Before the original Xbox was released, Microsoft intended to give it away for free to gamers.
In fact, Microsoft's determination to make Xbox available for free was the reason why Lorne Lanning and Oddworld Inhabitants studio agreed to develop Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee as a launch title for the platform.
"At the time, Xbox thought that the core market was going to be casual. They were going to be the casual gamers' machine. 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'," reminisced Lanning.
"So now you're like, 'look, if you're going to give the box away, you're going to win. If you're going to win, we want to be on board'."
Lanning's story was confirmed by Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley, who helped draft the Xbox proposal and assemble the design team. "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," he confirmed.
For better or worse, Microsoft's plan to use Xbox as a Trojan horse for Windows was halted by the Xbox team who found it to be too damaging as most game developers loathed Windows.
"You got the brand that everyone resents having to buy, how's that going to work in the entertainment industry? See, we don't need your OS in the entertainment industry. We don't need shit from you in the entertainment industry. In fact, if anything you do runs like fucking Windows, we don't want anything to do with it, right? That was a very common perception," said Lanning. "There was a lot of resistance; it was, 'Microsoft Game Studios? Fuck Microsoft!' And we went around the world defending them. We said, 'Look, this is about building better environments for developers so that you can get better games at cheaper prices and developers can stay in business longer'."
Sneaking Windows into Xbox was not the only bad idea Lanning and his team had to fight. In fact, the team had to turn down ideas such as having movie playback be the console's main focus, forcing all games to be developed by Microsoft only or acquiring Nintendo altogether. "Just name it, name a bad idea and it was something we had to deal with."
