sony and Nintendo – so having a third person in the market place was good for them. And they didn’t want somebody to do what 3DO did which was license their hardware to other people, they wanted somebody who had skin in the game on the hardware.”

“So, you know, ‘A.’ we had potential partners who said no, and ‘B.’ we had third party publishers who said “you gotta do this yourself” so that’s what we did.”

If you would like to watch the full roundtable yourself, it is still available on Twitch here (The segment detailed above starts at around 53 minutes in).

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