Geek Life

TEN YEARS OF XBOX: A BRIEF HISTORY
BY CRITICAL HIT STAFF
Before the local release of the PlayStation 4,
we featured a series of articles looking into the
history of PlayStation – so why not give it another
go on the eve of the Xbox One’s local release?
Let’s take a brief look at the history of the
console that started it all for the Xboxbrand.
Back in 2001, the console landscape
was a very different place.
Sony dominated the
sphere with its PlayStation 2,
while Nintendo’s Gamecube
was struggling to
find much of a market
despite its incredible
library of first party titles. SEGA was discovering
that its Dreamcast was about to sink the company’s
entire home hardware division. Ok, maybe in
retrospect it wasn’t all that different.
But it was in that year that things changed, and
changed how consoles would function in the decade
to come. It was in that year, that Microsoft entered
the fray with the launch of the Xbox.
It actually all started quite a bit before then. In
1998, a team of Microsoft employees convinced
Bill Gates that it would be a smart move to enter
the console war, if only to continue the Microsoft
tradition of taking other peoples ideas and trying
to doing them better
THE BEGINNING
Kevin Bachus, Seamus Blackley, Otto Berkes, and
Ted Hase formed the Redmond Giant’s first
console team, bringing Microsoft Game Studios
Ed Fries on board to head up games. Right from
the beginning, it was meant to bring the flexibility
and power of a PC to the console market – and in
fact started its prototype life as a chimera made
from parts ripped out of Dell machines. Microsoft’s
Direct-X Box as it was called then, was supposed
to have double the processing power of the yetto-be-released
PlayStation 2. It took two years
for Microsoft to go public with its console. Bill
Gates eventually showed it off at 2000’s Game
Developer’s Conference, touting its “next gen”
features. It was the very first console to feature a
hard drive and built-in networking for broadband
connections. Attendees were wowed by the hardware,
but developers weren’t all that keen to
jump straight in, with most
seeing it as little more
than PC in a set-top box
THE SPECS
Microsoft’s original Xbox
really was very nearly a PC
stuffed in to a console box,
with a Pentium III serving as its
CPU. It featured a custom Nvidia-made GPU that
performed similarly to Nvidia’s GeForce 4 Ti4200
PC GPU.
CPU: 733MHz Pentium III with 128Kb L2-cache
MEMORY: 64MB DDR SDRAM
GRAPHICS: nVidia NV2A ASIC 64MB
STORAGE: 2x-5x DVD-ROM Drive
8GB Western Digital or
10GB SeaGate Harddrive
AUDIO: nVidia MCPX with 64 3D voice channels
POWER SUPPLY: 130W
THE RELEASE
The Xbox was far away from being a guaranteed
success – but something happened that would
make Xbox a household name. That thing was
Halo.
Steve Jobs originally showed off Halo as a Mac
and PC game at the Macworld conference in
1999 – but Microsoft ended up buying the studio
responsible, making Halo: Combat Evolved an
Xbox exclusive and one of the system’s launch
titles. It’s a series that would later become
synonymous with the Xbox brand, and cement
the console in the hearts of many gamers.
On November 14, 2001, Microsoft released the
original Xbox, and a million of the things flew off
US shelves in three weeks, despite a $299 asking
price. It took a little while for the system to be
released in Europe and Japan – but it hardly
made a splash in either region. The high cost of
developing the system and its poor international
sales didn’t do much for profitability and a $100
price cut didn’t help on that front either. What
the cut did do though was make the system far
more appealing to consumers; enough so that it
outsold Nintendo’s Gamecube by the end of that
console generation. That’s no mean feat for a
company’s first console.
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