So, I was listening to a couple of podcasts featuring Seamus Blackley (one of the founders of Xbox) and he talks about how Next Generation magazine broke the story of Microsoft working on a videogame console before the company was willing to say so publicly. The podcasts in question are Podcast Unlocked and Kinda Funny Xcast and are well worth a listen, but Blackley’s anecdotes about Next Generation magazine and Tom Russo (who is also on the Xcast episode) made me curious to read the issue of NG that had the initial Xbox story.
After some Googling around I found many issues on archive.org, and I wanted to share some pages that I thought interesting. Aside from what I’m sharing below, there’s plenty more fun stuff. Like them stating that Halo was coming out on PS2. 
Oh, and I found this Flickr set to be helpful in deciding which issues might be interesting to look through.
Anyway, starting with the original scoop from issue 58, from October 1999, here are the pages I thought I’d pass along:
And then in issue 62, from February of 2000, I found this amusing bit:
And finally, their write-up of the official announcement in issue 65 from May of 2000:
