Description

The Xbox was Microsoft’s first console and was first discussed in 1998 by four of Microsoft’s top engineers with their main desire being to beat Sony in the market. During the console’s development Microsoft tried to acquire many major game studios such as Nintendo and Square Enix but to no avail but they did acquire Bungie who would go on the make Xbox’s most popular exclusive series, Halo. The console was shown to the public in January of that year and the reception was mixed with there being a lot of criticism aimed at the controller with people feeling that it was too big. The Xbox’s launch was successful, this was partly due to the success of Halo which was one of the first online shooting games on a console and gave the console a distinct exclusive to compete with the many exclusives offered by Nintendo and Sony. In 2004 Microsoft launched Xbox Live Arcade which allowed people to download smaller games onto the console, this was the first time a console would do this. Despite this success the Xbox struggled to compete with the PS2 and Microsoft had lost 4 billion dollars with the console only becoming profitable in late 2004. Xboxs are famously easy to modify to add emulators, burn DVDs and even run Linux.