Xbox 360 Wallpaper (Credit: tommy999999 on DeviantArt)
The Xbox 360 era of gaming was lightning in a bottle, and defined a generation of gamers.
I remember what life was like in 2006. I’d run out in my pajamas to the living room, turn on the Xbox 360, launch Marble Blast Ultra, and try navigating those courses while snacking on Low Sodium Wheat Thins. A few years later, I’d be running Nazi Zombies on Call of Duty: World at War after school with my buddies, and then we’d gather around the tables in the lunchroom to discuss the next day. After that, there would be summertime gaming sessions which would last all night. By the end of the 360’s lifespan, I had built strong friendships over the internet, and experienced stories which I could never have even dreamt up.
The Era of the Xbox 360 was something you just had to be there for. Those of us who took part in that legendary chapter of gaming history will always remember it fondly. Modern hardware has far outpaced the latest stage Xbox 360, and the cultural environment had continued to evolve, but there are factors which make nostalgia for the Xbox 360 less rose hued memories of the good old days and more fond remembrance of catching lightning in a bottle.
The 360 Degree View
Microsoft entered the gaming console market in 2001 with the original Xbox. It was a good forerunner to its far more iconic successor. The success story of the Xbox 360 was built by its online multiplayer service, but the original Xbox was where Xbox Live began its life. A great console in its own right, Microsoft rolled many of the lessons learned with the original Xbox into development of the Xbox 360 and the underlying infrastructure for the online gaming sphere.
The benefits of a console rest within its standardized nature. Unlike PCs, consoles don’t have to be upgraded as often. PC gaming is a costly enterprise to play at the top level, and not all PCs are created equal. The advent of console gaming leveled the hardware playing field in competitive environments. Now, every player uses identical machines with identical specifications. It also makes development easier, since game developers only have to write to one set of specifications instead of having to account for the wide range available with PCs. Games were easier to optimize for consoles, especially if they were exclusives. Therefore, a console built with the online experience in mind was a recipe for gaming success.
The Xbox 360 was released with great fanfare on November 22nd, 2005. Initial reviews were quite positive, and the consoles were difficult to keep on the shelves. With support for online gaming out of the box (wired, there was a separate wireless adapter that needed to be purchased for wireless connectivity), the Xbox took the industry by storm. It’s popular ‘Blades’ dashboard was loved for its simplicity and usability, even if it was slow to react. The variety of launch titles available highlighted the variety of games the console could handle.
One of the 360’s great leaps forward was the Achievements system. Achievements were ways for singleplayer games to be competitive and were earned for performing certain feats in games as decided by the developers. Common Achievements were finishing games on certain difficulty levels, collecting all collectibles, and so on. Each Achievement gave players a certain amount of Gamerscore, which was tracked across their Xbox Live profile. This resulted in websites like Achievement Hunter spinning up, where they would come up with Achievement guides for some harder to accomplish feats. Now, single player games had a competitive component to them. Players earned Achievements to raise their Gamerscore visible on their profiles, which gave them bragging rights. Online competitive games still had their stats, and their head to head competitions, but for the players who gravitated more towards cooperative or single-player games, they too could now get in on the bragger with their friends.
The community aspect was another advantage of the more centralized console experience. In the days before Steam, Xbox Live gave players a list of friends and ways to communicate with them. A player could see which of their friends was online at any given time and what games they were playing. Inviting friends to games or party chats was accomplished with a simple click of a button in the Xbox guide.
With the advent of voice chat in video games, games became social in ways they hadn’t before. The Xbox 360 had a messaging component which had both text and voice messages. From its launch, there was also a one-to-one private voice chat which worked even when players were playing different games or doing other things on the Xbox. That was extended into Xbox Live Party Chat on November 19th, 2008, with the NXE update. This allowed up to eight players to join a chat even if they were playing different games. Before this, group chat took place solely in game. Trash talking in lobbies was a part of the gaming experience, and while many recall the days of uncensored verbal abuse fondly, this now gave people who did not wish to be subject to the torrent of insults, slurs, and profanity a way to be social in the gaming sphere.
In April 2007, the first major upgrade of the 360 platform released: the Xbox 360 Elite. The Elite had a bigger hard drive, some upgraded components, and would give a slight edge without breaking the difficulty scaling. And it was now in black. The improvements would continue with the Xbox 360 Slim’s release in 2010 with a redesigned form factor and new hardware to allow compatibility with the Kinect.
Despite the Xbox 360’s reign as King Console for its era, it wasn’t a slew of nonstop victories. Early on, content on the Xbox Live Marketplace was purchased using Microsoft Points, instead of using cash. This would only be phased out in the last few years of the 360’s lifespan before its successor was released.
In the late 2000s, motion gaming was king, and Kinect was the biggest revolution in motion-controlled gaming. Created to compete with the Nintendo Wii, which popularized motion controls, the Kinect was an advanced piece of technology which could look at the room and pick up human figures and follow their gestures. Several games were built solely for Kinect. Kinect would be an included peripheral for the Xbox One when it released in 2013, only being dropped a few years later, and eventually sunset entirely by the time the Xbox One finished its own era at the launch of the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles in 2020. The underlying technology with the Kinect, however, would prove very useful in other avenues, where it continues today.
An overview of the Xbox 360 also cannot be comprehensive without mentioning the infamous Red Ring of Death. The original Xbox 360’s power button was backlit, and showed how many controllers were connected by segments of the ring around the icon. If one controller was connected, then the upper left segment would be lit in green, and the other three would fill in clockwise as other controllers were connected, up to four. When the console had a major failure, segments one, two, and four would light up in red, while segment three remain dark. In the early days of the 360’s lifespan, Red Rings were a very common occurrence.
Initially, the problem was believed to be damage caused to elements within the console not rated for the heat. A recent documentary gave more insight into the cause of the problem. The real reason was the stress on internal components caused by the rapid temperature shift of the console running hot in use and then rapidly cooling once powered off. Of course, with the community collaborating to find a solution for a problem they didn’t completely understand, some unorthodox methods sprung up to try and squeeze a little more life out of red ringed 360s. The infamous towel trick involved wrapping a console in a towel while the power was on to trap excess heat. This was believed to reheat the bonding between components and reestablish a specific connection. It worked in the short term, but long term, the console would have to be replaced – which was pricey – or sent back to Microsoft for a very time-consuming refurbishment process which meant a player may be without a console for months. Later generations of the Xbox 360 would have new boards which eliminated the red ring problem of early models. The red ring remained the signal for serious errors, but never to the same extent as in the early days of the console’s lifespan.
The Xbox 360, despite that pesky red ring, would become an icon in its own time, still remembered with fond nostalgia by those who were there. Much like George Foreman vs. Muhammad Ali in The Rumble in the Jungle, the Xbox 360 vs. PlayStation 3 was one of the defining showdowns of its time.
Much like Ali, the Xbox 360 was one standing on top when it was all over.
Long Live the King!
The Console Wars have been raging for many years. They continue even at this very moment, on schoolyards, message boards, social media posts, and amongst friends talking face to face. The argument over whether Xbox or Sony’s PlayStation is the supreme console to rule them all is an argument that has been played out hundreds of millions of times with no definite result. Throughout every iteration of their respective consoles, arguments could be made for either side winning. In retrospect, most people believe that the 360 came out on top over the PS3.
The 360’s dominance in its time was due to its interface, its more modest price point, the strength of its online community, and the bounty of first party exclusives available on the console. From a social aspect, the Xbox 360 did more to facilitate social interaction on the digital planes. The 360 launched a year before the PlayStation 3, which gave it a head start in gaining market share. Furthermore, Xbox Live was a paid subscription service, at a cost of around sixty dollars per year, and was worth the money. PlayStation Network was free, but many agreed that Xbox’s service outshone PlayStation’s, and the fact that Microsoft gave its Xbox Live team the resources to remain secure and strong while PlayStation suffered a major outage in 2011.
The Xbox 360 also had backwards compatibility with many original Xbox games, offering people who did not have older functioning consoles to go back and play older games. This meant that original Xbox users were more likely to purchase the 360 knowing their investment in their game libraries Backwards compatibility would disappear when the Xbox One launched in 2013, but would come back in June 2015, and the library of backwards compatible games would continue to grow even after the launch of the Xbox Series X|S in 2020. Having the majority of the original Xbox’s library available to 360 users when the Sony PlayStation 3 did not offer the same with PS1 and PS2 games helped the Xbox’s popularity for many gamers.
Of course, people also enjoyed playing new games on the Xbox 360 as well. 2007 was a landmark year in gaming. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare wrote a whole new book on first person shooter games. New series like Mass Effect and Bioshock paved the way for the prestige of gaming as a storytelling narrative. The release of Portal showed the puzzle solving aspect to gaming in a way which hadn’t been seen before. The Assassins Creed, Uncharted, Rock Band, and Witcher series of games were all launched. But one game would stand above the rest in terms of cultural impact.
On September 25th, 2007, we finished the fight. Halo 3 was the single most anticipated release of the year. The game was released with about as much fanfare as the console it was made for. Halo 3’s launch is one of those cultural moments which shall live forever in the minds of gamers who witnessed it. It’s also unlikely to ever happen again. The game’s release made national headlines.
Halo 3 was a cultural touchstone moment. Xbox Live had taken off with Halo 2, and much of the experience around the original Xbox’s successor was built around that connectivity. Halo 3 was the culmination of that work in the initial era of the Xbox 360. The game represented the best of Xbox as a whole, and was the perfect melding of cinematic gameplay experiences, cutting edge graphics (which still hold up fairly well today), social aspects of gaming, and encouraging creativity with its Forge and Theater modes. Forge was an object editor baked into the game where players could customize maps. Players used environmental objects to build entirely new maps. Combined with the ability to edit settings for the game types, Halo 3 became a platform for creativity. The Custom Games scene in the Halo 3 era was an important part in the game’s dominance, which parlayed into the Xbox 360’s success. Halo series developer Bungie would do significant upgrades to the capabilities of Forge and the customization of game settings in their next entry, Halo Reach, which released in 2010.1 The Theater mode was a filmmaking tool where players could view entire matches they had recently played, both custom games and competitive rounds of Matchmaking, and take clips to record. The use of free cam was important to this, allowing players to show different views of epic fails or incredible successes. It also allowed the game to be used for filmmaking.
Machinima is the art of making a film inside of a video game. The machinima community was really kicked off by Rooster Teeth with their popular webseries, Red vs. Blue. Red vs. Blue used creative cropping and some game glitches to help create a series inside of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 about simulation troopers in a box canyon undertaking whacky adventures. When Halo 3 released, not only did RvB’s filmmaking take a leap up, but so did the series’ writing with the sixth season, subtitled “Reconstruction.”2 A large part of that technical improvement was thanks to the tools Halo 3 offered, such as Forge and Theater. Red vs. Blue came to an end earlier this year around the time when Rooster Teeth itself closed down.
Of course, Red vs. Blue wouldn’t be the only machinima series to become popular. An entire company, called Machinima, Inc., would create both gaming news content (some of which used Halo 3 as a studio), and entertainment content. Machinima, Inc. had a bit of a troubled history. Many factors which led to their eventual downfall, one of which was the troubled relationship with its creators. The company would often stiff its creators on payment and push exploitive contracts onto young creators who didn’t know better. Then they abandoned machinima as an artform. The company would lose popularity when many of its high profile creators struck out on their own, and eventually folded in 2019 amidst little fanfare. Except for the fact that all of its videos were deleted from YouTube without any warning to the creators, many of whom now had no way to show their past work to prospective employers. One such creator is a man known as Jon Graham, aka JonCJG, aka DigitalPh33r (his original name; a relic of usernames being far less personal than today).
Different creators would use the game as the depiction of the real world, or to tell stories which were aware they took place within a video game. Graham did both. His two related series, Hard Justice and One Life Remaining took place in a world represented by Halo 3 in its entirety. His most popular show, however, was Arby ‘n’ the Chief. This show would be his most successful, beginning as a one off video for Machinima, “Master Chief Sucks at Halo,” the premise of the main series is that two figurines of the two lead characters of the original Halo trilogy came to life and lived inside Jon’s apartment, only Jon had no knowledge of the toys being alive. Much of the action centered around Master Chief and the Arbiter interacting with each other, with Master Chief as an illiterate, ill-tempered, and obsessive Halo fanboy, and the Arbiter as his long-suffering, culturally aware, refined, and intelligent roommate. Much of the conflict of the show comes with these two viewpoints clashing and referencing pop culture phenomena at the time. The early seasons are very rough around the edges but showed heart. That heart won the show a loyal fanbase, and the show transitioned into becoming a bigger, more serialized odyssey against hackers while exploring very dark and mature themes through the avenue of those two toys. The show finally concluded its long running narrative arc in November of 2022. Jon still uses the toys as a vehicle for one-off comedy sketches like the early episodes. Jon, with the help of the fanbase, managed to restore almost every video Machinima had hosted on its time.
It says a lot that series such as Arby ‘n’ the Chief could become so popular. Other shows such as This Spartan Life or Inside Gaming used Halo as an avenue for programming dedicated more to the real world. It helped blur the lines between gaming and reality and make gaming a much more common part of people’s lives. The world of gaming was smaller at the time, Microsoft had policies in place which were very friendly to creators using their products to create other types of content with them. Halo’s dominance in the FPS sphere parlayed into popularity of the Xbox 360 as a whole. Halo being a phenomenon in the gaming world meant that all of the other factors mentioned here boosted Xbox’s popularity.
The Xbox 360 had a few other aces up its sleeve. In addition to being the venue for some of the biggest games of its time, it also revolutionized games of much more modest size.
A Center For Entertainment Over The Airwaves
With such strong exclusives such as Mass Effect, Gears of War, and Halo, the Xbox won out many people who sought to play multi-platform games such as Call of Duty as well. The Xbox would strengthen its library and its hold over competitors with its digital offerings.
The Xbox 360 was built from the ground up to be on the cutting edge of the digital world. Digital distribution was a vital component of the 360’s dominance, and it was around from day one. Digital delivery was a new concept in 2005. Games were often purchased from GameStop, Best Buy, Circuit City, EB Games, Walmart, Target, and other retailers. Most large retail releases were playable only from discs. Xbox gave a platform for much smaller releases, which put many smaller game developers at the forefront of gaming.
Xbox Live Arcade was the name for the section of the Xbox Live Marketplace which housed a collection of smaller games which were created and released digitally. These games were smaller and simpler than the mainline digital releases but formed a large component of the Xbox 360’s library. The Xbox 360 release of Uno was infamous for its ability to live stream a player’s face using the Xbox Live Vision Camera. Of course, quite a few players showed things other than their faces, hence the infamy. Xbox Live Arcade was a haven for other small games such as Marble Blast Ultra, RoboBlitz, and others.
When Microsoft launched the Xbox 360, it was not meant just as a powerful gaming platform, but as a total media center. This was reflected in updates to its dashboard from the beloved blades to other layouts. With the dashboard updates, increased functionality would follow.
The built-in disc drive was a DVD player as well, meaning that standard DVD players were unnecessary in houses with Xboxes. Of course, with the Red Ring of Death running rampant through most early Xbox 360s, most people kept their regular DVD players. As the 360’s lifespan wore on, the mediums shifted. The Disc Wars would begin around the time of the 360’s launch, where HDDVD and BluRay would battle for dominance, as VHS and Betamax did in the 1980s. As Betamax did before it, HDDVD would fall out of favor and become a footnote in the history of media.
Ultimately, the HDDVD player peripheral for the Xbox 360 would be a bust, and BluRay would never joint the Xbox 360’s bag of tricks. However, Microsoft saw a chance to be ahead of the curve with digital media and streaming. From its inception, the 360 had digital delivery for games. The Xbox Live Marketplace would also include music and movies, which could be downloaded to the Xbox and played directly from the device. As streaming became more viable as an entertainment option, those applications would show up on Xbox as well. The earlier versions of the Netflix application on Xbox had a feature where people could watch a movie together and could even have their avatars show up in a movie theater frame around the picture.
The breakthroughs pioneered on the Xbox 360 would lead to Microsoft emphasizing its successors’ abilities to function as media devices in addition to gaming consoles.
The Glory Years Ended
In fall 2013, Microsoft released the Xbox One. Over the next seven years, a few iterations of the Xbox One would be released. The Xbox One didn’t fare as well as its more popular predecessor, and Xbox would be behind in the console wars until the new generation of consoles, the Xbox Series X|S released in fall of 2020. The Xbox vs. PlayStation debate continues today, and it’s a tossup to decide which console wins.
The Xbox 360’s lessons shaped the development of Xbox One, which became the foundation for the Series X|S today. The new Xbox consoles are all interconnected, in that all games purchased for the Xbox One work on the Series X|S, and the Xbox as a media hub is even more pronounced, with all major streaming services having applications built for the Xbox, and the console supporting 4K Ultra HD resolutions.
Microsoft has also pushed for the Xbox and PC gaming spheres to become more intertwined, with significant overlap. Every game released for the Xbox usually comes out on PC at a similar time, since the architecture of the Xbox is based on that of the PC and it’s easy to develop for both.
Gaming culture as a whole in that mid-2000s to early 2010s era was something different, and undoubtedly a major contributing factor to why the Xbox 360 was so universally beloved. The 360 helped shape some of that culture, but its lifespan was shaped just as much in return by the gamers of its era.
The world may never see another time like the Age of the Xbox 360, but there are always bright new frontiers for gaming to reach.
- Bungie created Halo originally and developed every installment, ending with 2010’s Halo Reach. Afterwards, Microsoft’s new internal company, 343 Industries, took over development of the series while Bungie created the Destiny franchise as an independent company. Bungie is now owned by Sony. ↩︎
- The first five seasons, subtitled “The Blood Gulch Chronicles” would later be reshot on the PC versions of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, where mods to permit better camera work allowed the first five seasons to be shown in HD for the first time. ↩︎
Ark of the Lost Angels 
Leave a comment