Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: bill gates, entertainment, games, microsoft, video games, xbox, xbox one

Bill Gates Tore The Original Xbox Pitch Apart

Microsoft as a company has always had a weird relationship with the Xbox brand. They are inseparable, but murmurs of division within the company about the games console have never been too distant.

It turns out that the original pitching meeting for the console was somewhat of a disaster too. In an interview withIGN (via NeoGAF), one of the console's founding members, Ed Fries explained how the now infamous meeting with Bill Gates quickly went south.

So, we go into the meeting and four o'clock Valentine's Day–Bill walks in he's holding a Powerpoint deck and yells, 'This is the blanking insult to everything I've done at this company' and that was the start, so we all looked at [Xbox director and designer J Allard] because we knew Bill's mad about the no Windows thing, because we forgot to 'pre-disaster' him, so J is in shock for a minute and Bill yells at me and shuts me down and Robbie steps up and Bill shuts him down anyway, and then [Steve] Ballmer goes through and says we're gonna lose a lot of money and he's beating us up about that, hours go by its five o clock, its six o clock.

However, what eventually won the debate as has been long noticed was the question of Sony. Microsoft really didn't want to let the tech company run living rooms completely, so decided that the Xbox would be made to compete.

It really is insane, after everything it has been through, and the lucky breaks it has got, that the Xbox ended up actually being a strong contender. The rest, as they say, has been history, and I think the world is better with the Xbox in it.

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