Microsoft

Microsoft
Type	Public
Founded	April 4, 1975
Headquarters	Redmond, Washington
Key people	John W. Thompson Brad Smith Satya Nadella Bill Gates Phil Spencer
Industry	Technology
Products	Computers, Software, Video Games
Employees	134,944 (2018)
Website	https://www.microsoft.com/

Microsoft Corporation is an American technology company founded on April 4, 1975 by Bill Gates and the late Paul Allen. It is best known for the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. 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 such as Halo, Gears of War, and Forza in addition to indie-developed titles such as Minecraft, Super Lucky's Tale, Ori and the Blind Forest, and its sequel Ori and the Will of the Wisps.

On September 24th, 2002, Microsoft purchased Rare, alongside the license for their original intellectual properties, such as Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, and Conker. Rare's contributions to the Donkey Kong and Star Fox franchises remain under Nintendo's ownership, excluding certain characters from Diddy Kong Racing.

In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Microsoft owns Rare Ltd., the company that created Banjo & Kazooie, and the universe debuted in Ultimate as DLC on September 4, 2019. Along with Banjo & Kazooie came 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 of Spiral Mountain's main theme, composed by Grant Kirkhope, the original composer of the Banjo-Kazooie games. Vault Boy from the Fallout franchise, a property of the Microsoft-owned ZeniMax Media, appears as a DLC Mii Gunner outfit.

Trivia

• As Microsoft produces the Xbox line of game consoles, it is the first, and so far only, company with content featured in the Super Smash Bros. series which currently competes with Nintendo. It is the third company to compete with Nintendo at any point in its history, following Sega and SNK, although both companies stopped making consoles prior to providing content for Super Smash Bros.
• Microsoft is the third third-party company to be introduced to the Super Smash Bros. series as DLC, the first two being Square Enix and Atlus.
• Microsoft is the first major Western third-party company to be introduced to the Super Smash Bros. series.
• As Microsoft is primarily a computer company with a video game division (Xbox Game Studios), it is the first company with major representation in the Super Smash Bros. series to not be a dedicated video game company.
• During the video presentation for Banjo & Kazooie, Masahiro Sakurai mentioned that players should play the original games on Xbox, 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.
• Prior to competing with Nintendo, in Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia, the image in the Video Games article depicts a family playing Mario Paint, and is even credited as having been provided by Nintendo of America.

This page 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 3.0 Unported License.