#xbox 20

Xbox 20th Anniversary Controller

This is one of my favorite controllers. The green grips and subtle green ring around the d-pad give it that classic Xbox color while the smooth, smoky transparent shell hides a 20th anniversary logo below the face buttons.

Top Ten Reasons I Bought an Xbox

So, recently, it was the twentieth anniversary of the launch of the original Xbox, and holy cats does THAT make me feel old. Apparently Microsoft has been in the home console business longer than Sega now? That’s insane if true. They still feel like the nascent upstart to me, the brand that’s nerdier because it’s less well-known, which is obviously daft as they’re blimmin’ Microsoft. Even if “Xbox” never became shorthand for “the entire videogame industry” the way Nintendo and Sony did, they’re still, well, Xbox.

Anyway.

I’ve had an Xbox since launch. Well, not quite; it came out over here in March 2002 apparently, and I reckon I probably bought it in the Easter holidays that year when I was home from uni. I had asked for a new graphics card for my computer – a fairly hefty one by my standards – but it either didn’t work or I was just an idiot and couldn’t get it working (accounts differ), and I ended up sending it back and getting a refund. I then decided I could put the money towards an Xbox instead, which would tick all my gaming boxes. But why? Well, that’s what this list is all about. Because at the time Xbox was the weird nerdy option – the strange, huge console with an awkward-looking controller, coming from the company that made Excel. Nintendo had that childlike sense of wonder about it; Sony was all nightclub cool. Microsoft? Microsoft meant productivity software, beige tower cases, EU antitrust violations, and Bill Gates. There was nothing even remotely cool about anything Microsoft ever did, and even though committed PC players such as myself could point to their success in the gaming space – Midtown Madness, Age of Empires, the genuinely-very-good line of joypads and mice – there was little to suggest they had what it took to succeed in the console space.

Other than billions and billions of dollars, of course.

So, despite all other options available to me, despite being a committed computer gamer since childhood, despite being someone who used to dismiss consoles as toys and who always preferred PC games, despite genuinely planning at one point to buy a PS2, what was it that persuaded me to get an Xbox? Why that of all things, why then? And that’s the subject of today’s lesson…

This is, as I said, inspired by the recent anniversary (I was too busy to write extensively about it when it actually happened; fun fact, the last two weeks’ lists were very heavily planned in advance). It’s coming out at quite a nice time, though, as the Xbox Museum launched this week, which is a lovely stroll down memory lane. I do recommend it for anyone who’s played on an Xbox, even though some of its stats seem a little off to me. Apparently my most-played game of 2015 was Kameo. Which I reckon I’ve played exactly three times. And my most-played of all time? Stardew Valley. For that I blame my wife.

Anyway. Onto the list.

Halo: this is the biggie, and I’d never seen anything like it. Reading about this weird Mac RTS from the guys who made Myth and Marathon was one thing; playing it on a demo pod was revelatory, and right then and there I knew I had to have it. I’ve often joked that the most I’ve ever paid for a game was the £500 I spent buying an Xbox bundle, as really I did it to play Halo. The feel of the controls, the emergent gameplay, the graphics, oh god the graphics: this was the first game I ever played where if you looked at the ground you saw blades of grass. I can’t stress this enough: you saw the blades of grass. There’s a reason my most anticipated game of the year is Halo Infinite, and it’s because they nailed it out of the gate, and it absolutely defined the Xbox.

Lionhead: I think Peter Molyneux was the first game developer I actually knew the name of, and when he jumped ship from Bullfrog and created Lionhead, that was a big deal. Black and White was a phenomenal experience, even if it wasn’t perfect, and now he was going to be making games for the Xbox? With this gorgeous-looking “Project Ego” RPG among them? And this wild and weird caveman game, B.C.? it wasn’t just these games and their typically over-zealous promises – “if you plant an acorn it grows into an oak tree” is the famous one – but rather the anticipation for what might come after, the Lionhead games that would only be out on Xbox. Was all that promise fulfilled? Well, Fable II is my favourite Xbox 360 game, so in a way, yes; but in another way, maybe not. At the time, though, I was all in.

A graphical powerhouse: I said that I initinally planned to upgrade my graphics card, but ended up buying a console instead; that was really the beginning of the end for me as a PC gamer. I’d long tried to keep up in the PC graphics arms race; I knew I’d never have top-of-the-line gear, but I wanted to play stuff at good resolutions, with most of the sexy features turned on. My PC ran games that looked better than most console games, but seeing what the Xbox threw out, those days were over. Halo and Project Gotham and Dead or Alive all looked far, far beyond what my PC would ever be capable of, and I figured I’d rather just buy a machine that looked like that than worry about constantly trying to update a computer. Sure, I’d buy more big computers and worry a little bit about running Half-Life 2 and Max Payne 2, but the Xbox was the way forward. Those games were stunning and a leap beyond what I’d ever experienced on a PC.

Hard driving: I vividly remember one interview with a developer in 2001 on the difference between the Xbox and the PS2. He said that both of them could render a “photorealistic” room, but the PS2 would have to render it over and over again every time you moved the camera, whereas the Xbox could store that in the cache on the hard drive. Was that true? I don’t know, I’m not a developer, and I’m trying to remember something I read in Edge twenty years ago. But all the same, the inclusion of an actual hard drive in a console was terrific. For one thing, it meant there was no need to scramble for memory cards or whatever, no worry about not being able to save – something I used to have on the Amiga and which my PC had gotten rid of. So whether the HD really did give the Xbox a graphical or gameplay edge I don’t know, but it definitely sounded like a good idea in my book.

Remote working: by the time the Xbox came out, I did actually have a DVD player. I can’t remember if I got it for Christmas ’99 or 2000, but I know my first two DVDs were The Matrix and 12 Monkeys. Anyway, despite this, the notion of playing DVDs on a console appealed to me. Maybe I was thinking I’d leave my DVD player at home and just use the Xbox at uni? I dunno. Anyway, unlike the PS2 – which was marketed very heavily on being able to play DVDs, if I remember, and did so right out of the box – the Xbox required a DVD remote, which had a little IR doohickie that you plugged into one of the controller ports. This was, apparently, to avoid having to pass the DVD licencing fee onto a consumer unless they really wanted to play DVDs. Anyway, I was happy, and so I bought the remote, doohickie and all. And since then, for the most part, my various Xbox consoles have been my main movie-disc-player of choice (apart from when I briefly had a standalone Blu-ray machine). So, despite it adding even more cost and arguably being a bit fiddlier, playing DVDs was always on my mind. Oh, and the remote was actually really cool, although the later 360 one was the best.

Music Maestro: because it had a hard drive, the Xbox allowed you to rip CDs. This was very fashionable around the turn of the millennium; we all had vast folders of music, either ripped ourselves or, er, “shared” with users across the web. CDs were rapidly becoming passe, and the industry was struggling to cope. Xbox was great in that it not only allowed you to rip your music and listen to it through an in-built music player, but also allowed you to use it as a custom soundtrack in certain games. For me, this was mostly used with Project Gotham, to such an extent that there are certain songs – Jangling Jack by Nick Cave, Get the Party Started by Pink – that instantly make me think of tearing around London in a VW Beetle. I think I had an idea that the Xbox would be like a mini hi-fi for me, which never really happened, but the thought of ripping and playing my music was really cool back then (even though, custom soundtracks aside, it was easier on PC).

The Duke: like I said, I was strictly a PC player; a real big mouse and keyboard guy. I’d used an N64 to play GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, and that was fine as it goes (I mean, they’re great games) but it was no substitute. Everyone was talking about how consoles couldn’t do proper FPS games because you couldn’t aim. The PS2 Dual Shock controller? I hated it. Too small, weirdly angled, and the sticks in the wrong place. Fun fact: all PlayStation controllers are rubbish up until about the PS4. Anyway, the Xbox? That was great. I’ve got big hands, so it never felt too large; solid, robust, with excellent analogue triggers. And the asymmetrical positioning of the sticks somehow made it feel perfect for moving and aiming; somehow, for some reason, they just fit beneath my thumbs in a way no other controller had. Okay, the buttons were spongy and the d-pad rubbish, but for playing Halo, it was a dream. And, yes, they refined and improved it (turned out it was better if it was a bit smaller). But back then? A weird work of art.

Multiplayer: gaming mags were always banging on about multiplayer games. I remember wishing I could experience deathmatch Quake the way PC Zone wrote about it. by the time the Xbox came along, even the scant two-player fun I’d had on the Amiga – with the likes of the Lotus games, Alien Breed, or SWOS – had fallen by the wayside in favour of the full-screen high-octane thrills of FPS gaming. But here, at last, I could play the games I loved with another person, in the same room, via the joys of split-screen. Halo and Project Gotham were amazing in multiplayer, and all it required was another controller. Gotham in particular was an incredible selling point for the console; I remember seeing demos of it in four-player mode and just being astounded. In fact, I still think it’s a huge shame that today’s equivalent, Forza Horizon, only allows multiplayer over the internet. Local multiplayer was a huge deal for me, and I wish they’d put more emphasis on it nowadays.

Ground floor gaming: this might be a bit weird, but I was always slightly intimidated by games consoles. PCs I understood; I’d grown up with home computers, from my cousins’ Spectrum and C64 through the Amiga to the PC. But consoles had their own history, their own language; even just reading my brother’s N64 magazine introduced me to this world of imports and Japanese exclusives, these long-gestating sequels to decade-old games I’d never heard of. Even the relatively new PlayStation – barely five years old at this point – had its own history, but beyond that, reached further back in time with massive sequels to classic Japanese franchises. I didn’t understand any of this; beyond Mario and Sonic, I was lost. So it was nice to have a console that I could access on the ground floor; a brand new machine with no baggage. The start of a bold new era, so to speak. It might be a daft reason, but much like catching a series from the beginning or picking up a comic with issue 1, getting the first-ever Xbox and experiencing the whole console cycle from year zero was appealing.