When something is 20 years old it’s easy for memories to focus on the best things. The Xbox 360, Microsoft’s best attempt at shaking up the games industry, wasn’t perfect (hello RROD, hello a pivot to Kinect), but it’s a console that for many is remembered as their console – the one that arrived at just the right time and offered exactly the right experiences.
We’ve cast our minds back to that time, when unbelievably PlayStation was often playing second fiddle, Xbox Live was booming, and the future for consoles looked great.
Alex: I skipped school. I would’ve been 16, so this was GCSE year, and for whatever reason my mum let me pull a sickie on the Friday of the 360’s release. I was old enough that I could That’s not massively in character for her, and I’m still not sure why she let me do it. In 2005, I’d been doing video game blogging and fan sites for several years – but 2004/5 was when I’d figured out internet advertising and I had started making actual money (which was how I could afford one!)… so maybe mum had seen there might actually be a career in this and let me prioritize it over school for a day. I genuinely don’t remember.
What I do remember is feeling particularly smug, because when we turned up to our local Toys R Us at 8am to pick up my pre-order, one of my mates was there with his mum. But whereas they were picking it up and then he was being carted off to school – which is how it should’ve been, to be fair – I was going home to get stuck straight in.
The other thing I remember is a shortage of consoles. The Premium machines, specifically. Or people who’d been confused by the branding, pre-ordered Core, then turned up on the day and were frustrated about what they were missing. I remember seeing quite a few people buying the Core Console plus a 20GB hard drive separately, which meant they were paying £10 more for the same stuff as someone who’d pre-ordered correctly would pay.
Rushing home, I was straight onto Perfect Dark Zero. Because I was already writing about games though admittedly as an under-age amateur, Microsoft had invited me to some pre-launch party. I took a friend, and I recall us getting annoyed when they clocked we were sixteen and thereby ruled out any more of the free bottles of Heineken that were being handed out. At that pre-launch event we played quite a lot of PDZ, and I zeroed in (pun unintended) on how even though the campaign seemed pretty naff, the multiplayer had some of that classic Perfect Dark special energy. Indeed it did, and it thereby became my go-to online game pretty much all the way through until Halo 3’s release two years later, with a brief interlude for a Gears of War addiction.
A final note: going through the SD card that was in an ancient phone, the oldest photo I have to hand of my first Xbox 360 appears to be from August 18th 2006 – a photo of it having red-ringed
There it is, lit up with the mark of death. The black and green tube with the red top appears to be a smoke grenade – laying on the desk just inches from the console putting out so much heat that it melted its own silicon. I was a sensible super-genius then as well, you see. Given how widespread this problem ultimately was – and how quickly it clearly reared its head – it’s astonishing how well Xbox was able to recover this generation. That, I think, speaks to show how they against all odds really had something special going on.
Dom: I didn’t get an Xbox 360 at launch, I couldn’t afford it. I was two years late to the party, when I was working as a kitchen porter (and eventually commis chef) in a small countryside pub under the watchful gaze of a Michelin-starred chef. I was 16 at the time, in the pub on evenings and weekends whilst doing my GCSEs, and eventually I started to hear the sous chef talking about his fancy new console, and a game called Halo 3. I was a proper little nerd, with my collection of 40+ PS2 RPGs, and thought this new HD console wouldn’t do anything for me. How wrong I was.
One day, after service, the sous invited me back to his house (well, houseboat, actually, docked in a nearby marina) and chucked me a beer and booted up Halo 3 on the 360. It literally took about two minutes for me to be sold on this. Crisp, colourful visuals in 3D, and amazing audio coming through a cinema system that filled the front room of this small canal boat with fat, bass-y booms… it was unlike anything I’d experienced before. It was a far cry from playing Shin Megami Tensei on my tiny, CRT TV/DVD-player combo. Just like that, I was convinced.
The next day, I took my PS2 and collection of 100+ games to the local GameStation, and traded them all in for a Halo 3-themed Xbox 360, a copy of the game, and one controller. The shine didn’t come off for a while (my next few paychecks and tip packets all went to getting a cheap little flatscreen HD TV, too), and I must have sunk hundreds of hours into Halo 3. It was the only game I had for about five months.
To this day, I regret getting rid of my PS2 collection. A lot of those games are worth serious money now, and the 360 didn’t really start getting good RPGs until a bit later in its life (Blue Dragon
Bertie: I hadn’t owned a console in years. The last console that was actually mine and not borrowed from friends was a SNES, which was bought for me, very kindly, by my parents one birthday long ago (I’d gone to bed crying the night before because they’d lied to me about being able to get one, and then blam, total turnaround the next day). But after that: a console drought. I slaked my thirst by going to other friends’ houses who owned them, then I migrated to MMOs and to PC.
But my PC was struggling to play The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Emperor Uriel Septim 7 didn’t look so much like Patrick Stewart as Pancake Stewart, and it bothered me. I’d been waiting for this game. I was excited to play it, but my PC, apparently, wasn’t. So five months after the Xbox 360 launched I bought one to play Oblivion on.
And I did play that game a lot (I once spent an entire afternoon once making a super-spell so I could annihilate town’s worth of guards in cast – some of my finest work) but my memories of the Xbox 360 expand far beyond that. I particularly remember how exciting the machine was because of the technological advancement it represented and showcased: HDTV. This wasn’t really a thing before Xbox 360; it was kicking around as a technology but there weren’t many reasons to pay out for it. We lived in a world of DVDs and film-by-post services. But then suddenly there were HDTV games.
Seeing a game being played in HD was a big deal. It was the sort of thing bystanders would huddle around and coo over, even if they knew nothing about games. “That looks crisp – what is that?” they’d say. I remember backpacking my Xbox 360 around to a few places by way of demonstrating it, this next generation of visual fidelity. The games I showcased it with? Fifa, Rockstar’s Table Tennis, Fight Night Round 3. God I miss Fight Night.
I have such strong memories of that generation. Maybe it’s because it was the first console I’d owned in years and because I’d bought it for myself, but it was also because of the games, I think. Oblivion, Mass Effect, Gears of War (co-op and multiplayer!), Geometry Wars, Lost Odyssey, BioShock, Guitar Hero 2. The Xbox 360 really felt like the beginning of something new.
Tom: I’ve told my most interesting Xbox 360 story already (did an Xbox 360 car crash predict the future?), but I have others. I could talk about a former Xbox PR manager who, an observer might have thought, wanted to take out as many games journos as possible during a karting event to promote the latest Forza Motorsport release, or frenzy Xbox whipped people into over the launch of Halo 3 (the likes of which you rarely see today), but instead I’ll briefly talk about the PlayStation 3.
Why are you doing that, Tom? This isn’t a week to celebrate the PS3, you idiot. Well, I think it’s important to consider just what an impact the Xbox 360 had, especially in the UK and the US. I attended the London launch event of the PlayStation 3 (I think at a Virgin Megastore) in March 2007. Former Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios president, Phil Harrison, was in attendance (he’s a surprisingly tall man), as were a fairly subdued crowd who didn’t really feel like they were about to be buying the future of video games.
The Xbox 360 had been on sale in the UK for about 15 months by the time Sony’s latest console hit stores, and well, the mood reflected that. As I walked along the queue and spoke to people, asking them what they were excited about, an alarmingly high number didn’t name any games at all. I was given answers that ranged from “playing blu-rays” to “using it as a home computer and linking it to my printer.” It was a truly bizarre time. A lot of the PS3 launch titles were already available on the Xbox 360 (Oblivion had been spinning in our 360s for a whole year at this point), and we’d recently got exclusives like Dead Rising, Gears of War, Viva Pinata, and Lost Planet.
It’s fair to say that the PlayStation 3 just didn’t seem to be that exciting for a lot of people. Price also played its part, with Xbox being super aggressive at £280 for the premium console, while Sony was asking for £425. PS3 went on to outsell the Xbox 360 globally (not by much), but it was a rather unique time, when Sony wasn’t seen as the undisputed king of the market.
P.S: PR and marketing was a different world back then. To mark the huge difference in price between the Xbox 360 and the PS3, Xbox PR sent games media crates of Fosters lager to demonstrate how much money you’d save if you bought an Xbox. I didn’t drink, but the crates became useful tables.
The Xbox 360 turns 20 years old on 22nd November, so we’ve put together a week of coverage that looks back on Microsoft’s most successful games console.