'Halo' And Xbox's Shady Bill Gates Led Origins
Today is Halo's 20th anniversary, which was celebrated with a trailer for the new Halo show on ParamountPlus dropping:
Nowadays, Bill Gates is just that guy who gets a bad rep for (insert whatever conspiracy he's blamed for this week). However, there are so many better reasons for doing it, like, for example, how shady he was when making the original Xbox. As we're all doomed to never forget, the mid-'00s marked an incredible comeback for Apple. But what we don't know is how that comeback could've started even earlier, as Steve Jobs – another shady tech CEO -- was going to have Halo be a macOS exclusive.
Imagine what Halo: Combat Evolved, one of the biggest, most revolutionary games ever could have done for the company. It could have sold millions or maybe just made Apple fans even more obnoxious for having that amazing game most people had no way of playing.
Apple
Jobs was seriously hyped with the project, even back when it wasn't the FPS that would end up changing it all, but still just a 3rd person shooter. And Jobs wasn't the only one seeing the game's potential. Bill Gates, needing a killer app for the original Xbox, decided to not simply make a deal to get Halo, but to straight-up buy Bungie, the company responsible for Halo, along with the game's exclusivity.
Jobs allegedly went into a fit of rage, which probably would've been even worse had he not already been used to getting blindsided by Gates. To appease Jobs, Microsoft signed a deal with Apple that would have them port a number of PC games to Macs, paving the way to the beautiful now where every single computer game plays great on all Apple-- hahaha, just kidding.
But Gates wasn't just mean towards his enemies, which we get since it was the war against Jobs, of all things people. He also screwed his allies. The original Xbox was meant to run on an AMD processor, and Gates even got the AMD engineers a front-row seat for his Xbox presentation, only for him to then reveal that he was actually going with a processor made by Intel, the Microsoft to AMD's Apple.
You can even hear him choking here when announcing that "Intel is a partner here" …
… and then say that the Xbox on display isn't the actual Xbox because some of the new chips were so state of the art they weren't even made yet, which is how one says, "That's the AMD Xbox," in traitor. Honestly, we wouldn't be surprised if a deleted part of this video somehow also revealed Gates swiping co-presenter The Rock's hair.
Top Image: Xbox Game Studios
