Collection essentials #472: Microsoft Xbox

Ever since the video game crash of 1983, the home console market had been dominated by Japanese companies, mainly Nintendo, Sega and Sony. At the turn of the millennium, we were about to get our first major competitor from elsewhere, as tech giant Microsoft decided to throw their hat into the ring with their first console, the Xbox.

What would set the original Xbox apart from its competition, the PlayStation 2 and GameCube? Quite a bit, actually. While not immediately obvious to the consumer, the console was built differently, more similar to the building blocks of a personal computer. The name “Xbox” comes from Microsoft’s programming interface “DirectX”. It was the first game console to come with a built-in hard drive, which offered a series of advantages. Mainly, this meant that players were no longer required to buy a memory card to save their progress! Xbox memory cards still existed, and were mainly useful when you wanted to transfer save data from one system to another, but they were far from mandatory. A hard drive allowed for downloading additional game content from the internet as well, something that would become ubiquitous in gaming’s near future.

The Xbox was clearly the most powerful system in its day. This made it attractive to many players looking for the most cutting-edge games, and developers who wanted the most capable hardware for their games. This power advantage often meant that multiplatform games available for all three competing systems at the time were often best-experienced on the Xbox, due to factors such as nicer graphics and/or faster loading times. A small number of Xbox games even support HD resolutions of 720p and 1080i, if you have the right setup to display them that way. 

A really neat and innovative feature of the console was “custom soundtracks.” You could put any audio CD in your Xbox and rip the tracks to be saved onto the system’s hard drive. And in certain games that supported it, the background music could be replaced by your own saved music! This could be used cleverly too; for example, in wrestling games you could create a wrestler who makes their grand entrance to literally any song that you wish. To my knowledge no other console has this feature in exactly the same way. I know at least one future Xbox console has some form of custom soundtrack support, but individual games cannot seamlessly utilize it for specific situations like a wrestler entrance in the same way.

The original Xbox also set a new standard for online capabilities. Online gaming was nothing new of course, but Microsoft set a new bar with their paid monthly subscription service known as “Xbox Live”, which was compatible with broadband and had convenient features like a “friend list” independent of any specific game as well as voice chat for users with headsets. It became much more common for games to have online play, and these games for Xbox advertised it very clearly on the front of the box with a bar that read “LIVE, ONLINE ENABLED”. And as I mentioned before, online connectivity meant that some games could even have downloaded content from the internet. This wasn’t really a big thing yet, but would blow up in the subsequent console generation.

Was the original Xbox a success? Well, yes and no, depending on how you measure it. The PlayStation 2, not surprisingly, was far more popular, selling tens of millions more systems. The Xbox was notoriously a complete and total flop in Japan, selling in downright pitiful numbers. As a Western console clearly designed with Western tastes in mind, it failed to appeal to many Japanese gamers. It didn’t help that the physical console was absolutely huge, which wasn’t a good fit for generally-smaller living spaces in the country. There certainly were games (even exclusive ones) from Japanese companies like Sega, Tecmo and Capcom, but nothing that turned a significant number of Japanese heads. It didn’t help that the Xbox offered almost literally nothing in terms of JRPGs, which were incredibly abundant on the PS2. Microsoft also lost money on the Xbox in general, largely because they sold the console at a loss, making its retail price well below what it cost to make the system. Overall, the Xbox sold a little bit better worldwide than the Nintendo GameCube. While that wasn’t a huge number, beating out a Nintendo console on the first try was still rather impressive, and it firmly established the Xbox brand in a way that set them up well for the next console generation. So if you ask me, the original Xbox was overall a success.

Obviously the original Xbox does not stand out as cutting-edge technology over 20 years later. So is it still worth checking out? You bet it is! As I said before, multiplatform games from back then tend to be the best in their Xbox form. And there were a LOT of multiplatform games in that era, so that’s a bit of a big deal! 

There’s another reason Xbox is worth a look, and that is…modding!! It’s pretty easy and straightforward to “softmod” an Xbox. If you’re unfamiliar with what “modding” is, it refers to the practice of altering software and hardware to do stuff that the original developers didn’t intend. One of the most obvious things of interest you can do with a softmodded Xbox is install emulators for old-school consoles like the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis onto the hard drive, basically allowing you to load your favorite games for those consoles as well and then simply run them by selecting them from a menu. You can also install a much larger hard drive in your Xbox, greatly increasing its storage capacity. With a larger hard drive you can rip your Xbox games off your CDs and store them on the hard drive directly, so you won’t have to worry about the CD laser dying. 

Now, for my past experience with the original Xbox. My earliest memories of it were of when my cousins Kevin and Peter got one early in its lifespan. I was happy to play it at their house, but at first it wasn’t a console that I was particularly thinking of getting for myself. PlayStation 2 was above it on my bucket list due in large part to its RPGs. I picked up a PS2 in the spring of 2004, as the upcoming Mortal Kombat game which wasn’t coming out on the GameCube provided me extra motivation to get another current console. However, my parents surprised me by getting me an Xbox as well not long after. Apparently they were at some event in public and got an opportunity to win one in some sort of contest or auction for a great price or something. And so, I wound up getting that Mortal Kombat game on Xbox instead of PS2. While I’m not big into “online gaming”, I also subscribed to Xbox Live at one point to play games online, the first time I had ever subscribed to an online service in that way. It was rather inconvenient to utilize because I had to bring the console downstairs to the main living room in order to actually connect it to the internet, since the connection had to be wired. Years later, the Xbox was the first console (not counting handhelds) that I had modded, and I very much enjoyed putting a bunch of old-school games on it. I still own that very Xbox, although the disc laser has gotten much weaker so I have relegated it to “back-up console” status.

It’s not easy to break into the home console market, and the Xbox was a commendable first effort from Microsoft. I have a lot of good memories with the system and it’s another one that I’m happy to revisit as long as I live. I guess you could call it…an X-ssential. (cue the audience’s groans)