Microsoft's marketing department hated the name Xbox so much they put it in focus groups only as a control variable to prove how bad it was, and it won. Employees called the project the coffin box because they thought it would end their careers. This episode traces how the original Xbox was born from Bill Gates' fear that Sony's PlayStation 2 would replace the Windows PC in the living room, and how an internal civil war between the WebTV team's cheap Windows CE appliance and the DirectX team's PC-in-a-box was settled in a May 1999 pitch meeting.

We cover the Valentine's Day Massacre of February 2000, when spiraling costs and a stripped-down Windows nearly got the project killed, the decision to include an 8 GB hard drive and a broadband Ethernet port when most homes used dial-up, and the supply-chain failure behind the oversized Duke contro ...