Thanks, great article.
It’s a bit bittersweet to relive the great memories I had with the Xbox I found under the Xmas tree, as the current state of the brand/company is rather disappointing, which has a bad effect on the overall gaming market. Still, Xbox converted me to console gaming and brought me countless hours of joy (then the 360 many more).
I will forever be happy that MS took the risk and I wish more companies were this bold today.
Not shure how the x-box changed gaming forever. More like “one of the consoles of all time.”
Most games are pretty simple. You jump on enemies, you die, you have to insert another quarter to continue. The XBox changed that.
lol downvoted for a meme, poor guy.
Are you being sarcastic or are you genuinely ignorant of the 20+ years of home consoles that preceded it?
Edit: saw your other comment.
Don’t worry, this isn’t the first meme that made me feel old today.
But it came after PS1/Dreamcast/any other console…
It’s a modified quote from Craig Mazin, who adapted The Last of Us into a show for HBO. “Most games are pretty simple. You jump on enemies, you die, you have to insert another quarter to continue. The Last of Us changed that.”
I’m still unclear as to whether he was serious, but it was a meme for a while.
I remember really wanting one back then, but never could get it. I bought my first one about 3 years ago to play the first Forza Motorsport. Really great experience. Can’t imagine how much I would have loved it 20 years ago.
The original Xbox turns 25 today! Well, since it is midnight now …right now!
On 15 November 2001, Microsoft entered the console market with an enormous black box, an equally enormous controller, and a little game called Halo. At the time, Sony was dominating with the PlayStation 2, Nintendo was preparing to launch the GameCube, and Sega had just bowed out of the hardware business. It was quite a gamble, especially for a company that had never made a games console before.
I’ve written a little retrospective article, just looking back at how the original Xbox came together, the people behind it, the games that made it special, and how Xbox Live helped change console gaming forever. I’ve also included some quotes from the people involved in its creation and launch, and finished with a look at how projects like hakuX are bringing original Xbox emulation to Android handhelds. I recently had Jet Set Radio Future running at 4× resolution and a steady 60 FPS on my Odin 3 Portal, which still feels a little ridiculous considering the size of the original machine.
Happy 25th birthday, Xbox!
Woah so do I! Guess it was destiny for me to be a gamer
Not saying it was a bad console but It didn’t change anything in gaming
The article does make some interesting arguments about the changes, here are some excerpts:
That hard drive was particularly important. Players could save progress without purchasing memory cards, while games could use the storage for caching data and reducing loading times. Owners could even rip music CDs to the machine and listen to their own soundtracks in supported games. The built-in Ethernet port was another forward-looking decision, even if Microsoft’s online service was still some way off.
First-person shooters had already enjoyed tremendous success on consoles, particularly with GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64, but Halo helped establish a new standard for the genre. While it wasn’t the first console shooter to use two analogue sticks, its intuitive approach to movement and aiming, with the left stick controlling movement and the right controlling the camera, helped establish the control scheme that would become standard across the industry. Combined with recharging shields and carefully structured combat encounters, Halo would influence first-person shooters for years afterward.
Thank you for reading!
An odd thing to thank these days …but often people check a headline, or skim things. It means a lot to me :),
Yea no problem 😄 A large chunk of my comment history on this site is sharing excerpts that people might find interesting. It leads to nicer discussions
Saturn already had SegaNet in 1996 Famicom had the disk system in 1986 N64 had 64DD Ps2 had a hard drive before Xbox Halo was announced for mac/pc with ps2 port to follow until Microsoft bought Bungie
The argument isn’t that it did these things first, it’s that it changed gaming by doing all of them well.
Being first to do something doesn’t matter if no one uses it. Xbox objectively popularised all of those things in a way no one had done before (at least in the console market), on a massive scale.
The PS/2 did not come with a hard drive standard. Few ps/2 games supported the add on hard drive.
Seganet was a modem, not an ethernet port.
The famicom disk system was proprietary floppy discs, not a hard drive.
The 64DD was a proprietary floppy disc like a zip disc.
The OP frames storage, networking/online services, and a single studio’s game design decisions as revolutionary.
These were not new ideas. I never really considered Xbox as a innovative console
You didn’t read the article.
"The article does make some interesting arguments about the changes, here are some excerpts:
That hard drive was particularly important. Players could save progress without purchasing memory cards, while games could use the storage for caching data and reducing loading times.
“Without purchasing”
“Caching data and reduce load times”
Having to purchase an extra storage device that was slow and with extremely limited space is not equivalent to including a hard drive.
Well we’ll certainly disagree with that idea
I disagree, it helped get us to where the console market is today. 🤣
