Xbox is a sixth generation era video game console produced by Microsoft. It was first released on November 15, 2001 in North America, February 22, 2002 in Japan, and on March 14, 2002 in Europe. It is the predecessor to Microsoft's Xbox 360 console. The Xbox was Microsoft's first independent venture into the video game console arena, after having collaborated with Sega in porting Windows CE to the Sega Dreamcast console. Notable launch titles for the console included Halo: Combat Evolved, Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding, Dead or Alive 3, Project Gotham Racing, and Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee.

History

The Xbox was initially developed within Microsoft by a small team which included Seamus Blackley, a game developer and high energy physicist. The rumors of a video game console being developed by Microsoft first emerged at the end of 1999 following interviews of Bill Gates. Gates said that a gaming/multimedia device was essential for multimedia convergence in the new times of digital entertainment. On March 10, 2000 the "X-box Project" was officially confirmed by Microsoft with a press release.

According to the book Smartbomb, by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby, the remarkable success of the upstart Sony PlayStation worried Microsoft in late 1990s. The growing video game market seemed to threaten the PC market which Microsoft had dominated and relied upon for most of its revenues. As well, a venture into the gaming console market would also diversify Microsoft's product line, which up to that time had been heavily concentrated into software.

According to Dean Takahashi's book, "Opening the Xbox", the Xbox was originally going to be called DirectXbox, to show the extensive use of DirectX within the console's technology. "Xbox" was the final name decided by marketing, but the console still retains some hints towards DirectX, most notably the "X"-shaped logo, which DirectX is famous for, along with the "X" shape on the top of the system.

As time progressed Microsoft's J Allard took over the Xbox project and developed a marketing and advertising campaign to help reach youth audiences. J Allard was also primarily responsible for Microsoft's follow-up product, the Xbox 360.

Software

The Xbox launched in North America on November 15, 2001. The greatest success of the Xbox's launch games was Halo: Combat Evolved which was critically well received and was the best-selling game of the year. Halo still remains one of the console's standout titles, while its sequel Halo 2 became the best-selling title of the console and enjoyed a long reign as the most played game on the Xbox Live service until November 13th, 2006 when the hit Xbox 360 title Gears of War claimed the top spot. Other successful launch titles included NFL Fever 2002, Project Gotham Racing and Dead or Alive 3 ). However, the failure of several first-party games (including Fuzion Frenzy and Azurik: Rise of Perathia ) damaged the initial public reputation of the Xbox.

Although the console enjoyed strong third-party support from its inception, many early Xbox games did not take full advantage of its powerful hardware, with few additional features or graphical improvements to distinguish them from the PS2 version, thus negating one of the Xbox's main selling points. Lastly, Sony countered the Xbox for a short time by temporarily securing PlayStation 2 exclusives for highly anticipated games such as the Grand Theft Auto series and Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance although they were later ported to the Xbox and no longer exclusive.

In 2002 and 2003, several releases helped the Xbox to gain momentum and distinguish itself from the PS2. The Xbox Live online service was launched in late 2002 alongside pilot titles MotoGP, MechAssault and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. Several best-selling and critically acclaimed titles for the Xbox were published, such as Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Ninja Gaiden and LucasArts' Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Take-Two Interactive's exclusivity deal with Sony was amended to allow Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and its sequels to be published on the Xbox. In addition, many other publishers got into the trend of releasing the Xbox version alongside the PS2 version, instead of delaying it for months.

In 2004, Halo 2 set records as the highest-grossing release in entertainment history making over 100 million in its first day, as well as being a successful killer app for the online service. That year, Microsoft and Electronic Arts reached a deal that would see the latter's popular titles enabled on Xbox Live.

In 2005, the long-awaited PC titles Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and Far Cry Instincts were released.

Hardware

The Xbox was the first console to incorporate a hard disk drive as standard, used primarily for storing game saves compressed in zip archives and content downloaded from Xbox Live. This eliminated the need for separate memory cards (although some older consoles, such as the TurboCD and Sega CD had featured built-in battery backup memory prior to this). Most of the games also use the hard drive as a disk cache, for faster game loading times. Some games support "Custom soundtracks," and you can also play non-burnt cd's, particularly unusual feature allowed by the hard drive. An Xbox owner can rip music from standard audio CDs to the hard drive so players can play their custom soundtrack, in addition to the original soundtrack of Xbox games that support such a feature.

Although the Xbox is based on older PC hardware and runs a stripped-down version of the Windows 2000 kernel using APIs based largely on DirectX 8.1, it incorporates changes optimized for gaming uses as well as restrictions designed to prevent uses not approved by Microsoft. A similar approach (PC hardware, stripped-down Windows) was used by the Tandy VIS entertainment system. The Xbox does not use Windows CE due to Microsoft internal politics at the time[citation needed], as well as limited support in Windows CE for DirectX. Microsoft's set of low-level APIs for game development and multimedia purposes, DirectX, was used as a basis for the Xbox.

The Xbox itself is much larger and heavier than its contemporaries. This is largely due to a bulky tray-loading DVD-ROM drive and the standard-size 3.5" hard drive. Because of this, the Xbox has found itself a target of mild derision, as gamers poke fun at it for things like a warning in the Xbox manual that a falling Xbox "could cause serious injury" to a small child or pet. However, the Xbox has also pioneered safety features, such as breakaway cables for the controllers to prevent the console from being yanked from the shelf and injuring a nearby person or pet.

The original game controller design (known as the "Duke" or Controller "0"), which was particularly large, was similarly often criticized since it was ill-suited to those with small hands because of the large handles. In response to these criticisms, a smaller controller was introduced for the Japanese Xbox launch. This Japanese controller (which was briefly imported by even mainstream video game store chains, such as GameStop) was subsequently released in other markets as the "Xbox Controller S", and currently all Xbox consoles come with a "Controller S", while the original controller that was launched with the Xbox (known as "The Duke") was quietly discontinued.

Several internal hardware revisions have been made in an ongoing battle to discourage modding (hackers continually updated modchip designs in attempt to defeat them), cut manufacturing costs, and to provide a more reliable DVD-ROM drive (some of the early units' drives gave Disc Reading Errors due to the unreliability of the Thomson DVD-ROM drives that were used).

However, later generation of Xbox units that used the Thomson TGM-600 DVD-ROM drives and the Philips VAD6011 DVD-ROM drives were still vulnerable to failure that rendered the consoles either unable to read newer discs or caused them to halt the console with an error code usually indicating a PIO/DMA identification failure, respectively. These units would not be covered under the extended warranty.

The Xbox incorporates a built-in Ethernet adapter. The Xbox's NV2A graphics chipset is a derivative of NVIDIA's GeForce 3, with an additional vertex shader over the desktop equivalent.

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