A Retrospective

By Ryan Treit

The Xbox® is now firmly entrenched as a videogame institution, not just for hardcore players, but for casual fans and even those barely familiar with gaming. While still in its infancy as a franchise console, Xbox has become synonymous with gaming, and no one seems all that surprised.

People forget how many companies have tried to get a piece of the videogame-console pie, only to fail spectacularly. Success in this business is chancy enough when you're just developing software, but success with hardware can be a flat-out crapshoot.

What's even more remarkable is that the Xbox isn't merely surviving, but rather flourishing. Some of the reasons for its success were based on variables that could be controlled, while others were due to cards that fell just right for the console. Let's take a look at a few things that helped the Xbox along the way.

Give Him the Franchise Tag
What if the Xbox had launched without Halo®: Combat Evolved? What game would have taken its place? It's true that there were plenty of good titles when the system debuted, but none sold the system quite like Halo. It's vital to have a game that gets people talking, gets people excited, and gets people buying. It's like a hit movie. You can never be quite sure what will ignite that special spark and become a pop-culture icon. All you can be sure of is that if you don't have it, it's going to be an uphill climb. Xbox and Halo are a match made in gaming heaven, and we can safely say that the Master Chief helped Xbox establish itself.

Storage
It seems like such a simple concept, but the Xbox really was the first console to come with a hard drive. No memory cards are needed. You can buy memory cards, it's true (they're handy for taking a saved game to a friend's house), but for the first time, memory cards weren't essential. Beyond the ability to save games directly to a hard drive, you can rip custom soundtracks and listen to those soundtracks in-game. The hard drive also allows developers to cache information directly to the console, creating design possibilities never before available for home video game systems.

Big to Small
Not to say anything too controversial, but I think I can safely say that the original Xbox controller did not meet with universal approval. For me, it was big, awkward to hold, and just didn't feel quite right. You have to give Microsoft® and the folks behind Xbox some credit, though, because they immediately recognized the controller's lack of acceptance and just as immediately offered an alternative, the Controller S. A controller isn't a deal breaker, and I wouldn't even call the original controller terrible (many of my friends still swear by it), but the fact that Microsoft made the switch spoke volumes to gamers everywhere.

The New Frontier
The successful launch of the Xbox and its almost immediate stranglehold on the number-two spot in North American console sales was a victory. The biggest push, the biggest change, and the most radical paradigm shift in console history, however, was the way in which the Xbox embraced the online market.

The Xbox provided an online service that had never been attempted before. Just having a game online with a home console was radical enough, but Xbox Live® took that basic idea and ran with it. It wasn't just a game. It was a whole service with a set of rules, promises, and standards. For the first time, a console company was saying that every one of its online games would:

• Support online voice communication.
• Offer dynamic online scoreboards.
• Support cross-game invites. (You can invite a friend to play Halo® 2, for instance, even if they're playing another game online.)
• Offer OptiMatch™ and Quick Match as standard functions.

These are just a few of the basic principles that we expect from every Xbox Live-enabled game. They give us the foundation that all online games are built on. They set a standard.

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