When The Original Xbox First Leaked, Microsoft Openly Lied About It

We've been treated to a bunch of fascinating information about the original Xbox courtesy of the new Xbox virtual museum, and one of the sections goes into detail about the first time the original console leaked to the press.

Next Gen Magazine was the first outlet to get word of Microsoft's new "Xbox" project, and they called the company to try and get a comment. Xbox's David Hufford picked up the phone, and urgently relayed the news to his colleagues:

"[I] hang up the phone, race downstairs where the engineering team was and say, 'oh my gosh, you guys, I think they're onto us.'"

The "Father of Xbox" Seamus Blackley also received a couple of calls about the apparent new games console from Microsoft, and openly lied in his replies, promising he was just "working on API's for 3-D FX video cards for Windows".

"No, man. I don't know what you're talking about. What's Xbox?"

'What are you talking about? I'm the program manager for entertainment graphics for Windows. I'm working on API's for 3-D FX video cards for Windows.' [I was] just lying to him..."

Blackley later humorously admitted that he was actually "in a warehouse welding those [Xbox] dev kits" when he received one of the calls. The source of the initial leak has seemingly never been revealed, but Hufford says "there were definitely some leaky employees on the team" and he has his "suspicions on who they were". Maybe we'll never know!

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