A VERY Brief History of Xbox

In my opinion the history of Xbox is more interesting then the Playstation. Simply because they had a large challenge that needed to overcome, a lot of competition.

Bill Gates had the idea to make the best gaming system out there. He wanted the graphics, memory, and overall game play to be superior to any other system out there.

The Xbox was hinted at in 1999 and confirmed by Bill Gates in a press release in 2000. This was a surprise for the public as well as other corporations. The PlayStation 2 was just going to be released and was the leading brand of games by far. People thought that Gate’s idea was crazy, why would he stand up against gaming’s super power?

There are two thought origins of the name “Xbox”. One was that it was originally supposed to be DirectX Box named after a group that designed it but was changed to Xbox because people liked the name better. The other idea says that it came from a conference of the original developers. They liked how the second part of recent gaming consoles have had a part of the name being with what the console actually was (eg. gameCUBE was a cube; playSTATION was a station for playing). So the team began to brainstorm, they came up with Pyramid, Sphere, Box, etc. They liked box so the person in charge put an asterisk next to it and when he turned in the form they thought that the box with an asterisk next to it was Xbox. In either story they liked the name so it stuck.

During the unveiling of the Xbox at a game developer’s conference later in 2000, people were amazed the technology that it held and thought that it had some potential, mainly because the Dreamcast was dying out.

The Xbox team became focused on the release of the Xbox, wanting to make a huge impact. In Japan they had little success unlike in Europe where they held a massive party to introduce it, the Europeans accepted the Xbox with open arms.

To start the party in Europe though, they needed an awesome game to go with it. They had seen Bungie at a computer games convention and liked their game “Halo: Combat Evolved” so much that they bought Bungie and used “Halo: Combat Evolved” as their opening game for their console. With this, Xbox took the title of second place of best console from Nintendo by 2002. They also released a couple more games along with the launch such as “Fuzion Frenzy” and “Dead or Alive 3”

In 2005 the Xbox 360 was released with better storage and better overall looks. The Xbox 360 was also released with a removable hard drive that would greatly increase the amount of memory that the Xbox had, allowing for more downloadable content and more memory for saved games