Xbox: A brief history part 1

In 2001, the gaming consoles were dominated by the mighty Playstation 2, Nintendo’s game cube and the Dreamcast that was getting Sega in top place. But that same year, the gaming consoles were going to change for years to come as Microsoft was going to introduce the Microsoft Xbox.

At the time of its launch in 21 November 2001, few believe in its success and its competition with playstation although it had previous experience in PC gaming. But Xbox had a few tricks up its sleeves.  At first Microsoft had to make its move which it did by the acquisition of game developers, Bungie through which they releases the game title halo: combat evolved and this title is still associated with Xbox even after 12 years of Xbox success. There were certain ups and down for Xbox but they made it through every moment.

The other thing that Microsoft did was the introduction of Xbox live which was only used by PC before but now it was bought to the gaming console world as well. Microsoft made a commitment to put Xbox live for the competition of online gaming supremacy. At that time Microsoft had 27 publishers working for them to create online games for Xbox and even bigger news was that there were more Microsoft employees working on the Xbox live service than there were for the engineering of the Xbox console itself.

Robert J Bach, the president of entertainment and devices division at Microsoft said: “online gaming console will play a significant role in the future of video games. Gamers will be able to compete with one another online, play games that evolve over the course of months and download new levels, weapons and characters”.

Bach also added: “Xbox is clearly positioned to lead the way in the online gaming revolution”.

This online feature of Xbox will keep the games fresh for the players and there will always be new downloadable features of the game. Other things that Xbox included were:

·         A hard disk drive to store new features of the games and new levels and characters of the game.

·         For fast action broadband connectivity, an Ethernet port.

·         Xbox gaming controllers contained slots for voice communicators that were used for real time voice communications.

REFERENCES:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2002/jan02/01-08successfullaunchpr.aspx (date accessed: 18/05/2013) 
 http://www.mummy-tips.com/2011/04/we-are-xbox-family-ambassadors.html#.UZ9iH6zvoj8 (date accessed: 18/05/2013)
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Xbox+Launch+One+of+Most+Successful+in+Video+Game+History%3B+Xbox+to...-a081463330 (date accessed: 18/05/2013)