From an interview with Trip Hawkins, founder of EA and 3DO:
“What do you think about Nintendo’s future? People have commented that they should focus only on portable systems in the future.
My magic eight ball says they will be acquired by Microsoft within five years.”
I have been obsessively loyal to Nintendo for over 15 years. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, F-Zero, Star Fox, Earthbound… Nintendo owns the IP for most of my favorite franchises. And I have been making a strong effort lately to purge the Microsoft from my technology.
<panic>But if Microsoft acquires Nintendo then Mario becomes evil, and all the Nintendo franchise titles will be on a heinous X-Box descendant, and I’ll never be able to play any of these games again, or else I’ll have to feed the evil of “shared source” oh my god this is the worst thing that could possibly happen to the video game industry apart from a total collapse or maybe the entire thing becoming owned by the Bush administration somehow or I guess everything getting censored like it does in China but dear sweet Sega this scenario would still be absolutely terrible and I’d probably end up compromising my principles just to get one last taste of Nintendo’s cartoony goodness even though Microsoft would end up tainting it and leave me with the bitter taste of corporate betrayal in my mouth and I’d have to buy a bunch of copies of the newest Windows OS just so I could light them on fire in retribution or something, which would be totally ineffective but maybe I could fool myself into making myself feel better anyway deep breath</panic>
Of course, it’s not likely to actually happen. Thank you Tycho Brahe for being the voice of reason.
“[Businessmen] have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public.”
—Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations”