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Microsoft Considered Giving Away The Original Xbox For Free
It takes a lot of time and money to develop a video game system. So much money that console manufacturers often lose cash on the system's early sales. Which makes it all the more crazy that Microsoft even considered giving away the original Xbox before it released in late 2001.
A recent article on GamesIndustry.biz explores the early days of Xbox's development.
"At the time, Xbox thought that the core market was going to be casual. They were going to be the casual gamers' machine," Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning told GamesIndustry.biz. "Now, that's why they approached us because they said 'we think you've got something that competes in that Mario space and we think Mario's the thing to kill...We see that space. We want that audience. We love Oddworld so why don't you get on this bandwagon? And we might give the box away.'"
"In the early days of Xbox, especially before we had figured out how to get greenlit for the project as a pure game console, everybody and their brother who saw the new project starting tried to come in and say it should be free, say it should be forced to run Windows after some period of time," added Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley.
[Source: GamesIndustry.biz]
Our Take
It's crazy to think about what our industry would look like if some of these ideas had actually panned out. If you have time go read that GamesIndustry.biz article. It details a bunch of other crazy ideas that were
floated around Microsoft at the time, including the proposal that Microsoft should
outright buy Nintendo. The article is a short, but interesting read.
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