The era-defining Xbox 360 reimagined gaming and Microsoft has never matched it | games

ANearly 20 years ago (on December 1, 2005, to be precise), I was at the first video game console launch party somewhere around Leicester Square in London. The Xbox 360 arrived on November 22, 2005 in the US and on December 2 in the UK, about three months after I got my first job as a junior writer at GamesTM magazine. My memories of that night are hazy because a) it was a worryingly long time ago and b) there was a free bar, but I remember DJ Yoda playing on a tragically deserted dance floor, and everything was very green. However, my memories of the console itself and the games I played on it are still as clear as Xbox Crystal. It’s up there with the greatest consoles of all time.

In 2001, the first Xbox entered a landscape dominated by Japanese consoles, shaking up the established order (it outsold Nintendo’s GameCube by a few million) and pulling console gaming into the Internet era with Xbox Live, an online multiplayer service that was leagues ahead of what the PlayStation 2 was doing. However, the PS2 ended up selling over 150 million versus the original Xbox’s 25 million. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, would sell over 80 million, with the PlayStation 3 through most of its eight-year life cycle (and many more in the US). It transformed Xbox from an upstart into a market leader.

In a very un-Microsoft way, the Xbox 360 was great. Its design was interesting, a double inward curve described by its designers as “spirating”, with an interchangeable front panel. It had memorable startup animations from 2000 and clean, futuristic menus that provided messages, friend lists, and music. I remember finding Microsoft’s marketing to be severely regressive at the time – see this developer video, featuring former Microsoft entertainment director J Allard and his infamous earring, in which a man juggles while saying the phrase “three identical cores”. But despite this, the machine they built looked modern and exciting. The console, too, in white with its colors popping, was such a massive improvement over the uncomfortably bulky original Xbox controller that it became a design standard. I know people who will still only use wired Xbox 360 pads to play PC games.

As the first seamlessly connected console, it brought a lot of things together to create a sense of player identity: playing different games online under one unified player name; Messaging and social features, as well as the idea of ​​inspiring achievements, created a personal gaming log through the mini-challenges you completed throughout everything you played. (Sony would soon copy this with awards.) Attaching a number to this, the gamerscore, was a stroke of diabolical genius, as it encouraged players to compete for ultimately meaningless leverage, and created a powerful incentive for people to stick with the console rather than buy games elsewhere. The Xbox 360 was the first console to realize that people stay where their friends are. If you had a choice between buying a game on PS3 or 360, you would choose the 360 ​​because that’s where everyone was playing.

By late 2006, when a complacent Sony released an expensive, weird-looking follow-up to the PlayStation 2, the Xbox 360 had already had a full year to convert people to its vision of high-definition gaming. People have already created a range of games and an online identity associated with Xbox. Large third-party game publishers, who found the technology for the PS3 difficult to develop, began prioritizing Xbox for cross-platform games. The 360 ​​never penetrated Japan, but in the rest of the world it became the default console, which is an extraordinary thing for Microsoft to achieve considering how comprehensively Sony dominated the previous two generations with the PlayStation.

Xbox Live Arcade also helped usher in the modern era of indie gaming. Between the 1990s and the late 2000s, publishers and retailers largely controlled the games that never made it into players’ hands, especially on consoles. In 2008, Xbox Live Arcade began allowing people to download smaller, cheaper games directly onto their consoles – without the need for a store or publisher. It did for console games what Steam would later do for PC, making gamers comfortable with the idea of ​​digital distribution. Games released via the arcade included Geometry Wars, Braid, Limbo, Bastion, and most importantly, the best digital version ever of Uno. I remember spending many hours on Oblivion, Mass Effect, and BioShock games in my late teens, but I also eagerly awaited each new installment of Xbox Live Arcade games.

Looking back, the Xbox 360 engineers really understood how and why people played games, and what they wanted from a next-gen console at the time. They understood how the Internet could change not just multiplayer games, but the social experience around games, and the way people find and buy them. This knowledge seems to have been lost in a few years, because when Microsoft announced the Xbox One in 2013, it was an absolute rubbish show. By then, Microsoft apparently believed that people would want to play games while watching sports in picture-in-picture, where the obligatory connected camera monitors your every move.

Microsoft has never again come close to market leadership in video games. Rising Sony took the best lessons from the Xbox 360 and packed them into the PlayStation 4, then the Nintendo Switch arrived in 2018 and blew everything else out of the water. With Xbox now in a distant third place in the dwindling console wars, it seems to see its future as a near-monopoly video game subscription service, rather than a hardware maker. The series that defined the 360 ​​era, like Halo and Gears of War, are now playable on PC and PlayStation. Other companies, like Fable, have been languishing for more than a decade.

The 360 ​​era was an exciting time in gaming, a period of great change and competition brought about by online gaming. The console market was much smaller at the time, but also less predictable. There was still room for “interesting 7/10” B-games that sometimes proved more memorable than blockbuster games when free-to-play games didn’t exist yet – games hadn’t yet been integrated into the five mega-franchises that now dominated everything. By bringing indie games to console players, it has truly changed the course of my gaming tastes.

What are you playing?

Writing about Xbox Live Arcade made me crave it Geometry Wars: Retro Evolveda stunningly compulsive top-down shooter on Xbox Live Arcade that looks like fireworks and feels like a sensory bath for your brain. So I downloaded it on Steam and it immediately linked again. Made by Bizarre Creations, of Project Gotham Racing, this game has been consistently trading places with Uno as the most downloaded digital game of 360, and is still holding up beautifully. I’d forgotten how beautifully the grid background ripples when things explode, which is a little touch of the HD era for an arcade-era game.

Available on: Steam and Xbox (if you’re happy to play the sequel instead)
Estimated playing time: 10 minutes, well, 20 years

What are you reading?

• I’ve been thinking a lot lately about challenging games, and what keeps me coming back to them, which has led to me reading a lot about challenge from a game designer’s perspective. And then, this exceptionally succinct article by Rafe Koster, veteran designer of Ultima Online and much more, was added to my feed. It’s called The game design is simple, actuallyAnd it must be read.

• If you’re a fan of the OG Xbox, you’ll be happy to know Crocs It has just launched its Xbox clogs, inspired by the original black and green Xbox controller monster. that it imaginary ugly.

• Poncle, maker of the Bafta award-winning game Vampire Survivors, has announced a new game, Vampire reptileswith a tongue-in-cheek trailer. This is a combination of an arcade game and an old-school first-person dungeon crawler.

What to click on

Question block

Last week, reader Judd asked me which video game world I’d like to live in (obviously Cyrodiil from Elder Scrolls), and we brought the question back to you. We’ve received a lot of delighted and/or confused responses – here’s what you had to say.

“If you want to go somewhere to get a beer, it’s a world Cyberpunk 2077 It seems very difficult to top.” – Spence Bromage

“I know it’s silly, but I was very impressed with the ship in it System shock 2I wanted to live there! -Charles Rollo

“the Dragon Age The universe in a heartbeat. Give me Fereldan and Denerim, and yes, even Orlais. Give me a Skyhold to live in and a barn to run, and I may never leave. – Kateland Vernon

“Call me weird, but I’ll take it Fallout 3 To live in. This had a huge impact on me, as I saw pockets of humanity suffering from the wasteland, in an all-out battle between good and evil. – Toby Dornal

“I have something strange: Animal well. The freedom to explore this small, self-contained map full of hidden corners means I have a good sense of where I am on the map. Even though I’ve “done” the game’s activities, I’ve felt some strange relief in the last couple of weeks after finishing the game, just wandering around in space for the sheer joy of it. – Ben Gibb Reed

If you have a question about the Q&A – or anything else you’d like to say about the newsletter – Email us at pushbuttons@theguardian.com.