Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation
Type	Public
Founded	April 4th, 1975
Headquarters	Redmond, Washington
Key people	John W. Thompson Brad Smith Satya Nadella Bill Gates Paul Allen Asha Sharma
Industry	Technology
Products	Computers, Software, Video Games
Employees	221,000 (2023)
Website	Microsoft Corporation
Article on Wikipedia	Microsoft

Microsoft is an American technology company founded on April 4th, 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Founded as a computer development company, Microsoft would become a leader in the technology industry, best known for operating systems like MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, the Microsoft Office Suite, and the Internet Explorer web browser. The company is also known for manufacturing hardware products, including the Xbox video game consoles. Its video game division, Xbox Game Studios, publishes well-known series by in-house studios such as Halo, Age of Empires, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Forza, Fable, and State of Decay, in addition to indie-developed titles such as Ori and the Blind Forest and Super Lucky's Tale. The company's portfolio also includes franchises from companies acquired by them, including Rare, Mojang Studios, Obsidian Entertainment, Zenimax Media, and Activision Blizzard among many others.

Microsoft are the first and only rival console manufacturer represented in Smash Bros. to have still been an active Nintendo competitor at the time of their inclusion. They are also the first non-Japanese third-party publisher to have received fighter representation, joining the franchise via DLC support for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Microsoft's purchase of Rare in September 2002 included the license for their original intellectual properties, such as Banjo-Kazooie and Perfect Dark, presenting difficulties for their inclusion in Smash until hurdles were cleared for Ultimate. Rare's contributions to the Donkey Kong and Star Fox franchises remain under Nintendo's ownership, excluding original characters from Diddy Kong Racing, allowing them to be used freely. The newfound agreements between Microsoft and Nintendo for Ultimate further permitted the appearance of the Minecraft universe, another franchise Microsoft had acquired via purchase of its respective developer over the preceding years.

In Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Several Rare-developed games whose ownership were transferred to Microsoft prior to Brawl, such as Banjo-Kazooie and Perfect Dark, are listed in the Chronicle exclusively in PAL versions.

In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Microsoft owns Rare Ltd., the company that created the Banjo-Kazooie franchise and owns its titular characters, Banjo and Kazooie. The Banjo-Kazooie universe debuted in Ultimate as DLC on September 4th, 2019, with Banjo & Kazooie as a playable fighter, alongside the stage Spiral Mountain, a location from the original Banjo-Kazooie games, multiple spirits, and 10 music tracks from both Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie, including a remix composed by Grant Kirkhope, the original composer of the Banjo-Kazooie games.

Microsoft also owns Mojang Studios, the company that created the Minecraft franchise. The default skin from the game, Steve, was released in Ultimate as the second fighter for Fighters Pass Vol. 2 on October 13th, 2020, along with alternate costumes based on the secondary skin Alex and two common enemies from the games, the Zombie and the Enderman, alongside the stage Minecraft World, multiple spirits and 7 music tracks from Minecraft, Minecraft Earth and Minecraft Dungeons.

Three characters from properties published by the Microsoft-owned Bethesda Softworks: Vault Boy from the Fallout series, the Dragonborn from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Doom Slayer from the Doom series, also appear as DLC Mii Fighter costumes.

Gallery

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  The logo for Microsoft's video game division, Xbox Game Studios.

Trivia

• All Microsoft properties represented in the Super Smash Bros. series are franchises the company gained through acquisition of their respective developers, rather than the inhouse creations of Xbox Game Studios. Fallout, however, represents Microsoft only retroactively, as their purchase of Bethesda had not actually occurred at the time Vault Boy's costume was included.
• During the Mr. Sakurai Presents for Banjo & Kazooie, Masahiro Sakurai recommended that players play the original Banjo-Kazooie titles on the Xbox One, the mention of which caused the word "Xbox" to be the number one trending topic on Twitter in Japan, due to the console's infamously poor performance in the country.
• Microsoft and Square Enix are the third-party companies with multiple representatives who all debuted in Smash via DLC, and received characters in both Fighters Pass Vol. 1 and 2.

References

This article uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Microsoft. The list of authors can be seen in their page's history. As with SmashWiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.