Not too mention what a great machine it became after rooting and getting a bigger drive.
It was a great media player with xbmc which is the predecessor of kodi and having a pirated game library on a console at that time was amazing.
I was one of those lucky enough to get it on the first day. I bought Halo before so I was chomping at the bit to play it. I also got Fuzion Frenzy, kinda reluctantly, but that game was a blast! Orbs!!! If I was allowed to be the yellow character, I was basically unstoppable. Ever since, I always try to be the yellow character in those party games because I learned that I can easily see my character in chaos. I can lose the other color characters sometimes.
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
I bought an Xbox around launch because of the hype behind Halo and I wanted to give it a go. Still one of the most over rated crappy games in my opinion.
I played through the whole game and it just isnt good. Ive played the multiplayer many times and I just dont think it is fun. Why would I run around with fisher price guns when I could be playing Counter Strike or Unreal Tournament.
I still don’t get the hype around Halo to this day, but k guess it just doesnt push the right buttons for me.
I think the 360 as a console was more revolutionary as well and really bought about proper online gaming for console. The original Xbox was just poor in comparison to the PS2 as far as I was concerned.
There is always plenty of rose tinted glasses when people look back on the consoles of their childhood, I love the Saturn even though objectively it is a bit crap. Likewise Xbox is mediocre as fuck and worked well enough to get them through to the powerhouse generation that was the 360.
Well, for console players, an Xbox was the only way to play Counter Strike (which didn’t release until years later and may not have been a priority without Halo’s popularity), and Unreal Tournament came out in 2000 on PS2 and 2001 on Dreamcast, and those ports were pretty bad. What Halo did was bring the FPS experience to a controller, not just a console. Before that it was hit and miss with controllers and FPS games. Halo is where the layout really locked in.
What matters even more is Halo 2 bringing things like matchmaking, parties, and playlists to FPS games. Without that, consoles would still be stuck on server lists. Would all of those innovations have happened without Halo? Would CoD and Battlefield be where they are now without Halo? Probably. But Halo is what brought them up.
And you say that the 360 was where console online gaming really came into it, but Xbox Live on the original Xbox was amazing. Voice comms while playing Ghost Recon. MechAssault. Rainbow Six 3. The Dreamcast tried, but it never made the leap. The Xbox and the Halo series are what pushed consoles into a closer parity with PC gaming, and you can see how true it is just by looking at the offerings that Sony and Nintendo have made. Sony has caught up now, but it took them years longer to follow Microsoft’s blueprint, and Nintendo still hasn’t figured out how to do proper online gaming.
If it isn’t for you, it isn’t for you, and that’s fine. However, calling it over-rated and crappy is a pretty hot take. That’s like booting up DOOM and saying, “Why bother, we already have Wolfenstein.”
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 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
Then you obviously never owned one.
It was the first to implement a standard online service with matchmaking, partially thanks to the built-in ethernet port. First to include a hard drive. Hell, you could rip CDs to the thing and play your own music in some games. And, I mean, fuckin’ HALO, particularly Halo 2. They built Xbox Live for the Xbox 360 off of what Bungie had built for the game. Not to mention the ‘standard’ controls that literally every shooter on consoles has started with Halo. Hell, it was the first console that supported HD resolutions. The PS5 only exists in the world that the original Xbox helped make.
I disagree, it helped get us to where the console market is today. 🤣
Well we’ll certainly disagree with that idea
Its wildly known persistent storage was a first in consoles tha is to the Xbox. DirectX also standardized quite a bit with gaming, also developers have quoted many times by saying the dev kits and developer experience were elevated by the Xbox team.
It changed quite a bit.
