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15 years ago I was 15 years younger than I am now, it boggles the mind!
The whole point of the Xbox was for Microsoft to use it as a trojan horse to get multimedia Internet content in your living room. They didn't start the whole thing just for game license revenues.
Mattrick was just following the road map implied by the Xbox project since the beginning.
His failure was actually setting the stage for its retreat back into a games console.
That failure was inevitable, given how long ago the Xbox project was started. Back with the original Xbox and the start of the 360 it seemed perhaps like an attainable goal, dominate the living room through a big black box game console, but then phones, tablets, smart tvs, and small and cheap streaming boxes emerged and that goal was suddenly far out of reach and no longer realistic.
At this point going back to just games was the only reasonable decision to make
He also announced the worlds worst video game controller.
That failure was inevitable, given how long ago the Xbox project was started. Back with the original Xbox and the start of the 360 it seemed perhaps like an attainable goal, dominate the living room through a big black box game console, but then phones, tablets, smart tvs, and small and cheap streaming boxes emerged and that goal was suddenly far out of reach and no longer realistic.
At this point going back to just games was the only reasonable decision to make, and to try and leverage the Xbox brand name across as much of Microsoft's products and services as possible. In the next few years I think we will see Xbox cease to mean Microsoft's game console, and come to mean Microsoft gaming across all their platforms, including any future consoles.
He also announced the worlds worst video game controller.
Sometimes I just want to rebuy one. Mainly for Gunvalkyrie, PD:Orta, NG: Black and Otogi 2. Those games won't ever be playable anywhere else I think.
That failure was inevitable, given how long ago the Xbox project was started. Back with the original Xbox and the start of the 360 it seemed perhaps like an attainable goal, dominate the living room through a big black box game console, but then phones, tablets, smart tvs, and small and cheap streaming boxes emerged and that goal was suddenly far out of reach and no longer realistic.
At this point going back to just games was the only reasonable decision to make, and to try and leverage the Xbox brand name across as much of Microsoft's products and services as possible. In the next few years I think we will see Xbox cease to mean Microsoft's game console, and come to mean Microsoft gaming across all their platforms, including any future consoles.
they basically were under the impression that living room computing was going to threaten their Windows empire, when in reality it was mobile that was that threat. How they missed that is insane to me
Not that insane actually. Imagine being in 2000 and telling people playing Counter-Strike or Quake that the future of entertainment would be playing Angry Birds or Minecraft on small phone screens or underpowered tablets...
It's easy to say it was obvious after you've witnessed the rise of smartphones and social networking, but it wasn't that obvious 15 years ago.
Wonderful console - imported one from the States.
That controller, though.
This book is a great read.
PS2 was just a bigger console all around... but whenever I went to frat house environment in the early 2000s with a bong on the coffee table, that crowd always preferred Xbox.
This is the part I don't agree with. The branding just isn't bro to me and my experience of what would now be 2000-05 bros just didn't play Xbox. Out of my year at school only 3 people including myself owned Xboxs.The branding style was directly responsible for that association... As was Halo. Even putting aside all the game choice motivations, bros flocked to that brand.
I was thinking late 90s and late 90s Sega, actually, along with The Matrix.I can see where you're coming from saying Xbox branding was 90s (particularly early 90s - I just mentioned that it looked like it was from a 1993 Mountain Dew commercial).
Again, I'm still not seeing this side to it - but perhaps this is something to do with a difference in how it was marketed in the US and UK. It was marketed quite classy (the baby -> death ad), if not Sony-esque, and aggressively in the UK. The box art looks great (I had a black one and crystal) and Monster, Ed Hardy t-shirts etc didn't really make it "big" here until after 2007, I would say. Pimp My Ride was popular, obviously, but even then I'm talking like 2004.But no console had based their branding completely around extreeeeeeme attitude. Sega might have screamed at you in the early 90s and Nintendo might have played it loud... But the actual branding was all "classy tech". Xbox was the first to make their logo and packaging look right at home among cans of Monster, Ed Hardy T-shirts and Pimp My Ride.
Cultivated it? Probably. Aimed to grow it with the branding? Not at all. The bro-gamer demographic (what ever that even is) was just a natural expansion of gaming as already mentioned in this thread. MS just enabled that with the 360 being the 1st to have a reliable and solid online infrastructure ad also the 1st to market with it last gen.I think they cultivated a fan base that grew into the typical FPS bro gamer of the late 2000s (like the kid in GTAV). Gamers in the 90s weren't like that.
Bought one on launch day and it still runs fine.
Maybe, but their ambitions were a whole lot higher than just gaming. It wasn't a stretch to understand that people wanted to read their emails, browse the internet and listen to music on the go as opposed to just being tethered to the living room instead of the computer room.
They should have cast their net wider instead of dumping billions into the Xbox and getting meager returns even 15 years later.
They did. They also spent billions on things like tablet PCs, Zune, smartphones or Courier. Not all of them were a success and many mistakes were made, but you can't accuse them of betting on a single horse. Only it's the Xbox horse that was the more successful.
We need a sequel focused on Xbox One
Courier looked amazing. I'm not sure it would have been a success, ultimately, given the rise of tablets and phones - but the concept videos were incredible.
Surface Pro 3, now you're talking
While the Xbox was a cool system, it always bothered me Microsoft never pushed for 1st party on it.
Even I knew back then the console was a Halo box. Luckily, there were third party exclusives to fill in the gaps but I think that strategy has worn thin.
Fast forward today, almost all third parties have gone multiplat now.
15 years ago I was 15 years younger than I am now, it boggles the mind!
Reminder to cut your clock capacitor in your Xbox
Wait, was the GPU on the OG Xbox really that good? 140gflops?
That's like 1/10th of the xbone's GPU!
was this GDC?
That makes more sense!Nowhere near. It's like 5.8 GFLOPS.
That makes more sense!
But why does the OP article say 140 gflop processor?
PS2 was my console of choice during the 6th gen but the Xbox brand has caused console gaming to change in many ways.
Heck, I would go as far as saying that this current gen of gaming would be VERY different if the Xbox brand didn't exist. All three current gen systems (Xbox One obviously) would be different if it weren't for the online features that the Xbox brand made standard.
I still have love for that big ass controller. And my Crystal Xbox is still one of the greatest and most awesome consoles I own!
He also announced the worlds worst video game controller.
Easily the coolest prototype console ever.
It's funny, I'm a huge Nintendo fan at heart, and I like both the PlayStation 3 and PS4 better than their direct competition. I'm an OSX guy. I have an iPhone.
But the more and more I think about it, I really do think the original Xbox may just be my favorite console of all time.
Built-in highspeed internet
Built-in hard drive
720p and 1080i games in 2001/2002
it is disgusting.You know what's even more amazing? 720p games in 2015.
You know what's even more amazing? 720p games in 2015.
Not only did Malice get released, it also showed up on PS2.