The first day of my career was October 1, 2002. I’d been lucky enough to get hired by Official Xbox Magazine. The fledgling Xbox console was not quite a year old, and when I got settled in on the staff, it quickly became clear that Xbox was really about one thing above all else: Halo. I remember being surprised in my first days on the job by what would happen every single day, like clockwork, at 5pm: consoles and TVs would get turned on, Halo would get fired up, and we’d all play a round or two of Capture the Flag on Blood Gulch before we all went home. Fun and friendly banter ensued. Halo was baked into the Xbox’s DNA from the very start.
It is one of my very first of many thousands of great Xbox memories. I’ve been lucky enough to have a front-row seat for most of the Xbox’s 25 years, covering the high highs and low lows of Microsoft’s pivot into the living room. It’s been quite a ride since November 15, 2001, and I wanted to mark the occasion by sharing some of my biggest memories with you. And, like everything else with Xbox, it started with Halo.
Thank goodness for Combat Evolved, in fact, because most of the rest of that first year of Xbox history was pretty bleak. Lots of C++ spaghetti was thrown at the wall, and most of it didn’t stick. Oh, don’t get me wrong – there were moments! Steel Battalion, Capcom’s batshit-insane mech vertical tank simulator that cost $200 and came with its own custom 40-button controller and foot pedals was quite simply amazing as both a game and piece of hardware and would never get made today. Meanwhile, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind was the beginning of Xbox becoming a Western-RPG powerhouse. But first-party hadn’t really found its footing yet, as it published stuff like the now-infamous Blinx: The Time Sweeper.
But thanks to Combat Evolved carrying the Xbox through its first trip around the sun, things got really interesting in Year Two. It turns out I joined the magazine at just the right time! Halo: Combat Evolved was the biggest very real reason to buy the console in its first year, but its critical second year was defined by three things: Xbox Live, Tom Clancy games, and BioWare.
Year Two
Xbox Live was a massive swing that connected for a home run. Back then, high-speed internet was far from ubiquitous. In fact, dial-up 56k modems still dominated the American online infrastructure. But Microsoft put a big bet on broadband by putting an Ethernet port into every Xbox. In the first year, that port only got used for Halo LAN (er, System Link) parties, but then, on the one-year anniversary of the system on November 15, 2002, Xbox Live launched. And it was a loud launch in the very best of ways. MechAssault brought an action-first take on MechWarrior to the console audience – including an excellent multiplayer suite – while a faithful port of the PC’s outstanding military FPS Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon was a perfect fit for the new online service. And all of it was buttery smooth and almost entirely free of latency on account of everyone being on a high-speed connection. Plus, every Xbox Live kit came with a chat headset, and in those earliest days, people actually used them! Party Chat didn’t exist yet, so everyone talked to each other, and trolls were few and far between on account of the service having a $50 per year buy-in.
A mere two days later, a second, wholly original (albeit single-player-only) Tom Clancy release dropped exclusively on Xbox: Splinter Cell. PlayStation had Solid Snake, but the young Xbox had the sardonic and effortlessly cool Sam Fisher (voiced to perfection by the irreplaceable Michael Ironside). Incredible real-time lighting, super-fun spy gadgets, memorable setpieces, and stellar stealth gameplay all combined to create an instant hit for Xbox – and one that also served as a technical showpiece for the console’s potent graphical capabilities.
The Tom Clancy brand becoming synonymous with Xbox would only continue in 2003.The Tom Clancy brand becoming synonymous with Xbox would only continue in 2003, when yet another Tom Clancy gem, Rainbow Six 3, hit Xbox that holiday and did some truly awesome stuff. For one, it looked and sounded great. That was a common thread running through all of the early Clancy games on Xbox: great visuals and sublime Dolby 5.1 surround sound. But more than that, its campaign was augmented by a compelling new feature: commanding your AI squadmates with your voice. Remember that chat headset that was bundled in with every Xbox Live Starter Kit a year earlier? The brilliant designers at Ubisoft Montreal had put it to good use, allowing you to shout things like, “Go! Go! Go!” when all of your guys were stacked up at a door and ready to breach. I sounded like an absolute lunatic doing this in the middle of the OXM office as I reviewed the game, but did it add to the fun? Unequivocally, yes. And then that same chat headset got put to great use for its original purpose: online multiplayer. Rainbow Six 3 dominated Xbox Live; it was arguably the online service’s first killer app. Xbox Live programming director Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb used to regularly post the top 10 most-played games on Xbox Live, and Rainbow Six was firmly entrenched in the top spot for months after its release (until November of 2004; you can probably guess why, but we’ll get to that…).
But 2003 saw far more than just one significant release for Xbox. That summer gave us one of the five best original Xbox games ever – a truly special release that doubled as one of the best Star Wars games ever made and tripled as one of the best RPGs ever made. And I had the tremendous pleasure of reviewing it. It was, of course, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, an epic tale set thousands of years before the original film trilogy that let you fully embrace either the Light Side or Dark Side of the Force. I opted for the latter, mostly because no game I’d ever played had fully supported evil choices. But KOTOR absolutely did, allowing me to double-cross people I’d made deals with and generally just be terrible. It was glorious, and it legitimized RPGs on the Xbox. I still remember driving 45 minutes from the OXM office to Skywalker Ranch to get the review build installed on my Xbox debug kit. I had no idea what a ride I was about to go on, and to this day KOTOR remains either my 1a or 1b favorite RPG of all time, along with the very next Xbox-exclusive game the KOTOR development team at BioWare would make, which I’ll talk more about later.
Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City also came to Xbox in 2003 as part of the GTA Double Pack, as did Max Payne 2 and one of Xbox Live’s first big multiplayer hits, the class-based first-person shooter Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War. The much-hyped first-party exclusive Brute Force dropped that year, too, and though it couldn’t quite live up to its “The Next Halo?” headline we’d put on it on the cover of OXM ahead of its release, it was nevertheless pretty good, though it failed to take off. But Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, a console continuation of a previous PC game, very much did, becoming another Xbox Live hit. So did the golf action of Links 2004 and the tennis competition found in Top Spin – two pillars of the short-lived XSN program. Voodoo Vince, meanwhile, was a really good platformer even if it didn’t sell all that well. But you know what did? Project Gotham Racing 2, a semi-realistic racer that deftly straddled the line between sim and arcade and proved to be a huge success. First party was finally starting to find its footing beyond Halo.
Halo Freakin’ 2
Xbox’s third year built on the impressive momentum of the previous one. A murderer’s row of killer games hit the console in 2004. You already know the big one, but let’s not forget about the rest. In fact, the 2004 lineup begins with another top-five original-Xbox GOAT, Ninja Gaiden. Designer Tomonobu Itagaki (may he rest in peace) and Team Ninja followed its Dead or Alive 3 day-one Xbox launch title with a revival of the 1980’s arcade and NES classic, translated gloriously into a 3D fast-action challenge of your wits and skill. My colleague Mitchell Saltzman, a connoisseur of the genre, called Ninja Gaiden the best pure action game ever made – and he did so 20 years after Ninja Gaiden’s release. And he’s absolutely right. We had a playable demo of Ninja Gaiden on the OXM demo disc prior to its release, and we got enthusiastic letters about it for months on end. That demo probably sold tens of thousands of copies of that game, and it was a point of pride and a privilege for us to be able to be the vehicle for introducing so many Xbox gamers to it.
Just a few weeks later, Splinter Cell returned with Pandora Tomorrow, delivering another excellent stealth campaign. But that’s not what Splinter Cell’s first sequel is best remembered for. That honor goes to another reason you absolutely had to pony up the $50 annual subscription for Xbox Live if you hadn’t already: the wholly original, wildly innovative Spies vs. Mercenaries multiplayer mode. In it, two Sam Fisher-like Spies – playing from the same third-person perspective as the single-player campaign – faced off against two first-person-viewing, heavily armed Mercs as they battled over objectives. Spies were nonlethal with one notable exception: if they could sneak up behind the Merc and grab him around the neck from behind, not only could they break said neck to take them out, but the mic chat would suddenly open up, allowing the Spy to vocally taunt the Merc before making the kill. It was genius stuff that’s still revered today.
I’ve already written extensively about The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and shared my memories of when developer Starbreeze first brought it to the OXM office, but hoo-boy, what a masterpiece this was. All of a sudden, licensed games weren’t terrible by default. I’d go so far as to say a lot of games based on an existing IP owe a debt of gratitude to Riddick.
Which brings me to Fable. Is it on the short list of best Xbox games ever? Admittedly, not quite – and I say that as the person who reviewed it for OXM and gave it a very strong 8.9 out of 10. But it did successfully birth a franchise, and it was a great game. It had the unfortunate burden of having to live up to series co-creator Peter Molyneux’s boasts and promises – most notably how Fable would have such advanced systems that you could plant an acorn early in the game, and by the end of the campaign it would grow into a full tree (you couldn’t). But this was a world full of charm and humor and some really high-quality action-adventuring. And it was a hit!
And then there was Halo 2. Where to even begin? It was probably the most fun I’ve ever had in my career covering a single game. The buildup to November 9, 2004 was unlike anything I’ve experienced as a gamer or as a media professional both before and since. The hype was truly unprecedented – everyone was fired up for it. In the pre-social media era where monoculture was still alive, Halo 2 had everyone’s attention. I’ve never been more excited for a first hands-on with a game than I was the first time I laid hands on Halo 2 back at E3 2004. The year prior, Bungie showed the now-infamous single-player demo – but nobody in the media got to play it.