The Xbox Legacy 1: Xbox
A retrospective, review and a spot of history surrounding the early 2000's big underdog
Around the turn of the millennium, deep in the bowels of Microsoft, a subtle paranoia was growing, a suspicion that Sony: the Japanese consumer electronics giant, king of the CRT TV, portable music player and usurper of Nintendo’s throne in the games industry was coming for the home computer market too.
When the PlayStation 2 was revealed with stunning claims about its power and some rather pointed marketing from Sony’s end, the paranoia became genuine alarm and a small team of Direct-X specialists within the company seized the opportunity to begin a push for Microsoft to create its own console.
A Windows-running, Direct-X compatible box for the home… an Xbox.
The Xbox had a tumultuous road onto the market, with widespread doubt about software company Microsoft’s ability to manufacture hardware. The team behind the console had to battle with the more experienced Windows CE team, an indifferent Steve Ballmer and at one point even an incensed Bill Gates to name just a few challenges; the console’s E3 hands-on was borderline disastrous and the up until then Mac-only developer Bungie struggled to have Halo: Combat Evolved ready for launch.
But this is in 2025, we all know that the Xbox eventually made it onto shelves and had a lasting impact, spawning a whole line of successor consoles… but was the Original Xbox good? Is it worth picking up today? And was it really has powerful as it was hyped up to be? That’s what I’m here to find out.
Revised Scoring System
Those who’ve read my The Nintendo Lineage series, which this one is a spiritual successor to will know my usual rating system by now, however, I’m going to be updating it with a new category:
HARDWARE: The console’s durability, attractiveness, quality of its gamepad and the level of hardware capability.
SOFTWARE: The quality of the console’s exclusive games, its quality and variety of third party titles and the quality of its storage medium.
IMPACT: The cultural cachet of the console and its popularity today taking into account lifetime sales.
(New) MERIT: Whether the cost, availability and quality of the console hold up today and make it still worth a purchase.
SENTIMENT: My entirely subjective preference for the console with a dash of memories and opinions, also whether I feel my purchase of the console and my time with it have been fun.
With all that important stuff out of the way, sit back and I hope you enjoy.
HARDWARE: 4/5 Stars
The design of the original Xbox was packed with innovation. Onboard Direct-X, an internal hard drive (the first console to have one) and a CPU and GPU made with Intel and Nvidia respectively made PC ports as pain-free as possible. Furthermore, the forward-thinking designers ditched modem connectivity for an RJ45 ethernet port, correctly anticipating that by the mid-2000’s, high-speed internet would become the norm. The Xbox is the most powerful console of its generation, no question.
In terms of its gamepad? Things get complicated.
The Xbox launched with the ‘Duke’ controller, this monstrosity:
The Duke certainly has its fans and I’ll admit it’s the first controller that comes to mind when I think of the Xbox but my God do I dislike this thing. The weird double-stacked diamond configuration of the face buttons always has me making misinputs or hitting B instead of Black and that D-Pad is gross! It’s still a weakness of Xbox gamepads today but this one is particularly egregious, it’s like running your thumb across a dry piece of chewing gum. Everything about this controller is loud, proud and obnoxious. The giant logo gets in the way of where the Start and Select should be, the controller was too large for Japanese consumers to use comfortably and it just feels heavy and excessive.
I don’t like the Duke, not at all but the Xbox redeemed itself.
You’ll notice in the picture I chose of the console a different gamepad is shown: the Model S. This one is simply lovely.
Before the console even launched it was clear that the Duke wasn’t going to work for the Japanese market so work got underway to design a smaller and more ergonomic alternative, this Model S is the definitive way to play the console, in my opinion. The awful D-pad? Improved. The oversized ‘jewel’ in the middle of the controller? Slimmed down. The button configuration? Divisive; some people will still pick the Duke over the Model S because of where the Start and Select and Black and White buttons ended up but I personally like them where they are. This is the best gamepad of its generation.
Aside from the crap default gamepad, two more reasons I denied the Xbox a full 5 stars is due to inconvenience of repairing it and the sheer size of the thing. Anyone with a retro collection will know that you become your own repair shop; resurfacing discs, cleaning cartridge pins with a cotton swab, replacing the laser on your console, I think most retro people have done these things and a bit of soldering too. The Original Xbox is quite durable: the laser can fail as with any console and capacitors can leak, especially for the internal clock but none of this is a hard job to fix up, however, the HDD in your original Xbox is linked to a code on a chip making it accessible only to that specific console. What this all means is that, unless you mod your console, you can’t replace the damn thing without bricking your Xbox.
Oh and this thing is a beast! It’s the size of like, 3 Dreamcasts glued together!
Image by Reddit user ‘GreenDonuts88’
SOFTWARE: 4/5 Stars
The Original Xbox library is quite a strange beast.
Many of its ‘exclusives’ were actually ports of PC games that would never have run on competing consoles; Halo: Combat Evolved even had a PC version and a lot of the console’s other exclusives are lesser-known cult classics like Voodoo Vince or Crimson Skies. This might sound like a bad thing on paper but in my opinion it only adds to the Xbox’s appeal. As any owner of a game on Steam older than about 2008 can tell you, playing old games on Steam is often very fiddly and very painful requiring fan-patches, mods and sometimes altering the game’s resolution manually by altering its code. With the Xbox? None of that is an issue; Max Payne, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Splinter Cell and countless other games all work and play not far off their PC versions on the console, the Xbox makes now unplayable, or hellish to get working PC games easy to access again.
An unfortunate point against this library too is that it missed out on some of the biggest and best games of its generation. No Final Fantasy, no Resident Evil, no Gran Turismo, none of Nintendo’s Gamecube classics obviously, so with some big trade-offs here and with games that often aren’t quite exclusive or nobody really cares about today, why have I scored the Xbox so highly?
One reason is the price.
The Original Xbox collecting community is small and they keep their mouths shut for a reason, that’s because the Xbox is quite a cheap console and its games cost less than a pack of bourbon creams. You won’t meet a happier soul than a retro Xbox player, if you’re a cost-conscious gamer looking to get into retro, you need to grab yourself an Xbox and a cheap 14” CRT as soon as possible.
Another reason I really love the Xbox library is that it kept a lot of that classic pick up and play feel and split-screen joy which both of its competitors lacked this generation; Nintendo might have had Smash and Mario Kart while Tekken or Gran Turismo on PS2 was always great for split-screen but the Xbox went all in; Halo: Combat Evolved is playable from start to finish in split-screen, its pre-Xbox Live multiplayer was entirely built off LAN and split-screen and another launch title: Fusion Frenzy was basically made for this kind of play. On top of this, while Sega’s new third-party status allowed for Sonic to escape containment and for Yakuza to later become a highlight of the late-PS2 library, the Xbox got several cult-classic exclusives and sequels that really make it the best choice of its generation if you’re a big Sega fan. In the US, Shenmue 2 was an Xbox exclusive and didn’t release on Dreamcast. But exclusive to the console in every territory were games like Jet Set Radio Future, Gunvalkyrie and a port of The House of the Dead 3.
At last, we come to the elephant in the room: Halo. I don’t want to spoil all my thoughts on Halo just yet since I’m planning something big around the series here on the Journal but needless to say? It was big and is likely the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Xbox games along with maybe Fable.
IMPACT: 3/5 Stars
Tragically, as good and as innovative as it was and as huge as Halo would become, the Xbox didn’t actually do insanely well; it did outsell the Gamecube by 3 million but 24 million units in the grand scale of things isn’t all that impressive: about half of what the SNES did and worse than the Series S/X currently. Famously, the console failed to sell much in Japan too.
It’s this duality to the Xbox that has made me score it somewhere around the middle of the scale. On one hand we have its relatively lukewarm sales and the fact that the USA, Mexico and UK are the only three countries where it really gained a lasting fanbase but on the other hand… this console changed everything. Accessible online multiplayer, on-board storage, parity with PC, downloadable content. Xbox was a pioneer in all these areas and in my opinion? The Original Xbox is the template upon which all modern consoles have been built; a machine that plays games, with onboard storage, internet connectivity and digital content for members of its online service.
This isn’t even mentioning the ripples that its greatest exclusive: Halo cast across the industry. For the next decade, any promising new first person shooter was called a ‘Halo Killer’ and Halo 3 was probably the biggest midnight launch of any video game that has ever been made; speaking as someone who experienced the 360 in its heyday, you cannot imagine how popular Halo was, everyone had it, I made friends I would go on to meet in real life through Xbox 360 Halo 3 lobbies.
The Xbox was a pioneering console and its sales are a sorely lacking indicator of the seismic change it heralded for gaming.
MERIT: 4/5 Stars
So, is it worth buying an Xbox today?
The Xbox does have some real disadvantages to consider: its limited market presence in most of the world, its large size and the complexity of repairing it means it might not be as cheap as the UK everywhere and even then? You’re investing in something you might struggle to keep running or store effectively, however, if you’re living in North America the UK or Western Europe, which I think almost my entire audience does, then I can’t recommend an Xbox enough.
People complain incessantly about the price of gaming online, about how it 'Isn’t how it used to be’ or ‘Nothing good comes out anymore’ and my answer to that is… buy an Xbox! This console sits in a wonderful sweet-spot where it’s powerful enough for the library to look on-par with the early Xbox 360 a lot of the time but still has that retro appeal and a lot of the classics you grew up with, usually running at their best too.
And for those prices? That’s cheaper than a physical copy of Mario Kart World, even if you mess around with the console for a weekend, it’s worth it to me.
SENTIMENT: 5/5 Stars
And now we come to the least surprising revelation of this entire post: I love the Xbox.
My older brother is someone who gets into gaming every few years for a couple of months and then ends up getting back out of it, this meant that as a kid, I was lucky enough to end up with all 3 consoles of the 6th generation and of those? The Xbox would go on to become my favourite; I have more nostalgia for the Gamecube, I played the PS2 the most but if I have to sit down with one of these machines today? I’m picking the Xbox.
the exclusives on this console just blow the competition out of the water in my opinion. Wind Waker and Super Mario Sunshine are my least-favourite 3D Zelda and Mario; I’ve never cared much for Smash either. The PS2 is the king of attrition, sure it has an amazing library but 90% of the games on that console were crap, simply by merit of of how many were published. Ratchet and Clank and Jak and Daxter are awesome but I’d never pick either of those over Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2; Psychonauts would also stand up well to the opposition, so I hear. The PS2 might have had more survival horror and Final Fantasy but the original Xbox had Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2, absolute classics. And if none of that has you convinced then most people would say San Andreas was best on the original Xbox too.
The Xbox is everything a great console should be: it has great exclusives, it runs third party games better than the other consoles and it left lasting memories for a young Scanlines to look back on. 5/5!
FINAL SCORE: 20/25 Stars
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I hope you enjoyed the first instalment of The Xbox Legacy and expect an episode every week from here on. I look forward to having a chat in the comments below!
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I owned an original Xbox at the time, and this reminded me of the size of it. In the early 2000's I would often take my console to friends houses to play together. The N64 could fit nicely in a backpack, along with cables, 2 controllers, all my games and have room to spare. The Xbox console alone took up the entire bag and the weight of it really dug into my shoulders! 😄
Of course I had Halo (reason why I got it), but I really liked Sega's post-Dreamcast era on the Xbox too. Jet Set Radio Future and Panzer Dragoon Orta were highlights, and I still listen to JSRF's soundtrack today. I'm also proud of the fact I completed Ninja Gaiden (easiest difficulty!), something I probably cannot do now.
I had a lotta fun with the OG Xbox... for about 2 years. After that, my games started glitching out at random times, freezing often, and the Xbox would make a loud whirring noise.
I can't remember if it finally died or if I sold it, but yeah, my specific console was not a well-built machine. Ditto 360... but I'll wait to talk about that one.
Still lots of great games on it, though, and for apparently rock bottom prices?! I had no idea. If nothing else, you can get a 360 and play most original Xbox games on it.