Microsoft’s first swing at the console business lost four billion dollars and changed everything anyway. The original Xbox was the most powerful machine of its generation, the first console with a hard drive and broadband built in, and the home of Halo and Xbox Live – the service every modern platform now imitates. This page is the complete story, from the DirectX team’s insurrection to the fan servers that brought the original Live back from the dead.
Start here
The Strategy Game That Became a Shooter: The Making of Halo: Combat Evolved – how a Mac real-time strategy game became the shooter that sold a console.
Microsoft Xbox – the machine itself, surveyed: the PC heart, the hard drive and the bet on power.
The war it lost, told from the winner’s trench: the PlayStation 2.
