Kevin Bachus, former director of third-party relations at Microsoft, has revealed that the company’s gaming arm attempted to buy Electronic Arts and Nintendo 20 years ago in order to secure exclusive games. While EA simply said, “no thanks,” Nintendo officials “laughed their asses off” at the suggestion.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Bachus revealed that approaching Nintendo was former CEO Steve Ballmer’s idea. “Steve made us go meet with Nintendo to see if they would consider being acquired,” he said. “They just laughed their asses off. Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went.”
Former head of business development, Bob McBreen, further revealed that Microsoft then tried to partner with Nintendo but that didn’t work out either. The idea was for Microsoft to produce hardware for Nintendo, and for Nintendo to focus on making video games.
“We actually had Nintendo in our building in January 2000 to work through the details of a joint venture where we gave them all the technical specs of the Xbox,” McBreen explained. “The pitch was their hardware stunk, and compared to Sony PlayStation, it did. So the idea was, ‘Listen, you’re much better at the game portions of it with Mario and all that stuff. Why don’t you let us take care of the hardware?’ But it didn’t work out.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Bachus revealed that Sony’s message that PlayStation 2 will “redefine the computer world” got Microsoft’s attention at a time when the company was considering delving into the home console business.
The full article makes for an interesting read so make sure to check it out.
