The Japanese Never Liked The Original Xbox

It’s always a good thing to get insight on how certain things happened. And I’m not talking about the PR talk that’s made known to the public, I’m talking about fly-on-the-wall kind of stuff. The inside information only insiders can give.

That’s what we get with former Microsoft executive, and Xbox boss, Ed Fries, who spoke openly to Develop in a recent interview. His latest reveal’s about the original Xbox, and the downright negative feedback the console received in the land of the rising sun.

“The first Xbox controller was built internally at Microsoft’s gaming peripheral group, who at the time had made things like the SideWinder joystick,” said Fries. “They had a controller they made for PC gaming, so they took on the job and we didn’t pay that much attention to what they were doing.”

Honestly, when the first controller came out, our group didn’t give a lot of feedback on it. We didn’t have a lot of experience on controllers anyway, so we didn’t have an issue with the prototype. But when I went to Japan to show the console, man, they really had a problem with it. I was told a number of crazy things, like the controller should weigh the same as water in your hands.

We heard all kind of negative things from Japan, like we couldn’t use the name Xbox because ‘X’ means death, and the console couldn’t be black, because that also was the color of death. The first Xbox consoles we released in Japan weren’t black, in fact, they were a smokey color – but I was always thinking to myself, ‘hang on, isn’t the PS2 black?!’

But in the end, it made sense that we’d make a smaller controller for Japan because, yeah sure, it was just way too big for their hands. That’s where the ‘S’ controller came from. Problem was that when people internally started playing with the ‘S’ controller, everyone preferred it to the massive one – but it was too late by then, we were set for launch.”

The man didn’t stop there, either. He went on to talk about other stories of the Xbox’s development stages. Going from DirectX Box, to Xbox, disregarding the marketing team completely who couldn’t stand the letter “X” as part of the then pending console’s name. It also went from literally being an “X” to what we have now sitting around in our homes.

Get the full thing through here.