Crosspost from the Acquisition OT:
VERY interesting article about Xbox early days and how they tried to acquire EA, Nintendo, Square (now Square Enix) and Midway Games (now NetherRealm Studios). It also talks about how Bungie was already in talks with Take-Two before the Microsoft approach.
EA:
BOB MCBREEN (head of business development) The first company we reached out to buy was EA. They said, “No, thanks,” and then Nintendo.
Nintendo:
BACHUS Steve made us go meet with Nintendo to see if they would consider being acquired. They just laughed their asses off. Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went.
MCBREEN 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. 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.
Square:
MCBREEN We had a letter of intent to buy Square. In early November 1999, we went to Japan. We had one of those big dinners with their CEO and Steve Ballmer. The next day, we’re sitting in their boardroom, and they said, “Our banker would like to make a statement.” And basically, the banker said, “Square cannot go through with this deal because the price is too low.” We packed up, we went home, and that was the end of Square.
Midway Games:
BACHUS We were talking to Midway about acquiring them. They were very serious about wanting to be acquired, but we couldn’t figure out how to make it work because we’d immediately get them out of the PlayStation business, and we didn’t need their sales and marketing group, and so that left us with not a lot of value.