Company: Microsoft

Despite being positioned as the Xbox's mascot by the gaming press, Blinx the Time Sweeper was not created to fill that role or rival the likes of Mario and Sonic. Despite an internal push from the Blinx team for the character to become the platform's mascot in Japan (of which executive producer Ed Fries claims to be "not sure how seriously [the Blinx team] took it"), as well as the desire of Bill Gates for Microsoft's gaming department to have a mascot, the character was not officially used as an Xbox mascot, though the game did get a major marketing push in Japan thanks to convenient timing during a Christmas dry spell of game releases and being a Japanese game.

In Excel 95 on Windows 95, if you follow a series of events you can reach a special Easter egg. To do this,

• Select Row 95 and press the Tab key.
• Click on the question mark on the toolbar.
• In the window that pops up, click the Technical Support button while holding Ctrl+Shift on the keyboard.

You will then access a Doom-like game called 'Hall of Tortured Souls' which shows the staff that created Excel 95.

In an article by Bloomberg, Kevin Bachus, ex-director of third-party relations at Microsoft, and Bob McBreen, former head of business development for the company, said that before Microsoft started development on the Xbox, Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo, but were reportedly laughed at for the majority of the meeting, before reaching out again to offer to provide hardware for future consoles, which they too declined.

Bachus: “They just laughed their asses off. Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went.”

McBreen: "We actually had Nintendo in our building in January 2000 to work through the details of a joint venture where we gave them all the technical specs of the Xbox. The pitch was their hardware stunk, and compared to Sony PlayStation, it did. So the idea was, “Listen, you’re much better at the game portions of it with Mario and all that stuff. Why don’t you let us take care of the hardware?” But it didn’t work out."

When Sega went bust, Microsoft wanted to buy Sega to try and make their way into the video game market. The deal never went through. This was because Bill Gates didn't think Sega had the power to stop Sony, so they decided to try and do it on their own.