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A<\/span>lmost 20 years ago (on 1 December 2005, to be precise), I was at my very first video game console launch party somewhere around London\u2019s Leicester Square. The Xbox 360 arrived on 22 November 2005 in the US and 2 December in the UK, about three months after I got my first job as a junior staff writer on GamesTM magazine. My memories of the night are hazy because a) it was a worryingly long time ago and b) there was a free bar, but I do remember that DJ Yoda played to a tragically deserted dancefloor, and everything was very green. My memories of the console itself, however, and the games I played on it, are still as clear as an Xbox Crystal. It is up there with the greatest consoles ever.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Guardian\u2019s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.\u00a0Learn more.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n In 2001, the first Xbox had muscled in on a scene dominated by Japanese consoles, upsetting the established order (it outsold Nintendo\u2019s GameCube by a couple of million) and dragging console gaming into the online era with Xbox Live, an online multiplayer service that was leagues ahead of what the PlayStation 2 was doing. Nonetheless, the PS2 ended up selling over 150m to the original Xbox\u2019s 25m. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, would sell over 80m, neck and neck with the PlayStation 3 for most of its eight-year life cycle (and well ahead in the US). It turned Xbox from an upstart into a market leader.<\/p>\n In a very un-Microsoft way, the Xbox 360 was cool. Its design was interesting, an inwards double curve described by its designers as an \u201cinhale\u201d, with a swappable front faceplate. It had a memorably Y2K startup animation and clean, futuristic menus that brought messaging, friends lists and music. I remember finding Microsoft\u2019s marketing powerfully cringe at the time \u2013 witness this developer video, featuring former Microsoft entertainment boss J Allard and his infamous earring, in which a guy juggles while saying the words \u201cThree symmetric cores\u201d. But, despite that, the machine they built felt modern and exciting. The controller, too, white with its pops of colour, was such a tremendous improvement on the uncomfortably gigantic original Xbox controller that it\u2019s become a design standard. I know people who will still only use wired Xbox 360 pads to play PC games.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/span>Powerfully cringe \u2026 Microsoft\u2019s Xbox 360 promo video. <\/span><\/p>\n As the first properly, seamlessly connected console, it brought a lot of things together to form a sense of gamer identity: playing different games online under one unified gamertag; messages and social features, as well as the inspired idea of achievements, which created a personal gaming history via the little challenges you completed in everything you played. (Sony would soon copy this with trophies.) Attaching a number to this, the gamerscore, was devilish genius, encouraging players to compete for ultimately meaningless clout, and creating a powerful incentive for people to stick with the console rather than buying games elsewhere. The Xbox 360 was the first console to understand that people stay where their friends are. If you had the choice between buying a game on PS3 or 360, you\u2019d choose 360 because that\u2019s where everyone else was playing.<\/p>\n By late 2006, when a complacent Sony released an overpriced and awkward-looking follow-up to the PlayStation 2, the Xbox 360 had already had a year to convert people to its vision for high-definition gaming. People had already built up a collection of games and an online identity that was tied to Xbox. The big third-party game publishers, who found the PS3\u2019s proprietary technology awkward to develop for, had started to prioritise Xbox for multi-platform games. The 360 never cracked Japan, but in the rest of the world it became the default console, an extraordinary thing for Microsoft to achieve considering how comprehensively Sony had dominated the previous two generations with the PlayStation.<\/p>\n <\/span>The weird, monochrome realm of Limbo.<\/span> Photograph: TriplePoint<\/p>\n Xbox Live Arcade also helped to usher in the modern era of indie games. Between the 90s and the late 00s, publishers and bricks-and-mortar retailers largely controlled which games did and didn\u2019t make it into players\u2019 hands, especially on consoles. In 2008, Xbox Live Arcade started letting people download smaller, cheaper games direct to their consoles \u2013 no shop or publisher required. It did for console gaming what Steam would later do on PC, getting players comfortable with the idea of digital distribution. Games released via the arcade included Geometry Wars, Braid, Limbo, Bastion and, just as importantly, the best-ever digital version of Uno. I remember sinking many, many hours into Oblivion, Mass Effect and BioShock in my late teens, but I also eagerly awaited each new batch of Xbox Live Arcade games.<\/p>\n Looking back, the architects of the Xbox 360 really understood how and why people played games, and what they wanted from a next-generation console at the time. They understood how the internet could transform not just multiplayer gaming, but the social experience around games, and the way people found and bought them. This knowledge was apparently lost in a few short years, because when Microsoft announced the Xbox One in 2013, it was an absolute shitshow. By then, Microsoft apparently thought that people wanted to play games while watching sports picture-in-picture, as a mandatory connected camera watched your every move.<\/p>\n Microsoft has never again come close to market leadership in video games. A resurgent Sony took all the best lessons from the Xbox 360 and packaged them into the PlayStation 4, and then the Nintendo Switch arrived in 2018 and blew everything else out of the water. With Xbox now in distant third place in the waning console wars, it seems to see its future as a quasi-monopolistic video game subscription service, rather than a hardware maker. Series that defined the 360 era, such as Halo and Gears of War, are now playable on PC and PlayStation. Others, such as Fable, have been languishing for over a decade.<\/p>\n The 360 era was an exciting time in games, a period of great change and competition brought about by online gaming. The console market was a lot smaller back then, but also less predictable. There was still room for those \u201cinteresting, 7\/10\u201d B-games that sometimes proved even more memorable than the blockbusters when free-to-play games were not yet a thing \u2013 games were yet to consolidate into the five established mega-franchises that now dominate everything. And, in bringing indie games to console players, it genuinely changed the trajectory of my gaming taste.<\/p>\n <\/span>Bath your grain \u2026 Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.<\/span> Photograph: Bizarre Creations\/Steam<\/p>\n Writing about Xbox Live Arcade had me hankering for Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved<\/strong>, the spectacularly compulsive Xbox Live Arcade top-down shooter that looks like fireworks and feels like a sensory bath for your brain. So I downloaded it on Steam and was instantly hooked once again. Made by Bizarre Creations, of Project Gotham Racing game, this game was constantly trading places with Uno as the 360\u2019s most downloaded digital game, and it still holds up beautifully. I\u2019d forgotten how the grid background ripples beautifully when things explode, a little high-definition-era flair for a very arcade-era game.<\/p>\n Available on: <\/strong>Steam, Xbox (if you\u2019re happy to play the sequel instead) <\/span>Obstinately difficult and painfully funny \u2026 Baby Steps.<\/span> Photograph: Devolver Digital<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been thinking a lot lately about difficult games, and what it is that keeps me coming back to them, which has led to reading quite a bit about challenge from a game designer\u2019s perspective. And then this exceptionally succinct article by Raph Koster, veteran designer of Ultima Online and much else, dropped into my feed. It\u2019s called Game Design is Simple, Actually<\/strong>, and it\u2019s a must-read.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n If you are more of an OG Xbox fan, you\u2019ll be delighted to learn that Crocs<\/strong> have just launched an Xbox clog, inspired by the original Xbox\u2019s black and green beast of a controller. It is fantastically<\/em> ugly.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Poncle, makers of Bafta game of the year winning Vampire Survivors have announced a new game, Vampire Crawlers<\/strong>, with a tongue-in-cheek trailer. This one\u2019s a blend of card-game and old school first-person dungeon crawler.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Pushing Buttons<\/span><\/p>\n Keza MacDonald’s weekly look at the world of gaming<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n <\/span>Top this \u2026 Cyberpunk 2077.<\/span> Photograph: CD Projekt<\/p>\n Last week, reader Jude asked me which video game world I would most want to live in (Cyrodiil from Elder Scrolls, obviously), and we threw the question back to you. We had so many delightful and\/or deranged responses \u2013 here\u2019s what you had to say.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you want somewhere to go get a beer, the world of Cyberpunk 2077<\/strong> looks amazingly hard to top.\u201d \u2013 Spence Bromage<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI know it\u2019s silly but I was so enthralled with the ship in System Shock 2<\/strong>, I wanted to live there!\u201d \u2013 Charles Rouleau<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThe Dragon Age<\/strong> universe in a heartbeat. Give me Fereldan and Denerim and yes, even Orlais. Give me a Skyhold to live in and a warble to manage, and I may never leave.\u201d \u2013 Kateland Vernon<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cCall me weird, but I\u2019ll take Fallout 3<\/strong> to live in. It had a massive impact on me, seeing pockets of humanity enduring the wasteland, with an overarching battle between good and evil.\u201d \u2013 Toby Durnall<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI have strange one: Animal Well<\/strong>. The freedom to explore this self-contained little map full of hidden corners has meant that I have a really good sense of where I am on the map. Even though I\u2019ve \u2018done\u2019 the game\u2019s activities, I have had some strange comfort in the last two weeks after finishing the game, just in wandering the space for the sheer joy of it.\u201d \u2013 Ben Gibb-Reid<\/strong><\/p>\n If you\u2019ve got a question for Question Block \u2013 or anything else to say about the newsletter \u2013 <\/em>email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Almost 20 years ago (on 1 December 2005, to be precise), I was at my very first video game console launch party somewhere around London\u2019s Leicester Square. The Xbox 360 arrived on 22 November 2005 in the US and 2 December in the UK, about three months after I got my first job as a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35401,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[15171,378,6082,19956,1563,10131,13777],"class_list":{"0":"post-35400","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-eradefining","9":"tag-games","10":"tag-gaming","11":"tag-matched","12":"tag-microsoft","13":"tag-reimagined","14":"tag-xbox"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What to play<\/h2>\n
Estimated playtime: <\/strong>10 minutes to, well, 20 years<\/p>\nWhat to read<\/h2>\n
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Question Block<\/h2>\n