In the second part of an interview with The Guardian, Peter Moore has revealed that Microsoft considered to buy Nintendo. In a response to a question that asked Moore about his relationship with Steve Ballmer, the former Corporate Vice-President of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business unit said:
He wanted my attitude, he didn't care what I'd achieved at Sega, he wanted to know how I was going to win for Microsoft, how we were going to take on Sony, how would we compete with – or acquire – Nintendo. Those were the conversations in those days. It was a classic build or buy conversation. Xbox had launched but it was an aggressive black box for shooters, and how do we evolve that, how do we build the next Xbox, how do we get after Sony? Interestingly, we were just completely fixated on Sony – Nintendo didn't even come into the conversation. But Steve was very compelling, particularly when you're one-on-one with him in his office – we talked about what we'd done to compete with Sony, where I felt their weaknesses were. But the bigger picture for Steve was, we need to get into the world of consumer entertainment. There's a role for Microsoft to play, we truly believe in Xbox as being something that can… there was a little bit of a concern with Sony – we wanted to keep them out of the living room, from a software and services perspective. And then I started work at Microsoft on February 1 2003.
http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/17598/Peter-Moore-Microsoft-Considered-to-Buy-Nintendo/
