Microsoft xbox has grown to become one of the biggest gaming brands in the entire industry, but before it could take off, it was almost killed in the crib by Bill Gates and Steve Ballmerwho were the company’s chief software architect and CEO at the time, respectively.
Former Microsoft vice president of game publishing Ed Fries spoke about the infamous and heated meeting in 2000 in which Gates and Ballmer almost canned the creation of the original console in a new interview – and also went into detail about why it was ultimately given the go-ahead.
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“It’s a little hard to think about it now if you weren’t there then, but everything we see now about the rise of, say, South Korea, and then China, and the rest of Asia, where their economies are growing very fast, that was all Japan back then,” he explained. “Japan was on track to surpass the GDP of the United States. Everyone thought that was going to happen. You know, when I went to school, you had the option of learning Japanese. You know, French, Spanish or Japanese, because that was clearly going to be one of the places of the future, right?”
“It didn’t really work out that way, but there was no bigger brand coming out of Japan than Sony at the time,” he continued. “It didn’t end up being the threat it seemed at the time, but it was still very important.”
Fries went on to point out that Japanese companies were Microsoft’s biggest competitors in the gaming sector, especially since it was Nintendo that revitalized the industry after its massive collapse in 1983 with the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
“When we were doing Xbox, all of our competitors were Japanese, right? Nintendo and Sony. All the big, major console game developers were Japanese. So it’s a little hard to look at it that way now, you know? Japan is still there, big things are still happening there, but the market is a lot more global than it was,” he said.
Ultimately, it’s pretty fascinating to learn that Microsoft wasn’t just afraid of losing a market specifically to PlayStation, it was afraid of Japan’s growing influence in gaming and technology in general. Fast forward 25 years and Xbox is in third place compared to Sony PlayStation and Nintendo… but it is competing fiercely with Xbox Game Passintegrations with PC gaming marketplace, Xbox cloud gamingand more.
💬 Does Xbox compete well against Sony and Nintendo?
Sony and Nintendo have always They have been rivals to Microsoft in gaming, but this new interview with Ed Fries sheds some light on why they feared them in the tech industry at large and ultimately decided to give Xbox the green light to compete with their gaming systems.
25 years later, I would like to know: do you think Microsoft and Xbox have done a good job against Sony PlayStation and Nintendo? Let me know in the comments and vote in our poll too.
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