When 25 years old Miami resident Jia Li ordered a laptop from Microsoft's website, he received an Xbox One instead. An honest – and not really that uncommon – mistake save for one thing: this happened two months before the console was announced and eight months before it was released.
It happened in March 2013. The first thing Li noticed when he received his run-of-the-mill notebook was wrapped in lots of security tape. "The box had a lot of security tape over it," he told Business Insider. "So I was wondering, 'What is that?' I opened it, and it's something I've never seen before."
Behind all the wrapping lied a white Xbox One decorated with a pattern of random black rays. The package didn't include gamepads and it didn't include Kinect controller, but that didn't stop Li from hooking it up to his TV which lit up with the console's "Kryptos" pre-launch codename.
Sony announced the PlayStation 4 in February 2013. By the numbers, Sony's consoles looked more powerful than the Xbox One, which put pressure on Microsoft to make sure its console specs wouldn't get leaked before the carefully-crafted official announcement. The Xbox team wanted to make sure no Microsoft employee would find the Xbox One beta units and – just like a cheap joke – they decided that the best way to go around that was to "hide them in plain sight." The team stored the top secret beta consoles on the ground in a Microsoft shipping facility and that's were one of them was mistaken for Li's laptop.
Li quickly understood that he got his hand on an "Xbox 720," the name used by gamers back then to refer to the Xbox 360's successor. He contacted Engadget and tried to sell the console to them. Engadget wasn't interested in buying the beta unit, but they facilitated negotiations with Microsoft and reached a 3-way agreement by which Li returned the console and got his laptop while Engadget got exclusive early access to the Xbox One and Microsoft got to keep the whole story secret until an ex-Engadget writer spilled the beans 3 years later.
