While Microsoft is a $3T company, it’s also a company made up of people, people who have to make last-minute decisions that help propel the company towards that trillion-dollar valuation. And not every one of those decisions is made in some 5D chess play, but rather with a flip of the coin and a prayer.
When taking a trip down memory lane, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen reminds us of a few decision oddities that accompanied the Microsoft Entertainment Pack, such as the odd story behind the licensing deal that resulted in a bright red Tetris sticker being slapped on the box at the last minute.
Microsoft mishandled quite a bit in its lead-up to and release of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack, but the Tetris sticker was actually planned.
Microsoft wanted to showcase its burgeoning platform and chose the Microsoft Entertainment Pack as its early salvo. Rather than the customary numerical branding on the package, customers were met with a different message: a bright red sticker that told them Windows now included TETRIS.
Now Includes TETRIS for Windows!
Oddly enough, the rest of the box had no images or any other text pointing to or highlighting the game, and that was because Microsoft was negotiating a licensing deal for the game up against a hard deadline for the release of its bundle of games.
“Rather than including Tetris on the box art and risking having to destroy a production run of boxes if the license couldn’t be acquired in time, the decision was made to produce boxes that omitted any screen shots or even a mention of Tetris. In anticipation of the deal coming to a satisfactory conclusion, they did have a run of red stickers on standby,” says Chen.
Microsoft had to weigh printing the Tetris declaration without actually having sealed the deal and then potentially having to trash an entire run of packages that showcased a game the company couldn’t provide. Rather than taking that expensive gamble, Microsoft played it safe by assuming that the deal wouldn’t go through in time and instead crafted its Microsoft Entertainment Pack without any mention of the game.
But Microsoft had a contingency plan: craft a batch of red stickers that held the claims the company wanted to make but wasn’t going to be able to legally support if the deal didn’t close in time for release.
Fortunately, the deal closed right before the release of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack, and Microsoft slapped its contingency plan all over those early runs of the boxes.
“When the deal was completed, the ‘Now includes TETRIS for Windows!’ stickers were applied to the already-made boxes,” Chen explains.
Over time, Microsoft embraced its last-minute ploy as a thoroughly vetted branding effort by folding the sticker into the actual box art. The company retroactively gave its bundle a numerical extension that would have the software read Microsoft Entertainment Pack 1, after its positive early adoption and subsequent sequels.
What some have attributed to a bungled release was, in fact, a perfectly executed stopgap that became a rare consumer hit for the company.
Similar to the Windows 95 holographic box, the sticker version of Microsoft Entertainment Pack becomes yet another collectable for Microsoft fans. I’m not saying you need to run to eBay and overpay for a piece of nostalgic history, but if you happen to have a copy of either, you might want to run to eBay and sell it to someone willing to overpay.
Beyond the collectable aspect of this little piece of Microsoft history, people who own the red sticker Tetris box own a slice of time when the company was nimble and flexible enough to salvage a consumer-facing project rather than pouring billions into a pit and eventually scrapping the whole project a couple of years later.
