Xbox Publishes 1999 Letter About Trying To Acquire Nintendo

It was revealed earlier this year that Microsoft had once tried to acquire Nintendo back at the turn of the millennium, and now a letter from that time period has been published by the Xbox team on the new Xbox virtual museum.

The letter is from October 1999, and unfortunately the majority of it is obscured as you can see above. Here's what we can make out of it though, with the transcript provided by our friends over at Eurogamer:

"Dear Jacqualee, I appreciate you taking the time to try to arrange a meeting with Mr. Takeda and Mr. Yamauchi to discuss a possible strategic partnership between Nintendo and Microsoft on future video game platforms. I understand Mr. Takeda's concerns about the possible partnership and will try to [obscured] the guidelines that he has requested."

It then goes on to make a reference to 'Dolphin', which was the codename of the Nintendo GameCube, and states something about a "strategic alliance to work together on future video game [obscured]". It also references "[continuing] the development on our Xbox project."

According to former Xbox team member Kevin Bachus in this past January's Bloomberg interview, Nintendo "just laughed their asses off" at the idea of being acquired at the time. Nintendo then reportedly made a trip to Microsoft in January 2000 to discuss a potential joint venture, but it again didn't work out.

What do you make of this bold attempt to acquire Nintendo 20 years ago? Let us know down below.

[source eurogamer.net]