Xbox (console)
Xbox Live | |
Best-selling game | Halo 2, 8.46 million (as of November 2008)[10][11] |
---|---|
Successor | Xbox 360 |
The Xbox is a home video game console manufactured by Microsoft that is the first installment in the Xbox series of video game consoles. It was released as Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market on November 15, 2001, in North America, followed by Australia, Europe and Japan in 2002.[3] It is classified as a sixth-generation console, competing with Sony's PlayStation 2 and Nintendo's GameCube. It was also the first major console produced by an American company since the release of the Atari Jaguar in 1993.
The console was announced in March 2000.
The Xbox had a record-breaking launch in North America, selling 1.5 million units before the end of 2001, aided by the popularity of one of the system's launch titles, Halo: Combat Evolved, which sold a million units by April 2002. The system went on to sell a worldwide total of 24 million units, including 16 million in North America; however, Microsoft was unable to make a steady profit off the console, which had a manufacturing price far more expensive than its retail price, despite its popularity, losing over $4 billion during its market life.[18][19][20][21][22] The system outsold the GameCube and the Sega Dreamcast, but was vastly outsold by the PlayStation 2, which had sold over 150 million units by the system's end of production.[23] It also underperformed outside of the Western market; particularly, it sold poorly in Japan due to its large console size and an overabundance of games marketed towards American audiences instead of Japanese-developed titles.[24] Production of the system was discontinued starting in 2005.[6][7] The Xbox was the first in an ongoing brand of video game consoles developed by Microsoft, with a successor, the Xbox 360, launching in November 2005, followed by the Xbox One in 2013 and the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles in 2020.
History
Creation and development
Before the Xbox,
In 1998, four engineers from Microsoft's DirectX team—Kevin Bachus,
The 4 DirectX team members encountered disagreements with the
Rick Thompson and
Throughout the console's prototyping, Microsoft was working with AMD for the CPU on the system. According to Blackley, just prior to the system's reveal in January 2001, the Microsoft engineers opted to switch to an Intel CPU, a fact that had not yet been communicated to AMD prior to the reveal.[34]
Among the names considered for the new console were a number of acronyms, including "Windows Entertainment Project" (WEP), "Microsoft Total Gaming" (MTG), "Microsoft Interactive Network Device" (MIND), and "Microsoft Interactive Center" (MIC).[35][36] Also among the names considered was "DirectX Box", referring to the system's reliance on Direct X. At one point, Hase jokingly came up with the names "XXX-Box" and "DirectXXX-Box" as a nod to the system's higher volume of adult content compared to Sony or Nintendo's consoles.[37] "DirectX Box" was quickly shortened to "Xbox" through an e-mail conversation, and was ultimately favored by the development team, though a number of spelling variants were tossed around, such as xBox, XboX, and X-box.[35][37] Microsoft's marketing department did not like this name, suggesting "11-X" or "Eleven-X" as alternatives.[35] During focus testing, the company put the name "Xbox" on the list of possible names simply to prove how unpopular the Xbox name would be with consumers. However, "Xbox" proved to be the more popular name on the list and was thus selected as the official name of the product.[38]
When the physical design of the controller began,
As the development team began to tighten down the design of the Xbox, they got help from
Initial announcement and content acquisitions
Gates first publicly mentioned the Xbox in an interview in late 1999, stating that he wanted the system "to be the platform of choice for the best and most creative game developers in the world".[41] It was later announced officially by Gates in a keynote presentation at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose on March 10, 2000, showing off an early prototype build of the system and a series of demos showcasing its hardware.[27][42] The presentation and the new system were well-received, impressing developers with both the hard drive and the Ethernet port and appealing to them with the notion of easy-to-use development tools.[27]
Microsoft began looking at a series of acquisitions and partnerships to secure content for the console at this time.
Around this same time, Microsoft announced it was rebranding its Games Group, which had been focused on developing games for Windows, to the Microsoft Games division to make titles for both Windows and the Xbox.[45] Microsoft began acquiring a number of studios to add to the division, notably Bungie in June 2000, shortly after their announcement of Halo: Combat Evolved. With Microsoft's acquisition, Halo switched from being a release for personal computers to being an Xbox exclusive release and as a launch time to help drive sales of the console.[46][43]
Formal announcement and release
The Xbox was officially unveiled to the public by Gates and guest professional wrestler
The unit's release in November 2001 was partially hampered by the impact of the September 11 attacks on travel, as Microsoft could not travel to the Guadalajara facility to help test units. They were able to arrange to ship the units locally instead of testing at Microsoft facilities to have them ready for launch.[26]
The system was officially launched at midnight on November 15, 2001, three days before the subsequent launch of the Nintendo
Promotion
In 2002, the Independent Television Commission (ITC) banned a television advertisement for the Xbox in the United Kingdom after complaints that it was "offensive, shocking and in bad taste." It depicted a mother giving birth to a baby boy, fired like a projectile through a window, aging rapidly as he flies through the air. The advertisement ends with an old man crash-landing into his own grave and the slogan, "Life is short. Play more."[52]
Discontinuation and successors
The Xbox's successor, the Xbox 360, was officially announced on May 12, 2005 on MTV. It was the first next generation system to be announced. It was released in North America on November 22, 2005. Nvidia ceased production of the Xbox's GPU in August 2005, which marked the end of brand-new Xbox production.[7] The last game for the Xbox in Japan was The King of Fighters Neowave released in March 2006, the last Xbox game in Europe was Xiaolin Showdown released in June 2007, and the last game in North America was Madden NFL 09 released in August 2008. Support for out-of-warranty Xbox consoles was discontinued on March 2, 2009.[53] Support for Xbox Live on the console ended on April 15, 2010.[54]
The Xbox 360 supports a
Hardware
The Xbox was the first video game console to feature a built-in
Unlike the PlayStation 2, which could play movie DVDs without the need for a remote control (although an optional remote was available), the Xbox required an external IR adapter to be plugged into a controller port in order to play movie DVDs. If DVD playback is attempted without the IR sensor plugged in, an error screen will pop up informing the user of the need for the Xbox DVD Playback Kit. The said kit included the IR sensor and a remote control (unlike the PS2, the Xbox controller could not control DVD playback). Said remote was manufactured by
The Xbox was the first gaming product to feature Dolby Interactive Content-Encoding Technology, which allows real-time Dolby Digital encoding in game consoles. Previous game consoles could only use Dolby Digital 5.1 during non-interactive "cut scene" playback.[56]
The Xbox is based on commodity PC hardware and is much larger and heavier than its contemporaries. This is largely due to a bulky tray-loading
Several internal hardware revisions have been made in an ongoing battle to discourage modding (hackers continually updated modchip designs in an attempt to defeat them), to cut manufacturing costs, and to make the DVD-ROM drive more reliable (some of the early units' drives gave disc-reading errors due to the unreliable Thomson DVD-ROM drives used). Later-generation units that used the Thomson TGM-600 DVD-ROM drives and the Philips VAD6011 DVD-ROM drives were still vulnerable to failure that, respectively, either rendered the consoles unable to read newer discs or caused them to halt the console with an error code usually indicating a PIO/DMA identification failure. These units were not covered under the extended warranty.
In 2002, Microsoft and Nvidia entered arbitration over a dispute on the pricing of Nvidia's chips for the Xbox.[57] Nvidia's filing with the SEC indicated that Microsoft was seeking a $13 million discount on shipments for NVIDIA's fiscal year 2002. Microsoft alleged violations of the agreement the two companies entered, sought reduced chipset pricing, and sought to ensure that Nvidia fulfill Microsoft's chipset orders without limits on quantity. The matter was privately settled on February 6, 2003.[58]
The Xbox includes a standard AV cable which provides composite video and monaural or stereo audio to TVs equipped with RCA inputs. European Xboxes also included an RCA jack to SCART converter block and the standard AV cable.
An 8 MB removable solid-state memory card can be plugged into the controllers, onto which game saves can either be copied from the hard drive when in the Xbox dashboard's memory manager or saved during a game. Most Xbox game saves can be copied to the memory unit and moved to another console, but some Xbox saves are digitally signed. It is also possible to save an Xbox Live account on a memory unit, to simplify its use on more than one Xbox. The ports at the top of the controllers could also be used for other accessories, primarily headsets for voice chat via Xbox Live.
Technical specifications
The Xbox
Its
Controllers
The Xbox controller features two
The "Controller S" (codenamed "Akebono"), a smaller, lighter Xbox controller, was originally the standard Xbox controller only in Japan,[66] designed for users with smaller hands.[67][68] The "Controller S" was later released in other territories by popular demand and by 2002 replaced the standard controller in the Xbox's retail package, with the larger original controller remaining available as an accessory.
Software
Operating system
The Xbox runs a custom
The
Xbox Live was released in November 2002, but in order to access it, users had to buy the Xbox Live starter kit containing a
Games
The Xbox launched in North America on November 15, 2001. Popular launch games included Halo: Combat Evolved, Project Gotham Racing, and Dead or Alive 3. All three of these games would go on to sell over a million copies in the US.[77]
Although the console gained strong third-party support from its inception, many early Xbox games did not fully use its powerful hardware until a full year after its release. Xbox versions of cross-platform games sometimes came with a few additional features and/or graphical improvements to distinguish them from the PS2 and
In 2002 and 2003, several high-profile releases helped the Xbox gain momentum and distinguish itself from the PS2.
2004 saw the release of highly rated exclusives
By 2005, despite notable first party releases in
Exhibition discs
The Xbox Exhibition disc collection was a
- Discs
Services
On November 15, 2002, Microsoft launched its Xbox Live online gaming service, allowing subscribers to play online Xbox games with other subscribers around the world and download new content directly to the system's
Sales
Region | Units sold (as of May 10, 2006) |
First available |
---|---|---|
North America | 16 million | November 15, 2001 |
Europe | 6 million | March 14, 2002 |
Asia & Pacific | 2 million | February 22, 2002 |
Worldwide | 24 million | N/A |
Prior to launching, anticipation for the Xbox was high, with
Despite strong sales in North America, Microsoft struggled to make a profit from the Xbox due to its high manufacturing cost. With its initial retail price of $299, Microsoft lost about $125 for every system sold, which cost $425 to manufacture, meaning that the company would have to rely on software sales in order to make any money.[27] According to Robbie Bach, "Probably six months after we shipped, you could see the price curve and do the math and know that we were going to lose billions of dollars."[26] These losses were further exacerbated in April 2002, when Microsoft lowered the retail price of the Xbox even further to $199 in order to further driving hardware sales.[31][32][96] Microsoft also struggled to compete with Sony's more popular PlayStation 2 console, which generally saw far higher sales numbers,[97][98] although the Xbox outsold the PS2 in the U.S. in April 2004.[99] By its manufacturing discontinuation in 2005, the Xbox had sold a total of 24 million units worldwide, 16 million of which had been sold in North America. These numbers fell short of Microsoft's predicted 50 million units, and failed to match the PlayStation 2's lifetime sales of 106 million units at the time, although it did surpass the GameCube and Dreamcast's lifetime sales of 21 million and 10.6 units, respectively, though the GameCube turned out to be more profitable than the Xbox.[8][31][32] Ultimately, Microsoft lost an accumulative total of $4 billion from the Xbox, only managing to turn a profit at the end of 2004.[32] While the Xbox represented an overall loss for Microsoft, Gates, Ballmer, and other executives still saw it as a positive result for the company as it brought them into the console marketplace against doubts raised by the industry, and led to Microsoft's further development of other consoles in the Xbox family.[26]
Japan
Prior to its Japanese launch in February 2002, many analysts estimated that the Xbox would have trouble competing with the PS2 and the GameCube, its local counterparts in the region, noting its comparatively high price tag, lack of exclusives, and larger size which would not fit as well in Japan's smaller living spaces.[100] Microsoft hoped to ship six million Japanese Xbox consoles by June 2002; however, the system had only sold a total of 190,000 units in the region by April of that year, two months after the system's launch in February.[101] For the week ending April 14, 2002, the Xbox sold only 1,800 units, considerably less than the PS2 and GameCube, and failed to see a single title reach the top 50 best-selling video games in Japan.[102] In November 2002, the Xbox chief in Japan stepped down, leading to further consultations about Xbox's future, which by that point had only sold 278,860 units in the country since its February launch.[103][104] For the week ending July 18, 2004, the Xbox sold just 272 units, even fewer than the PSOne had sold in the same week.[105] The Xbox did, however, outsell the GameCube for the week ending May 26, 2002.[106] Ultimately, the Xbox had only sold 474,992 units in its lifetime.[107] Factors believed to have contributed to the console's poor market presence included its large physical size, which contrasted the country's emphasis on more compact designs, and a lack of Japanese-developed games to aid consumer interest.[32]
Modding
Xbox modding is the practice of circumventing the built-in hardware and software security mechanisms of the Xbox video game console.
History
The popularity of the Xbox, as well as (in the United States) its comparatively short 90-day warranty, inspired efforts to circumvent the built-in hardware and software security mechanisms, a practice known as "cracking". Within a few months of its release the initial layer of security on the Xbox BIOS (which relied heavily on
Methods
- Modchip: installing a modchip inside the Xbox that bypasses the original BIOS, with a hacked BIOS to circumvent the security mechanisms.[citation needed]
- TSOP flashing: reflashing the onboard BIOS chip with a hacked BIOS to circumvent the security mechanisms. The Xbox BIOS is contained on a commodity EEPROM (the 'TSOP'), which can be made writable by the Xbox by bridging points on the motherboard.[109] Flashing is usually carried out by using a specially crafted gamesave (see 'Game save exploit', below) to flash the onboard TSOP, but the TSOP can also be de-soldered and re-written in a standard EEPROM programmer. This method only works on 1.0 to 1.5 Xboxes, as version 1.6 (the final hardware version produced) replaced the commodity TSOP with an LPC ROM contained within a proprietary chip.[110]
- Softmods: installing additional software files to the Xbox hard drive, which exploit programming errors in the Dashboard to gain control of the system, and overwrite the in-memory copy of the BIOS.[111] Soft modification is known to be safe for Xbox Live if the user enables multibooting with the Microsoft dashboard and an original game disc is used.[citation needed]
- Game save exploit: using select official game releases to load game saves that exploit buffer overflows in the save game handling.[112] When these special game saves are loaded, they access an interface with scripts for installing the necessary softmod files. Disassembly of the Xbox is not required when installing most game save exploits.
- Hot swapping: using a computer to change the data on the hard drive. This requires having the Xbox unlock the hard drive when it is turned on, then swapping the powered hard drive into a running computer. By using a Linux-based Live CD, data on the hard drive can be read, altered, and deleted. In most cases, an automated script will automatically install the softmod files directly to the Xbox hard drive. This technique has been used extensively to harbor cheating on many online games. Disassembly of the console is required to perform a hot swap. It's the least recommended as it might shock the Xbox hardware or the user's PC components.[citation needed]
Alternative operating systems
Beyond gaming, a modded Xbox can be used as a media center with XBMC4Xbox.[113] There are also distributions of Linux developed specifically for the Xbox, including those based on Gentoo,[114] Debian, Damn Small Linux and Dyne:bolic.[citation needed]
Some operating systems ported to Xbox include
See also
- Xbox Live Marketplace
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External links
- Official website at xbox.com
- Xbox (console) at Curlie
- Xbox at the Wayback Machine (archived February 23, 2005)