20 Years of Xbox 360: Microsoft's Reach for the Stars

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Until the turn of the millennium, Microsoft was not directly known as a gaming company. Of course, the company, then still led by founder Bill Gates, provided the operating systems on which the world's PC games had run since the early 80s. And naturally, there were always games associated with Microsoft, foremost among them the "Flight Simulator" series, which had existed since 1982. And the company also had a hardware division that brought to market, among other things, some excellent products like the "Microsoft Mouse" or the "SideWinder" series of gamepads and flight sticks.

But its own console? Microsoft left this field to others for a very long time. While Nintendo, Sony, and Sega celebrated one success after another, Microsoft first began to explore this direction in the late 90s – in the form of the operating system based on "Windows CE," which powered Sega's beloved, but ultimately very unfortunate, Dreamcast console. This doesn't seem to have dampened the enthusiasm of the Redmond company, because almost exactly three years after the Dreamcast's initial release, Microsoft finally launched its own gaming system: the Xbox, a name derived from the original working title "DirectXbox." It was a mighty, powerful box that already did many things right (built-in hard drive, broadband internet use, very developer-friendly development environment, etc.) and established game franchises like "Halo" and "Ninja Gaiden."

Right out of the gate, the Xbox became a very solid success with a total of about 24 million units sold. While not comparable to the 160 million of the PlayStation 2, it was a clear lead over the GameCube (approx. 22 million) and the Dreamcast (approx. 10 million). With the successor model, officially announced at E3 2005, everything was supposed to get better – Microsoft wanted nothing less than world domination!

360 What?

The name of this successor was not "Xbox 2," but "Xbox 360." An unusual choice. According to Robbie Bach, then head of Microsoft's Entertainment division, this was partly because they didn't want to appear numerically outdated compared to the PlayStation 3, which was also about to be released at the time. Secondly, the new Xbox was intended to be more than "just" a game console: users should also be able to watch movies and TV shows, listen to music, and surf the internet – in short, a 360° entertainment offering. For Netflix, which launched streaming in the US in 2007, the 360 was also an important platform.

It hit North American stores on November 22, 2005, followed by Europe a week and a half later. The large white box with the friendly green rings and the simple "XBOX 360" lettering contained a system that hid a tremendous amount of processing power for the consoles of that era within its slim casing: the tri-core "Xenon" CPU based on PowerPC with 3.2 GHz, 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM, and the ATI "Xenos" GPU at 500 MHz. For the year 2005, this was a fiery racehorse!.

Furthermore, the development environment was very user-friendly again (unlike the PlayStation 3, released about a year later). Microsoft could already draw on ten years of experience, including with DirectX on Windows. Developing for the Xbox 360 was hardly different from classic PC programming – no wonder then that small and large game studios enthusiastically embraced the system. Counting all retail and digital releases via Xbox Live Arcade, the Xbox 360 received over 2,100 games during its regular eight years of life.

Looking to the Future

But it wasn't just the sheer volume of entertainment that made the Xbox 360 so special; it was also its presentation. Because it was only with the 360 that true HD gaming officially entered living rooms and children's rooms worldwide. The PlayStation 2 and GameCube only offered 480p output, and while the original Xbox could output a 720p signal, it was only used by very few games, and only in the US in NTSC standard – this feature was not available in PAL regions.

The Xbox 360, on the other hand, was designed for 720p (i.e., "HD ready") from the start. With the dashboard update released in October 2006, support for 1080p ("Full HD") was even added via component and VGA cables. Later, it was also available via HDMI on newer console models. Initially, the 360's connections were heavily tailored to the US market, where component inputs for HD signals were common on televisions. And once you had played "Call of Duty 2," "Kameo: Elements of Power," "Need for Speed: Most Wanted," or "Peter Jackson's King Kong" (four of the 15 European launch titles) in HD, the step back to the blurry pixels of our ancestors was a difficult one.

Welcome to the Home Arcade

Another extremely important contribution of the Xbox 360 was making online gaming on consoles mainstream. Of course, such options existed before; for example, the Dreamcast came with a built-in 56k modem. For the PlayStation 2 and GameCube, there were corresponding network adapters sooner or later, and the first Xbox already relied on broadband internet usage via its built-in Ethernet adapter.

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Die besten Spiele-Serien der Xbox 360 (3 Bilder)

Gears of War

But back then, it was more "proof of concept" than a real online service. The true democratization of online gaming on consoles came with the Xbox 360 and the "Xbox Live" service, which was geared towards gaming from the start and was by far the best online service on consoles for a long time. Games like "Gears of War," "Halo 3," "Battlefield: Bad Company 2," or "Forza Motorsport 2" were already a huge fun for solo players. But online, with or against real people, entirely new entertainment worlds opened up.

This also includes the game service called "Xbox Live Arcade." This also began on the original Xbox, but was just an afterthought there. On the Xbox 360, it was one of the most important arguments for smaller developers. Because here you found not only great ports of many classics like "Rez," "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night," "Ikaruga," "Radiant Silvergun," or "Contra," but also some of the best indie games of all time. Games like "Braid," "Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved," "Bastion," "Limbo," "Super Meat Boy," or "Trials HD" got their start on the Xbox Live Arcade of the 360.

Of course, not everything went as smoothly as it sounds in retrospect. For example, initially, you could only pay in "Microsoft Points" in the Arcade, a virtual currency that you had to buy with real Euros – which was always only possible in blocks, such as 400 Points for 4.80 Euros. Furthermore, Arcade games were initially not allowed to be larger than 50 megabytes. But both this size limit and the arbitrary payment system quickly disappeared, and you could look forward to at least one new XBLA game every Wednesday.

Working for the Gamerscore

But not every innovation of the 360 was automatically a good idea. The concept of "Achievements," for example, is still controversial today: on the one hand, the steadily increasing "Gamerscore" from unlocked achievements is a nice additional reward for particularly attentive or persistent players. On the other hand, clever developers quickly discovered the pull of simple "Cheevos" for themselves and pushed cheaply made games into XBLA, whose sole reason for existence was the very easily unlockable achievements. But no matter how you feel about this system, it has prevailed. Achievements or their counterparts can now be found on PlayStation, Steam, in retro emulators, and pretty much everywhere.

With other ideas, one wonders in retrospect why they were ever approved: The "Kinect" system, an oversized camera that captures movements in front of the TV and can transfer them into the game, cost hundreds of millions of US dollars in development and marketing. Ultimately, it only resulted in a few simple games that could never compete with those that had already existed for Sony's "EyeToy" system years earlier. And the external HD-DVD drive, which was added later, flopped despite several price reductions – the format war for HD discs was won by Sony with Blu-ray. The PlayStation 3 with a corresponding drive was released a year after the Xbox 360.

Over a Billion for the Death Ring

And then, of course, there was the dreaded "Red Ring of Death": a hardware failure that affected the first generation of the Xbox 360, and owed its name to the ring indicator on the front of the 360. In normal operation, it glowed encouragingly green – but if the console was broken, the segments glowed blood red, and nothing worked anymore.

In 2007, this became a real problem for Microsoft; more and more customers reported consoles spontaneously failing, and the author of these lines was affected three times. Microsoft extended the warranty of the Xbox 360 and replaced all affected devices without issue. However, this naturally cost a lot of money again. Official reports speak of nearly 1.15 billion US dollars, and customer trust was also shaken. In its own YouTube documentary on the history of Xbox consoles called "Power On," Microsoft presents the whole thing as a quick, top-level problem-solving effort. It also shows the anger that many players in the US vented at the consoles at the time. To be fair, the PlayStation 3 also suffered from a similar, but less widespread, problem called the "Yellow Light of Death" (YLOD).

Beautiful New Game World

But when the console ran, it ran like clockwork: The picture was wonderfully sharp, the controller felt great in the hand, the sound boomed in Dolby Digital from the speakers – it was an entire new world of gaming! "Gears of War," "Forza Horizon," "Halo," "Mass Effect," "Dead Rising," "Lost Planet," "Skyrim," "Dead or Alive," "Crackdown," "Project Gotham Racing," "Lost Odyssey," "Blue Dragon," "Fable," "Alan Wake," "Halo Wars" – there are so many games and series that either began on the Xbox 360, were continued on it, or reached their peak performance on it.

There's a reason why the Xbox 360 is not only Microsoft's best-selling console to date with over 80 million units sold, but also its most popular. The company learned thoroughly from the experiences and mistakes of the first Xbox and delivered a successor that simply did everything much better.

Exactly eight years after its initial release date, the Xbox One followed the 360. But will we look back on it with the same enthusiasm in another twelve years?

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