In an article by Bloomberg, Kevin Bachus, ex-director of third-party relations at Microsoft, and Bob McBreen, former head of business development for the company, said that before Microsoft started development on the Xbox, Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo, but were reportedly laughed at for the majority of the meeting, before reaching out again to offer to provide hardware for future consoles, which they too declined.

Bachus: “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."