It Used to Be Different

A reminder, before we begin. In early April, the a pro-Palestinian human rights movement BDS that’s pressuring Israel by promoting boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against the country added Xbox to its boycott list. Learn more here.

Microsoft laid off more than 9,000 employees in and around its gaming divisions earlier this month, while at the same time spending billions in trying to convince the world its advancements in AI are going to change the world. It's even spending more than a billion to [deep breath] something called AI education.

Xbox, weird green coloring and tank-like controller, used to represent something. These days, it's hard to figure out what it represents, beyond reckless spending, endless layoffs, and countless pivots to trying to figure out the future of games.

Today, Rob and Patrick chat about how Xbox did (or didn't) enter their lives when the console first launched in 2002, and the different ways seminal games like Halo signaled a sea change in the relationship between consoles and PCs.

Patrick: There were two formative first-person-shooter moments in my friend group: GoldenEye and Halo. These were games that we played often enough with the exact same groups of people that the modifiers in the video games themselves to change how matches played out was never enough; we’d come up with our own house rules that defined how we wanted to play.

With GoldenEye, I remember that we’d call out one another if someone else was overly relying on determining where someone was based on looking at their section of the split screen on the TV. We also banned people from playing as Oddjob, unless someone was a dick and decided to pick Oddjob anyway. At that point, the group would gang up on Oddjob and make sure they lost.

It was also a race before someone screamed “GOLDEN GUN,” because the mode where you could one-shot someone was deliriously fun. There was no faster way to make someone upset.

It was six years in-between GoldenEye and Halo, and while my friends and I still regularly played video games with one another, it wasn’t until Halo arrived that it became an appointment all over again. Hangout sessions after school were determined by “Where are we playing Halo?”

Because unlike the Nintendo 64 era, where fewer of my friends owned video game consoles and it was largely people using all the ones I’d been amassing in my room, a lotta folks had an Xbox. They played other video games on it, but for young teenagers it was really a Halo box.

The difference between 1995 and 2001 was also that we were a little older and a little meaner than before. Halo produced legitimate arguments where friends would storm out in protest, especially during moments where it felt like everyone was secretly ganging up to kill one person over another. Most of the time, they were right to be angry, because we were secretly plotting.

Xbox felt, I don’t know, edgy? 

I was 16 years old, too young to articulate what I found appealing about a new game console other than “hey, it’s new,” because I was legitimately hoovering up everything I could get my hands on in those days. But dude, that launch era up for Xbox was killer in retrospect, and so when I say “edgy” I probably mean “different.” Dead or Alive 3 was probably the last time I spent significant time memorizing fighting game moves. Oddworld: Munch’s Odyssey was just plain weird. Project Gotham Racing. Jet Set Radio Future. (I will defend that game!). Gunvalkyrie. 

Scrolling through a list of Xbox games produces a reaction of “oh, that game.”

There was a sweaty desperation from Xbox that I found appealing. You knew they had something to prove, they didn’t exactly have an identity, and it felt like it wasn’t playing it safe.

I think you were mostly playing on PC during this era, but what did Xbox mean to you then?

Rob: I have a hard time figuring out what I felt about the Xbox era versus the 360 era. There was always a mix of trepidation, resentment, and excitement. You have to remember, Halo was going to be a PC game. There had already been major previews for it, it was something I was excited about. The realization that it was going to exclusive to this new console, the pitch for which felt like it was staking out a position between PC gaming and traditional consoles, made me wonder what it meant for the PC. If a home computer developer like Bungie could turn its back on the PC to promote a console, did that mean the PC was going to start losing a lot of games and genres to the Xbox? By the middle of the 360 era, that worry had been compounded by a glut of third-rate PC ports, the abysmal Games for Windows experiment (man, Microsoft not really knowing what to do with all this is nothing new, is it?), and the outright hostility a lot of publishers had to the PC as a platform. The Xbox may have been aimed at Sony and to a lesser extent Nintendo, but its success had brought forth a really troubled, frustrating era for PC gamers like myself.

On the other hand, it did that partially by being really good at translating PC games to a console format. It felt like a miracle the first time I saw Halo running on the Xbox. How could a game that incredible-looking run so seamlessly on a box that cost half what a mid-range PC build would run you? I resented the shit out of that console because outside of strategy games, it was clearly the easiest and best way to play most shooters and increasingly even RPGs now. Sports games existed solely on the consoles, largely thanks to EA’s exclusivity and (temporary) near-abandonment of the PC. When the 360 came out and suddenly it basically had solved all the friction of online play? You didn’t need to be whispering IRC channels and Vent servers to people over multiplayers servers? Meanwhile everything on the PC was a huge pain in the ass and actually getting more so because so many games were lousy ports burdened with terrible bloatware.