When it came to the Xbox, the befuddling feedback continued. “We were told we couldn’t call it the Xbox because X is the letter of death,” Fries remembers. “We were told we couldn’t make it black because black is the colour of death. I was like, isn’t the PlayStation black? Rules that apply to you as an outsider don’t necessarily apply to insider products.”

A very long but amazing reading. From Wesley Yin-Poole at Eurogamer: Why Xbox failed in Japan.