Recently, former Xbox President Ed Fries made a guest appearance on the 105th XboxEra podcast, sharing his tenure (1986-2004) Microsoft's efforts to acquire Blizzard Entertainment, Westwood Studios and Nintendo.
Former Xbox President Ed Fressim Studios
Fryes said he is a big player of Command & Conquer, but he has also played classics of Westwood Studios such as Dune 2 and Blade Runner, and is an uncompromising fan of real-time strategy games.
At that time, Fryes was preparing to draft an acquisition contract for Westwood Studios and was confident in the terms of the contract offered by Microsoft. Since Fres was newly married, he embarked on a 10-day honeymoon trip to Australia after telling the team not to screw up the contract.
The story after the honeymoon must not need to be repeated: EA intervened in the acquisition at a higher price, successfully included Westwood Studios, and finally closed the studio in 2003.
To this day, Fryes also believes that if Westwood had followed Microsoft, it might have developed better than at EA.
Westwood Studios Command & Conquer Blizzard Entertainment
Another thing that upset Fres was the acquisition of Blizzard Entertainment. Warcraft was a well-known real-time strategy game series at the time, and another representative work of the same genre, Age of Empires, was one of the foundations of Microsoft's later PC gaming. It can be said that Microsoft in the 90s was a company with real-time strategy game plots, and it was reasonable to have the willingness to acquire Blizzard.
As a Blizzard fan, Frys naturally did not want to miss the opportunity to acquire Blizzard. When Blizzard's parent company, Davidson & Associates, decided to sell Blizzard in 1996, Microsoft immediately took the shot. However, contrary to expectations, including this acquisition, Microsoft has been fought by two companies with higher bidding.
The first (1996) was the successful acquisition of Blizzard and Snow Mountain's CUC Group in the United States, at that time CUC was mainly engaged in tourism including rental camps, and the loss to a "camping company" made Fryce feel unbelievable.
After CUC fell into a financial fraud scandal, Blizzard was sold again with The Snow Mountain, and the second (1997) company that took Blizzard was desperate, turning out to be a water treatment giant from France. Players familiar with this company must have guessed that this company is Vivendi, who has the ambition of "entertainment empire".
Yes, Microsoft, which was eager to buy Blizzard, lost to a travel company and then a water company, and lost to Blizzard. But Ed Frys smiled at the end of sharing the story and said:
I think Microsoft finally managed to buy Blizzard.
Blizzard Entertainment Warcraft 2: Kuroshio Nintendo
At the end of the acquisition story, Frys shared more details of Microsoft's pursuit of a partnership with Nintendo. The story was first shared by Robbie Bach, the former president of Microsoft's entertainment and device division, the well-known story of "Nintendo laughed Microsoft out of the building."
He said that at that time, Microsoft's office campus and Nintendo in the United States were next to each other, so they decided to ask about it, so that Nintendo did not figure out what Microsoft was here to do. Fres remembered it well, and Nintendo asked him a question:
Who is the performance of the PlayStation and Nintendo 64?
Fres's answer at the time was "Nintendo 64" console, but Nintendo itself did not agree with this answer. This made Nintendo feel that Microsoft at that time probably had not yet figured out what they were going to do, what they could bring to Nintendo, and why they wanted to find Nintendo, so the cooperation was gone.
*Editor's note: In terms of paper data, the CPU frequency of the "Nintendo 64" is actually higher. But in terms of real performance, the two have their own advantages.
PlayStation and Nintendo 64 consoles
Fryes also mentioned that in fact, Microsoft was only looking for cooperation, at least during his tenure, Microsoft did not really want to acquire Nintendo' plans, and the partner was responsible for the hardware, and Microsoft was responsible for the software, which was the typical thinking of Microsoft when the Windows operating system was in the sky, which was also reflected in the competition of the original Xbox development team (in the Xbox 20th anniversary documentary, the Windows CE team was more favored than the DirectX team).
In addition, Fryes also rejected the internal acquisition of EA because he felt that EA's game Microsoft would rather do it himself than buy it. Bill Gates also had a conversation with Ken Kutamagi of sony SCE Group, but the two sides could not agree on a cooperation, and microsoft later developed its own Xbox to enter the console market.
In this nearly 2-hour podcast, Ed Frys also talked about a lot of anecdotes about the inside of Xbox when he was employed, his views on Xbox Game Pass, and the story that he left Microsoft and almost made Phil Spencer want to quit, etc. Interested friends can click here to listen.