Before Microsoft stepped into the console market with Xbox, the original pitch at the company was to create a PC gaming machine that looked like a console.
Xbox co-creator Ed Fries shared the story behind the original Xbox’s inception on the latest episode of IGN Unfiltered, noting it was "people like Seamus
and Otto
" who approached him about making a game console. Fries said that because they were "DirectX evangelists" who’d been heavily invested in "the part of Windows that games use," their original idea was "to make a console that was really a PC."
According to the Xbox co-creator, their pitch was as follows: "It’s gonna look like a game console—you’ll stick a CD in and it’ll install it quietly in the background but it’ll really be just a PC CD, and then it’ll play like a console but it’ll really just be a PC game."
Source: IGN PC Articles