Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 416: The Xbox Launch and Legacy

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Kat Bailey, Ray Barnholt, and Stuart Gipp turn back the hands of time two decades once again, this time with a too-huge-to-hold-comfortably episode commemorating Microsoft's entrance into the first-party realm with Xbox. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You are listening to Retronauts a part of the soon-to-be-renamed Greenlit Podcast Network. This episode is brought to you by Trade Coffee. This week in Retronauts, it's the real MSX. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts, episode 416, a number that has nothing to do with what we're talking about today, which is the Xbox's 20th anniversary. Wow, the Xbox is 20 years old. That's, that's startling. I am Jeremy Parrish here to tick away the moments of our mortality. And with me, both in person and from far, far away, we have a host of talented and knowledgeable regulars, including Ray Barnholt. Hello. And...

Cat Bailey. Hello. And finally, from far away. Stuart Jip, hello. And contrary to what you may think, I don't actually like Blinks the Time Sweeper. Wow, that's, okay, this really changes the texture of our conversation. I had everything really kind of planned around that. It was everything sort of anchored around my love of that game.

I know, yeah. I mean, you've seen the notes. It's basically just like there's a big section that says Stuart talks about blinks for an hour. Yeah, it's like 45 minutes set aside. All right. So, yes, Microsoft Xbox is 20 years old, which means, oh, what does that mean exactly? I don't know. For me, this is kind of me approaching the episode as an outsider because I played

some Xbox games primarily for review for OneUp.com, but I did not own an Xbox. I would just lug that enormous brick of computer back and forth to the office by foot, carrying it laboriously up Knob Hill. It was a delight. It's like carrying a desktop. It pretty much. Yeah. It was like, yeah, just, you know, why not take home my desktop computer as well? I got a good workout. It kept me in shape. penny arcade is not a funny comic but they made a lot of hay out of the size of the size of the Xbox back in the day like you can see the thing from space it was a very large console and very heavy and you know that was not so much a you know unlike the Atari Links it was not a quality assurance

you know focus testing decision people are like oh we Americans like big things it was just the things that Microsoft wanted to do and accomplish with that Xbox were best expressed and realized through a very, very large box. And, you know, compared to the very, you know, pretty trim PS2, especially the slim version that came out later and the cute little lunch pail-sized Nintendo GameCube, Xbox was a behemoth. But, you know, it also had a lot of power inside that system. And it represented, I think, a pretty pivotal moment in video game history, which is, you know, the shift of console gaming back toward American development and toward American tastes and interests

and Western tastes. We've got a British person here on the show. I don't want to, I don't want to be, you know, totally local and chauvinistic. No, no, no. You say jump. We'll say how high is always. Is that, is that how it works? I thought it was the other way around, but that's okay. You know what? Let's discuss this for the duration of the podcast. Forget the Xbox. I mean, Microsoft did buy the most famous British studio at that time. I mean, rare. Cosgrove Hall. What did you say, Stuart?

I said Cosgrove Hall. That's a bit of a small audience for that joke. Yes. I'm not small enough for that one. Retronauts is where we have jokes that are meant for small audiences. We don't take pride in that. If your joke is meant for one person, that is a great, that is a great Retronauts episode. That's open my whole world up.

Thank you for that, Jeremy. You're welcome. Anyway, so I have confessed my shame. that I did not own an Xbox, you know, I just, I could only afford two consoles and I went with the ones that had the brands that I knew. But it did hurt a little because, you know, Microsoft also bought Bungy and I loved Marathon and very much wanted to play Halo, which was supposed to be a Macintosh game. And then it turned out not to be for a long time. So, you know, there was this part of me pining for the Xbox, but my budget said, no, sir, no, no, you're not doing that.

So let me ask each of you what your respective experiences with Xbox are, starting with Kat. I didn't own an Xbox, but my friends did. I was in college at the time, and the Xbox was a very popular dorm console. I remember when Halo 2 came out, it was all the rage, people were having parties, people were landing together, all of their Xboxes and playing throughout their different houses. I found that controller terrifying. It took me a long time to figure out how to use Twin Stick, the Twin Stick setup for Halo.

Of course, now it's the de facto setup and everything. I have a lot of respect for the Xbox. So we did on my other podcast, X of the Blood God, we did a console RPG quest, and we looked back on all the ways that the Xbox change things. I think it's not just that it represents a C-Change, for American or Western interests in games, it inaugurated the modern era of games as we know it

because we had these consoles that had off-the-shelf parts for the first time. Like, it started to change that way. A lot of the PC franchises like BioWare and Bethesda started to develop for console in a major, major way. Like, so much of what we see today in games. games started on the original Xbox. And so in that sense, I find it to be a fascinating console. I agree.

And we will get into that this episode. But Ray, how about you? What was your Xbox inauguration? Yeah, fascinating is a good word. But yeah, that year was really exciting for me. But at the time, I prioritized GameCube because it just seemed a bit more. Everybody in here and prioritized GameCube repeats. Hey, hey.

Hold on in a minute. I know we're all those kind of nerds, but I'm getting to it. Yeah, it was more exciting to have things like Monkey Ball and Smash Brothers at the time. But I did intend to get an Xbox, and I did finally the following year. So October 2002 was the time to get it, especially if you're me, because that was when they, A, standardized the controller S as the pack in, and B, a two pack of Sega games right there on the a box that said two free Sega games and I'm like okay it's time and so speaking your language with jet set and Sega GT and then on the way was Shenmu 2 because in America that was the only way to get it was on Xbox but yeah I liked it and also for me as like a sort of beginning

freelance games reviewer type of person it did help me get some extra games to when those were tossed into the waters, so I was also exposed to things like some of the early from software stuff on that and GameCube, actually. That was back when freelance reviews actually made decent money as opposed to

I guess. Here is $10. Yeah. For your, you know, 200 hour RPG review. The only problem is, decent money, the problem is getting it. Right. Getting a debug unit. So yeah, and I was also really fascinated. There's a word again by like the Japanese side of

the Xbox, even though it did turn out to be a failure over in that market, like the scene as far as software goes was really, really interesting. And some very interesting Japanese games made it over here, and some did not. And that just was like always like a kind of a mild obsession for me. And so that was also why I ended up kind of doing a whole magazine about that. Right. I'm glad you're here because not a lot of people know that much about the Japanese side of Xbox, the original Xbox. So that is definitely something I would like to discuss in this

hour and a half. But before we do that, Stuart, what about you? How, how is Xbox received in the UK in general, in addition to your own experiences? Well, I didn't, I know, I knew like one person who had on Xbox. Everyone I knew had a GameCube and or a PS2. The Xbox was, I don't know if it actually did well, because in recent years, I see a lot of people talking about all the time they spent with their Xbox and I just find myself wondering where these people lived and who they were. They went to my college. This has been allowed to happen. I just, I remember playing, I remember playing Halo.

I remember playing Fusion Frenzy and I remember really wanting Munch's Odyssey because it got moved over from Sony to Microsoft because they think, I think that Microsoft just bought Oddworld inhabitants straight up, or at least they licensed it. But when I did eventually play Munches Odyssey, it was really bad. So I felt like I dodged a bullet in that one. But for me, the Xbox was this kind of, it was sort of a distant third because all I remember about the marketing when it was coming out is the magazines that I was reading were weirdly obsessed with this game called Malice

and talking about how this game was going to be like the killer app for the Xbox. It was like the Mario Beta like platform, but it was also really edgy and adult and it had boobs and like a girl with a massive hammer, smashing things and then that game just kind of vanished and eventually I saw it on PS2 and I don't think it even ended on anyone's radar in any way whatsoever or anyone's even heard of it to be honest I just remember for some reason it was a big deal before the Xbox came out um but then ultimately uh I mean now now to me the brand is really uh I hate saying that makes me sound like such a tool the brand is very important to me um because I find it

kind of fascinating like cat like you said it was such a precursor to sort of modern gaming in so many ways and the fact is you could have a halo 2 disc from back then from 20 years ago 20 or 19 years ago whenever halo 2 came out and you could just play it on your series x today you could just put it in it and it will just natively work which is insane to me that they have supported this thing for so long and with rumors that even more Xbox games are going to be backwards and compatible soon. We might all be gathering around playing Jetset Radio Future, which is what I really, really hope is going to happen. Or Malice. Or Malice. Exactly. Although I don't even, I don't think Malice even came out in the Xbox

in the end. It was a much huge to do. Yeah, I did. It was late. It may have done. It may have, okay, okay. I don't know that for a fact. Unfortunately, I completely went off my radar as soon as I saw a GameCube, I think. That's bad. But no, ultimately for me, the Xbox is sort of in its later years, it's the machine that is only notable because it was the only way you could get Bubble Symphony without emulating it. Is that one of the Taito collections?

It was one of the exclusive games on Taito Legends 2 because for some reason the exclusivized some of the games. I think the PS2, the trade-off was you got G. Darius amongst like Ray Storm maybe, some other stuff like that. But if you got the Xbox, you've got Bubble Symphony and you got Kadesh and I was kind of like

Bubble Symphony, that's a pretty good game. So to me, the Xbox is basically just a big, expensive bubble symphony playing machine. I mean, it's still cheaper than buying the arcade version or actually getting the Saturn version of Saturn. It is definitely, yeah, that is true. Plus then, you know, if you ever get fed up with Bubble Symphony, you can put Mattel Black on and not get anywhere

because the controls don't work properly on that version. Sweet. But it's all fun. Yeah, it's a good machine. Bubble Symphony, great game. Recommend it to get an Xbox. Yeah, the extremely narrow selection of, like, Xbox exclusive retro game collections is very interesting because you really didn't see a lot of retro game collections on Xbox compared to GameCube and especially PS2.

But then you had stuff like, you know, just the random Tecmo arcade collection. Yeah. And then, you know, odd little little things that would pop up. up like the you know bubble symphony yeah i think that's because if you i think the key to understanding the xbox is that whereas a lot of consoles that came before it like look at the dream cast which kind of faded melded into the xbox as it were at a certain point they had a strong arcade lineage even the original PlayStation had a strong arcade lineage launch with like ridge racer and warhawk and teckin these kinds of games the xbox had a strong pc lineage, starting with Halo and all of those games.

And in many ways, that would define the tenor of game development going forward. It's that very strong PC lineage. So if you want to talk about why we have these backward compatible games on the Xbox Series X to this day, that is part and parcel of its PC lineage versus its arcade lineage, I would wager. That's a very interesting perspective on that. And I think you're right. Just the idea of accessibility beyond, you know, the hardware generations, the idea that when I do think of Xbox and what it's become, like Xbox Series X and S, it does feel like Microsoft has done, really, like really taken strides to get rid of the concept of consoles as sort of standalone objects. And Sony flirted with that for a while.

And then PS3 came along and they were like, eh, throw it of that backward compatibility. and, you know, Nintendo, forget about it. I mean, it is like Windows. Yeah. But it's, you know, there's actually, you know, it's required a conscious effort by Microsoft to get there because the Xbox and especially Xbox 360 architecture are wildly different and not even in the same families

as what you have now with Xbox Series X. But they've really, you know, made a tremendous effort to go back. and really in a way that doesn't profit them directly, which is something you don't see in game systems from major corporations, to make old games that are no longer commercially available viable on this system that they're selling now. And it seems weird to say this about Microsoft, but it seems weirdly altruistic in just in a way that you don't see anywhere else in the video games industry.

They want to be the Netflix of games. And actually, if you look at the original Xbox, it was even back at the time the Xbox was discussed as kind of a prototype the Xbox 360 was going to be

the real deal they were just making their way into the market and there was always kind of a 10-year plan going on with Microsoft

where they were like we're going to have all this inter-connectivity we are going to dominate the living room with the Xbox at the center and then they discovered

in 2013 when they finally reached that end game that their ideas had been left behind and that everything had changed and that's why

the Xbox One struggled so much. So they had to completely pivot and change. And now they're like, okay, now our real 10-year plan is finally coming to fruition. I was there at the Microsoft conference in Seattle in 2013 where they

unveiled the Xbox 1 and were like basically talking about everything except video games. And I just remember kind of the deafening silence among everyone who was there. There was applause and everything, but everyone just kind of went away, like, puzzled.

like this isn't what we want and it doesn't seem good. The Xbox one was revealed just a couple of months after House of Cards debuted on Netflix and we started getting Netflix original programming which began in my view the true streaming

era. Like if you want a juxtaposition of where the Xbox one went wrong, there it is. Right. I do kind of wonder about the point that the original Xbox, and by the way, I can try not to say Xbox 1 to refer to the original.

Dang, Microsoft in your naming conventions. I'm going to try, if you just hear me say Xbox by itself, I do mean this original console. I wonder about, you know, the fact that back before it was originally announced even, there were years and years of people being like, Bill Gates owned your desktop. Now he wants to own your living room. And it's like, oh, now they're making a game console. It means it's going to be like multimedia insanity every day, games and movies and TV. this is finally what Microsoft is going to do.

They're finally going to make that set top box, that goddamn term set top box. I heard that a million times in the 90s. But the Xbox is like a pretty normal video game console. And even this 360 to some degree, they didn't, I mean, as we already said, like the Xbox one was the one where they were just like, okay, now it's the big TV box.

But even the original and 360 were just kind of like pretty standard game consoles, except for some extra frills on 360, of course. It was very customizable. Yeah. Like, the Xbox is maybe lasting legacy. The original Xbox is emulation, I would wager. People would just load so many ROMs onto that thing.

Yeah, that was kind of an unintended legacy. Right. Well, that is the thing. People made it into the big multimedia box by putting in a bunch of games and movies and TV on the hard drive and things like that when you modded it. But officially, it wasn't really... But, you know, they must have known kind of...

of what they were getting into when they gave people so much control and the ability to swap out for bigger hard drives and things like that. I'm sure they did, yeah. They knew that this was a PC pretty much at the end of the day. I think they pretty much knew

what they were getting into. Are we going to talk about the lead-up to how the Xbox came around? Yeah, well, I think first it's worth mentioning the fact that this wasn't Microsoft's first flirtation with console gaming because they worked with ASCy nearly 20 years prior to put together the MSX standard. And I've never been entirely clear just how much the MSX platform relied on Microsoft and how involved they were with it. It doesn't really seem like when you go back and look at the hardware and the software, you never really see Microsoft's name. No. But the idea was to create the standard that I don't even think it was a licensed standard. It was just like,

here's like the platform spec. You know, it wasn't like 3DO where people were paying a license to. Well, I mean, you had like a logo badge and you had to have like an MXX branded computer and stuff. Okay. But no, I think most of that lies with, Asky, or really K-Nishi, who was just the main figurehead of MSX. And, you know, he had represented Microsoft in Japan, for sure. But, yeah, like you said, the only time Microsoft really shows up on those computers is in Basic, when you boot it up. Right. There's really no significant Microsoft presence with MSX, except for the fact that people might, that people think the MSS stands for Microsoft.

And I'm not even sure anybody does. I genuinely thought that and I'm sorry Yeah Well I mean again it's not your fault Because I don't think it was ever really officially established What it was supposed to be other than just a cool set of letters Because Keenishi was just like I think making things up As he was going along trying to sell the thing for years and year

There's a big gag in Game Center CX where they were doing the MSX look And at the end of each segment Arino would be like What does MSX mean and he would come up with like Yeah Here's what the acronym actually means exactly so that was that was kind of their first

sort of glancing blow with console games although MSX was kind of a console kind of a computer it was this sort of interesting hybrid that you got a lot back then sure was the 80s wasn't it

it was very much the 80s but that doesn't even really matter to Americans because the MSX was basically a non-starter here it showed up and then promptly vanished bad timing for one thing but also

it was just kind of superfluous But, you know, Microsoft didn't really have much of anything to do with console gaming that I'm aware of until the Dreamcast came out. And they worked with Sega to provide the WinC.E environment for, you know, lightweight game development, things like Choochoo Rocket and Sega Swirl, whatever. I remember Sega Rally 2 was like the first notable game on that Windows C.E. platform. And that was where I looked and said, oh, Microsoft wants in on the games business, they're going to, you know, muscle their way in through the Dreamcast. That's how it is. Those bastards, they're going to try to take over everything.

And I wasn't totally wrong, but they turned out to be much more benevolent than I think I would have expected, given their reputation in the 90s. Interesting name. I was a PC gamer in the mid-90s, and Microsoft was very much making a big push into PC games, especially through Windows 95. They were making a lot of noise about how the Windows 95 would be a great gaming platform,

except everybody hated it because DOS games would never boot up properly in the dang thing, so you would have to make a DOS shell to be able to properly play games. And they published a game called Fury 3, and it was a pretty bad shooter. They went and acquired an ensemble,

did the Age Vampire series, and Microsoft was pretty much enemy number one in the PC gaming space at that time. And everybody's like, oh, no, they're going to come into consoles and ruin those, too. Well, they were, you know, I was, I was someone who did a lot of graphic design work and therefore owned a Macintosh, and Microsoft was beyond enemy number one there. And then when they swept in and bought the only publisher that cared about Macintosh of Note bungee,

it kind of felt personal. I was, you know, that really, it really stung. I was like, but my Halo, Steve Jobs showed it and it looks so good. And now I can't play it. What are you? No. Steve Jobs wouldn't lie to us. He would never, never lie.

Yeah. And then it was like not even, I think a year later where the final form of Halo showed up. But yeah. It was very different. So, yeah, I mean, Halo had been shown off at Worldwide Developer Conference, 1999, which is a like a Macintosh platform-specific, Apple-specific event. Steve Jobs was out there like, you know, we're really, we're back. We have lickable computers. They're cute and adorable and you want to own them.

Was that the year? Was that the year he did? Was that the year that he had, sorry, Bill Gates pop up and, you know, you gave the famous speech of like, I'm back, or was that 97? That might have, I can't remember exactly. It's all in there. It's all a blur of elderlyness now. Because 99 is also when Pirates of Silicon Valley was airing.

and they did cover that event so it might have been great movie by the way essential viewing in my opinion good TV movie is it really that old geez I saw it on cable

back in like 2000 all right well yeah that was Apple was really like trying to convince people that they were all about video games after

decades of being like video games no and then you know Microsoft said let's take that video game for ourselves for our console And it was a great decision because Halo turned out to be the killer app. And certainly I remember in the game magazines at the time, like that's all anyone could talk about was their multiplayer sessions.

And, you know, even that felt a little wrong because they were talking about these like great land parties they were having in their magazine offices. I was like, well, you know, that doesn't really work for the rest of us. Congratulations on all of you with your like interconnected hardware in the same space. but what about everyone else? But, you know, it was baby steps. And when Halo 2 came out, that was really the killer app for Xbox Live.

And that really, like, that was the future of online gaming right there and really just kind of set the standard. It was the moment, for sure. Like Halo 2 was a huge moment. Yeah, it took three years for them to get there. November 15th, 2001 to, was it November 9th, 2004? I'm trying to remember the tattooed

I'm pretty sure it was a November 9th, Peter Morton. We had Crimson Skies. That was an incredible Xbox Live game. I'll take your word on that one. Yeah. I mean, I think people may not remember is that, you know, Xbox Live did launch before Halo 2. It wasn't like...

It was like 2002. Yeah. It was like a year later, so they were... Yeah, I'm not correcting you, Jeremy. I'm just saying for... But people think of Xbox Live truly beginning with Halo 2 because in many ways, that's when it really did start. Yeah, it's kind of like...

Steam existed before Half-Life 2. too, but no one cared about Steam before half-like. Exactly. Sometimes you just need, I mean, software is always, you know, the thing that motivates people. It's not the technology. It's how you use it. And I think to Microsoft's credit and the credit of their partners, they put together a lot of really interesting, compelling technology that could have just been DOA. Not in like the DOA series, but yes.

Then arrival. Well, that's right. But because they had such great software developers working with them and so many great exclusive games that really harness that technology, you know, by the end of the Xbox's lifespan, you know, and moving into the Xbox 360, it had gone from being this kind of curiosity, clunky, ha ha, it's so big. There's like three games on it that we really care about to like, wow, there's a lot of really cool stuff happening here. and, you know, people were playing Halo 2 death match, you know, until what, like the Master Chief Collection came out or something? It was like a decade. They just, you know, as long as they would support the servers, people still wanted to just go to blood gulch or whatever. Yeah, and Halo 2's single player was kind of disappointing because it was fairly unfinished.

I mean, Bungie famously went in by the seat of their pants trying to get this thing finished. So the multiplayer really carried this game in a big way. And that was the beginning of an era of multiplayer carrying a lot of not-so-great games. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I wouldn't call Halo 2 Not-so-Great. Okay, Halo 2 was great. It was just rough. It was rough in many ways, yes.

We had some issues. Anyway, so was there anything more you wanted to talk about with the lead-up or? Not in terms of the lead-up, but if you ever read the oral history of the creation of the Xbox, go read it because it is fantastic. Is that the book building the Xbox? It wasn't a book. it was, I forget which site it actually went up onto. Oh, yeah, it was more recent, right? It was very recent, yes.

Oh, okay, I haven't seen that yet. Shoot. I think it was published as well because it was in one of the story bundles, a while, or at least a sort of two-part thing. I think it got expanded into a book as well. They talked about, like, how the Xbox was conceived, how they came up with the name, like how Bill Gates basically was like the, okay, let's go, like, do it, right? They came up with it during a retreat, you know, a corporate.

retreat where they were basically mind mapping what the future is going to be in that's right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, what I read in researching for this episode is that the name Xbox was like the control option. They did all this A-B testing and marketing focus group testing

where they were like trying out. No, everyone at Microsoft was like, yeah, everyone at Microsoft was like, oh, this is a name is terrible. No one would want this. So we'll just use this as a control and then A-B-Test against it with all these other names. And everyone was just like, oh, Xbox, that's a cool name. Yeah. It's not a cool name.

It's a bad name. It's not. I mean, this is, but this was the era of, like, Extreme Sports and Mega Man Xtreme. Yeah, I mean. It's a badass name. Okay. Thank you, Stuart, for providing counterbalance there. It's a very 2001 do-the-do kind of name.

Right. It matches the logo. Yeah. Like, if you had it in the Dreamcast font with the swirl, it wouldn't, you'd be like, what's the fun? No, I mean, with the black and green and the pointy X, yeah, it makes sense. Xbox. Yeah, it looks great. Go with it. You guys want to come and play the GameCube? No way.

I want to play the Xbox. It sounds cool. It really does, yeah, it really does have like edgy teen written all over it, especially the original color scheme. I mean, you boot that thing up and you got like a volatile chemical explosion happening

right there. I mean, that's not, you know, that's because it's like making drugs. It's edgy. Shake gently. I mean, it just, it does seem, you know, you can tell that it is an American-made console, like X isn't something you can easily say in Japanese in the first place. And it was really sort of the, I mean, it was the first American-made console of note to hit the market since Atari's Jaguar eight years prior. That's a long, a long gap. And I guess, pretty much, yeah.

You can kind of count the Pippin, which was sort of Bandai, sort of. of Apple, but also entirely disaster. And actually, the Pippin kind of has a lot of thematic, like conceptual similarities with the Xbox, except Microsoft actually succeeded, whereas

Apple and Bondi, like, just... Yeah, the Pippin is too much of a Mac, really. It is, yeah. The original Xbox is like an Atari on steroids. Like, the Atari 5200, if it really bulked up. I don't know. A 5200 is pretty bulky.

That was a big dark console at the time, too. The controllers are better. Big, but at least they re-center. Stuart, what were you going to say? I can't remember. Nice. Excellent. Yeah, so, of course, this being an attempt by an American corporation

to push back and take a chunk of the console space from the Japanese corporations that had dominated it for decades now, like a decade and a half, They very tastefully codenamed the system midway during development. I did not realize this until I was researching, but that's profoundly tasteless. Wow, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Yoshiki Okamoto was probably like, yeah, way to go, guys. But yeah, just, I don't know.

But they thankfully changed it to something that could not be pronounced. Yes, much better. And, you know, the system didn't really fly in Japan, although they made a genuine effort, I think. To some degree, or at least they put someone in charge at the Japan studio. Bill Gates went to Japan and was doing the whole media tour over there. I mean, oh, no, I had to go to Japan and eat amazing food and see cool robots and stuff. They cared enough to make Bill Gates. Like, Bill Gates, of course, was the face of the whole push.

He was like Dwayne famously had the rock up there introducing it. But he cared enough that he was like kind of the best. pitch man for this console. Like, he could have been, like, had nothing to do with this thing at all. Yeah, I mean, just, just think of how many Epstein parties he had to skip to go to Japan. Oh, my God, I'm so glad you made that joke before I did. I was like, do I go for it? Should I go for it, man?

Okay, we got it out. It's done. Yeah, I mean, they really did push, make an effort to find some traction in Japan, and Japan was basically having none of it for, I think, a variety of reasons, including just the enormous girth of the system, which just, like, in the spaces available in homes over there, you want, like, the PS-1, you know, you want the PS2 slim. You don't want basically something that is the size of someone's entire Kotatsu. It was described to me by Japanese gamers as a kind of a, you know, bi-local sort of pride thing.

They were like, oh, we're going to buy the Japanese consoles. We're not going to buy this American crazy thing. Sorry. I mean, of course, there are Japanese gamers who love the Xbox. I've met them. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of just like we have the wee-a-boos here. Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, there are little shops you can find in, like, Nakano or Akihabara that are dedicated to the, you know, the dozens of Japanese gamers who are like, yeah, American and European products are so cool. I love them. Yogi. The guy who made Downwell was like, don't like Japanese games. I've played Xbox. I like Skyrim.

And I'm like, that's really interesting. Yeah. I don't know. I think the size issue is one of those things that you can't exactly quantify without like seeing research data or something like that. I think part of it was just as strong in the branding, having the pointy X, bright green pointy X, on black, everywhere next to, I mean, even the GameCube had his logo on black,

but at least it is a friendlier-looking brand and console and such. So I feel like that had some things to do with it too. And also, as we'll probably go into the software issues. You know, you mentioned how they bought Bungee, but one of their big Japanese gets was Tecmo, which is really almost as weird as Bungi, just in a Japanese sense. It's like, Tecmo, I mean,

they didn't really have. that might have a profile, not since the Dreamcast, DOA2, kind of, but before that they were just like making relatively niche, like, PS1 games and, you know, they hadn't really had a hit since the Ninja Guidon days. But Microsoft just sort of elevated them and brought back the Ninja Guiden days. Yeah, basically. And it worked out for the most part, enough to get bought by Koai, I suppose. Ninja Guiden was the defining action game, in my opinion, that generation. Yes, Devil May Cry also existed and was an incredible game and obviously has a better legacy.

It's a good bookend. Good bookend to Devil May Cry. Devil May Cry was kind of like early days, PS2, and then Ninja Guideon was kind of like mid to late Xbox. The original Ninja Guideon on Xbox, though, A-plus. Like, people forget how big that game was. It's so good.

Right. And it looked amazing, too. The visuals, it really kind of felt like, oh, we've already gotten to Xbox 360, a couple of years before Xbox 360 came along. There was just so much detail and this kind of glossiness to it. And a lot of stuff happening all the time on screen. I haven't played that much of Ninja Guidon because it's not really my style of game.

But, I mean, even if I am not like a huge enthusiast of it, I still greatly respect what Tecmo accomplished with that game. And it was such a strange contrast to their other sort of big Xbox exclusive games. game, which was Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball. That was also graphically impressive, but it put its emphasis elsewhere, let's say. Well, okay. Well, to be a little bit more fair, DOA3 was like the launch game that really elevated them, like I said.

And then they made like DOA Ultimate, which was basically like a super version of DOA2, which followed volleyball and probably looked even better. So, I mean, generally speaking, in the whole of things, DOA and Ninja Guidance series, yeah, they really, they pushed the limits, they really took to the Xbox. They were like, yep, we're in this for the long haul. I was just going to say, if you want to play Ninja Guideon now,

there are three different versions, and people have died arguing about which one is the best. So, you know. Ninja Guiding Black is the best one. Well, that was easy. There you go. Definitely answered by Retronauts, another myth.

Thank you. Where do you stand on it, Stuart? I, I, I, no opinion. Absolutely no opinion. I find that hard to believe. I can't tell the difference. Oh, okay. I can't tell the difference.

I didn't play them until relatively recently. Well, Sigma had some bugs and, like, some other issues compared to black. I'm too much, I'm also too much of a ninja dog to really care. I do actually have an opinion on this. I think it was the original that let you unlock Ninja Guide in one, two, and three, so I vote for that. Okay. Yeah. Of course.

There we got to be. Extra Matron. So, yeah, I feel like Xbox launched pretty well in the U.S. And Europe, um, and kind of sold steadily. just one of those platforms that sort of gained traction the longer it went and I feel like, you know, kind of snowballed over time.

It sold about as well as the GameCube. It sold a little better than GameCube. Yeah. I mean, it was, they were neck and neck for the most part. Xbox, I feel like, had more cultural cachet over here. At the time, now the GameCube, I would argue, is more nostalgic than the Xbox. Of course, these

are the circles that I run in. Right. I mean, certainly if you're going by vintage game pricing on the Aftermarket, certainly the GameCube wins. But you can call it that now that every game for the system costs like $300. The PS2, of course, annihilated both of them like the frickin' Death Star. Three times as many systems as Xbox and GameCube combined. There will never be a route in gaming quite like that again.

Yeah, we're just talking about like fighting over scraps, essentially. I mean, you know, 25 million units isn't scraps. The PS4 routed the Wii U and the Xbox one almost. as much. Yeah. Okay, fair enough. I forget the PS4 existed. I mean, it's not retro yet.

Therefore, it's not in your life vision. It's totally off my radar. But, you know, the success that Xbox did see actually kind of worked against Microsoft because the more systems they sold, the more money they lost. They put together this incredibly ambitious plan for their hardware and never really figured out how to make that profitable. which is really interesting. I've read that it lost them something like, what was it,

$2 billion just for that one generation, which you can understand why their current president came in and was like, I don't know if we're going to keep doing this video game thing. But they still are, and it seems to be going pretty well for them. Certainly, I can't buy an Xbox Series X at retail yet, and it's been a year. They're making all their money off GamePass now, but at the time, it wasn't just that the Xbox itself was a loss leader, a major loss leader. They were throwing tons of money at these studios like BioWare or rare

and being like, yeah, like we're going to throw as much money as we possibly can to get a foothold in this space. I mean, if you go and read, it was on Bloomberg, by the way, the oral history of Xbox. They talked about, they were trying to buy Nintendo. Nintendo laughed them out of the room, you know. They were trying to buy Square Nix. they're trying to buy everybody. That's how you end up becoming,

you're losing like $2 billion when you're just throwing a money around that cavalierly. I mean, you couldn't buy Nintendo with $2 billion. Nintendo has like, even in their darkest days, they had so much liquidity,

just cash in the bank. They could have stayed mired in the GameCube generation for decades and still not run out of money. All those cash reserves. Yep, that's tough to overcome. But, you know, the concept behind Xbox,

was really grand and impressive. And, you know, it really comes down to a team of four people. Seamus Blackley, who now is doing similarly revolutionary things with bread. Kevin Bacchus, Otto, Berks, and Ted Haas, or Hase. They came up with this concept of basically creating a video game console box based around PC parts instead of a closed architecture, which was pretty much the standard at that point. And like I said,

it was a little bit similar in spirit to the Pippin Atmark, which was based around a PowerPC 603E processor, I think, which was the low-end kind of Macintosh processor. But they weren't going low-end. They were like, let's put a real, honest-to-God, Pentium-3 in here. Let's put a real, honest-to-god, I think, Nvidia graphics card in here. Let's, you know, give it a ton of

like twice as much as any system on the market. Let's, you know, put a hard drive in it. Let's put gigabit Ethernet in it or Megabit. I don't know what it was, but it was Ethernet. Like, you know, broadband built into the system instead of an adapter you had to buy like with GameCube and Dreamcast or PS2. They just loaded this thing down with all the cool stuff. And I'm sure, you know, looking back, that's a big reason why with PlayStation 3, Sony

and specifically Kin Kuduragi were just like, we've just got to put everything in here. We've got to load this down because they looked at what Microsoft was doing. And we're like, wow, they didn't have necessarily the marketing clout that we did and didn't necessarily do as good a job of hyping up their system. But their hardware annihilated our PS2. And we're supposed to be the cool ones. We're supposed to be the powerful ones.

So let's make people get a second job. Let's tell them to go out and get a second job to be able to buy our system. So what you're saying is they took all the wrong lessons for the They sure did. Make it ten times more proprietary. That's true. Yep, it's all the bad parts of Xbox and none of the go to it. It's huge and glossy and...

A hard to program for. Yeah, well, no, that wasn't what Xbox was. Before we go too much farther. I feel like we can't mention both Robbie Bach and the concept of consoleizing PCs at this time without mentioning the phantom. Boy, that ghost-like... just slipped away from my memory. Yeah, almost like vapor. Yeah, the Phantom, which was another weird company

trying to make a consoleized PC, who then did, I believe, hire Robbie Bach post-X-Box to head up there, whatever, head up something. And yeah, this was kind of concurrent with the Xbox because it was like, you know, similarly being hyped up to gamers and things, but didn't really come to pass after a few. false starts. So, you know, the Xbox obviously had more money, resources in general behind it and got out the door, as opposed to the smaller ones. But I mean, yeah, it's good that

they decided to be competitive and pump it up in that way because, like, you had, I think Microsoft did buy web TV. And so, like, their only other hardware boxes was the web TV box, which was just like, you know, a very cheap, slow thing that you just plug into the TV to browse the internet. So compared to that, you know, they did take the right lessons from the game industry in particular, not the piece, not the computer industry or anything like that, and decided to make something that was properly competitive. Yeah, I mean, one of the retrospectives I was reading the other day for this episode, um, said that there was a turf war internally between the direct X team, which is the, the group that put together Xbox and the web TV team

that Microsoft acquired because the web TV team really wanted them to make a closed box basically like hey turn our web TV player into a video game system and the DirectX team was adamant that no we need to use off the shelf parts we need

to make this an open you know an open platform not that people can just create relatively it needs to be you know relatively open proprietary kind of hybrid but where people have the ability to augment it and make it better than it started out as.

And, you know, the original concept was that it would be twice as powerful as a PlayStation 2, which, you know, arguably, that's how it turned out. But it would run on Windows 2000 and be a very literal PC and console form. And, of course, you know, the X and Xbox kind of came from DirectX, which was their graphics... API. Processing technology, their 3D technology. So, you know, that's kind of almost like the Dreamcast Catana Dural Battle, where you had two teams, basically, each with their own kind of vested interest in doing things one way or the other, pushing for conflicting platform standards.

And, you know, one team came out ahead of the other, and the other team you never hear about anymore. Yeah. Can you imagine, though, an Xbox derived from web TV, it would be like the CDI-2. I mean, we wouldn't have Xbox Series X at this time, that's for sure. It would have gone nowhere. It was so weird at the time. Like, you all mentioning multimedia multiple times, the 1990s watchword. Set top box, set top box.

It's like, Jesus Christ. People were trying to figure out where the heck technology was going to go and nobody had any ideas. They had a lot of weird ideas. Yeah, yeah. What if we gave you a Peter Gabriel album and let you change which instruments you can hear? You can't actually change the song, but you can, like, take out the vocals and do karaoke or you can take out like all the leads and just have peter gabriel singing that's a great use of technology and more of a phil collins guy sorry uh okay i can respect that joke about the

saga genesis ah there you go i couldn't be bothered to think of an actual joke sorry fair enough fair enough i like the footnote approach though it's good uh But, yeah, ultimately, you know, it came down to what did boss Bill Gates like. And he, he approved of the direct X plan. He thought it was a better choice because, one, the upgrade options that it left open were very consumer-friendly. And that was kind of Microsoft's thing. you know, like compared to Apple or whatever, was to be... Well, wait, elaborate on that.

Upgrade options. Like popping in the hard drive and... Okay, yeah. There weren't that many. But, yeah, I guess it wouldn't be possible if you needed to. Like, just the fact that it was, you know, parts that could be swapped out in the event of... Yeah. I mean, things like that are mostly also, you know, business-wise looked at in terms of, like, service.

Like, is this going to be good for our service teams, repair factories, things like that? How much trouble will this get us in or not? Right. Yeah. And also because the DirectX approach made it very easy to get online. And that's probably the big one because, I mean, in 2001 or 1998, 1999, when Xbox was being conceived, you know, it was very clear that the future was going online. And, you know, everyone is making that push. But Microsoft really stepped out ahead of everyone else and said it's a standard part.

and it's not just like dial up it's honest to God broadband you can you can have like some super fast speeds you know you compare that to what Nintendo did with GameCube and it's you feel kind of embarrassed for Nintendo you compare that to what Nintendo's done with Switch

and you feel kind of embarrassed for Nintendo you're still like 20 years behind and at least you connect to broadband internet on Switch that's true they even have Wi-Fi yeah that apocalyptic E3 of 2003 where EA or sorry Xbox and PS2 were showing off

Xbox Live and all of the online features and Nintendo's like, what if GBA connectivity and Pac-Man versus? That's our big thing. Let's go. On the plus side, though, it was really easy to get an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto back then. If you were like, hey, we actually want to cover Nintendo.

They'd say, whoa, really? Please, come on in. We'll feed you dinner. Take you to a movie. It'll be great. Saturu Iwada, rest in peace, saying, nobody wants online, okay? Online's not a thing. It's not what we want. He was a great programmer and by all accounts a great person, but not always right.

Not always right. Yeah, well, the internet situation around the world was kind of murky then, too, because it was bold to have an Ethernet port when, you know, cable or broadband internet in America was still fairly new. I think it had really started to roll out mainstream. like a year prior in 2000, I think. Yeah, well, in 2001 in Japan, it was pay by the minute as you go. A lot of DSL in Japan.

Yep. And so, yeah, that was a big deal. I was just reading someone posted a comment on the Something Awful Retro Game Forum about how, you know, Sega was such a big believer in online that the guy who bankrolled the company basically funded a year's worth of online

DSL connectivity for anyone who bought a dream. cast just to make it happen. Like, that's, you know, a big part of why that had to go away. By 2007, I had a internet connection in Japan that's better than the one that I have right now in America. Like, I had fiber. Yeah, I really flipped. I had fiber in Japan in 2007.

But, you know, at the same time, I feel like internet didn't really kick off for consoles until you went Wi-Fi and, you know, until, you know, wireless became available. And then it didn't really, really matter. where you were in the house. You didn't have to sit your console next to the router. I mean, even in 2008, 2009, there was a lot of talk about how people weren't connecting their 360s and PS3s to the internet. Like, I got back to America in 2009. My friends had a PS3. They're like, oh, yeah, we don't connect it to the internet. It's not a thing. Yeah, it's not what we do. Yeah. We especially, in fact. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, Microsoft really made that push and

they gave you the ability to connect your systems directly for land parties, very much a PC kind of approach, or through Xbox Live, which launched like a year after, as you mentioned, the system itself and would become a huge part of its identity. So, yeah, I mean, they were really, I think coming from that PC background really gave them a big advantage in kind of seeing where the shape of technology was going, that other console companies did. didn't necessarily have because, you know, in a way, Microsoft was kind of driving a lot of that technology. And, you know, they didn't always come out ahead, like, who used Internet Explorer after, like, 2003 or four. That pretty much went away. But the kind of underlying

technology, they were, they were right there in the driver's seat and coming up with all the systems for Windows and everything and doing what they could to make Internet connectivity be more seamless, like if you look back and think about how hard it was to get online in like 1999 and how you had to configure all these different things, whereas now it's pretty much you just like you find a Wi-Fi network and you're online. That's, that's all you have to do is just connect. And I feel like Xbox kind of benefited from their pushes in that direction, but also was kind of a vanguard for that. So, you know, it was a good business for Microsoft even if they did lose $2 billion.

on the online tip I would like to talk about sports for a moment please do please forgive me no no that's why you're here something that is kind of lost to history there was a feud between EA and Xbox at this time circa 2003 or so because EA did not want

to support Xbox live and did not want Madden to be online and so it was a huge talking point of like EA Xbox you got to make up here come on and Xbox had its own NFL game, NFL fever, which by all accounts was an okay NFL game. But it speaks to how different the kind of the landscape of the sports gaming at the time definitely was. The Xbox

was kind of intended to be a big, it should have been the heir to the Sega Genesis in the Dreamcast as a sports console, but it took a bit for it to come to fruition. as a real sports platform at that time. At the risk, go ahead. You can finish. Okay, well, I was going to say, at the risk of putting you on the spot, do you recall what EA's problem was?

No, absolutely not. I wonder if it might have been tied to some sort of PlayStation deal. Probably because they didn't have control over the actual service. There was a lot of debate over, like, different companies having control over, having effectively their own online service versus the more overarching service provided by Xbox Live. And those questions have basically been resolved since then,

but I think it has to do with that. Now, a lot of sports people would tell you that this was the golden age of sports games. Like NFL 2K, Mad in 2004, Madden in 2005, are considered to be some of the best games ever in the sports space. And then it all went to crap with the Xbox 360. And you had more than just EA making sports games, which was different than now. It helped.

I guess you could technically consider Konami as making sports games, but do they really? You also had all the arcade sports games, like, what was it, NFL Street, and FIFA Street and all of that? And it was a much better time, I would say, for sports games than it is now. That is my sports digression. No, no, that's to be expected. Well, I'll also shout out things that are not considered. to be sports, at least in this country, like racing games and other

really strong things that Microsoft at least put under their sports brand, like rally sport challenge, a really strong series of racers there. So, yeah, motorsports as well, also really strong on Xbox. The only sport that matters professional wrestling.

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Enjoy. When it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year, we'll be there for you. I'm Ryan. The line is always a dot to me. And I'm Mark. How are you doing? We're a podcast of two friends watching Friends. We're living every episode of the TV show in all its glory,

delving behind the scenes and discussing all our favorite moments. Join us as we get reacquainted with some old friends and how. hopefully make some new ones along the way, only on the Greenlit Podcast Network. So we've kind of danced around what the Xbox accomplished and kind of where it was weak. But I would like to specifically call out what I see as it's three key strengths. And the first is the system's architecture. And, you know, the idea that it was based around off-the-shelf parts. Pretty revolutionary for the time.

Certainly the only example of a system at that point that did it success. successfully. But that's basically become the standard by which all consoles are made now. Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. You know, there's some degree of proprietary technology involved in each of them, but it's not like Sony went out and built its own chips like they did for the emotion engine on PS2. And then you have Nintendo Switch, which is basically the Nvidia Shield, essentially. So, you know, the idea of, companies going out and making their own hardware, like the only one who does that now is, or their own chips, is the only one that does that now is basically Apple, who makes their own arm chips. Microsoft's kind of getting back into it, the surface stuff. Okay.

Yeah, they make their own surface chips. So do you think they're going to go in the direction of Apple and eventually they'll, you'll see PCs running? I mean, surface in general is them trying to be more like Apple, so we'll see. So, yeah, it was basically a PC architecture built around a kind of common reference spec. it had online support it had some degree of hardware extensibility with swappable drives

and even though it didn't end up using Windows 2000 as its operating system it still had a custom OS that was very PC-like and would evolve into like Microsoft 360s blades and dashboard and so forth and that's pretty much the standard now is where you have either a PC-like

or mobile platform-like interface for your consoles For better or worse For better or for worse It had online Which you know It was hardly the first console to have online But it was the first console to really have online worth of crap

I mean Dreamcast I think did a respectable job But it still felt a little optional And maybe it was just a little too early to really work out Of course people who love Fantasy Star Online Would certainly argue otherwise You know say it was essential But just you know Xbox Live made everything so seamless and smooth compared to, especially like the PlayStation

PlayStation 2 system, God, I remember having to review PS2 online games for one up in the early days and just struggling to connect to anything or anyone. Yeah. Like I wrote a review of Monster Hunter and I'm still not sure I actually connected online with anyone. The original Monster Hunter. Yes. Yeah.

The very first Monster Hunter that no one cared about. I think I was online but I don't know it was really hard to say because the system was just so opaque I think that I remember the PS2 the first PS2 game I remember being online was Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and I don't think that the online adapter

had even come out it was just like you had to budget you have to do it yourself somehow and I have no idea how that works you had to buy a USB adapter basically oh right that was easy as that okay I missed out You had to buy, like, a special, you know, they had a certain list of adapters that you could buy that would be compatible with the game and the system. The main multiplayer games of that era were games like Socom.

Yeah. Also, Splinter Cell, I believe, was a big online game. That's right, I did have a multiplayer game. Yeah, and then, of course, Halo 2 came on in 2004. But I think that online was still seen as, as you already said, a quite an opaque process. A lot of people felt, I think, fairly intimidated. I know I felt intimidated by the concept of going online.

But, I mean, this is all PS2 stuff. Final Fantasy 11 was on the PS2, of course. So this was an experimental era for online play. When I look back on the Xbox, I think that one of its major accomplishments actually is the, it kind of made BioWare. like bioware was already very popular with PC gamers it had a specific era with Baldersgate and all the D&D games and everything

but it was Knights of the Old Republic that made it with mainstream gamers and when people think back on the OG Xbox there are a couple games that come up Halo's a big one Nice of the Old Republic is maybe the other like those were the killer exclusives for the Xbox

and BioWare after that exploded into the console gaming consciousness because of Cotor and it directly paved the way to get to Mass Effect. Yeah, I think we're due for a Cotor episode at some point.

Didn't they just announce like a remake or something? Yes, yeah. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's really neat. Full-blown remake by a Spire. And a port for Switch. Because that's, that is what Switch is all about and I'm not complaining. It's all these games that I missed out on.

And I've just, I'm just, I'm just hoarding them on my switch and someday when I'm like 80 and I can finally stop working I'm going to go back to my switch and finally play all these games Well that's the plan anyway Excitedly dive into Jedi Outcast

Like yes here we go Jedi Outcast And you play it and you're like Oh no They were cast out for a reason A good friend of mine Only played Xbox Like

He played Halo And he played Cotor And he was a big Xbox person And he was just, he had never really played an RPG before. But when Cotor came out, he was like, I put like 70 hours into this game. I was just completely obsessed with this. Yeah, if Final Fantasy 7 didn't hook you, Cotor was going to a generation later. Yeah, exactly.

And like, if you look back on Cotor now, it's somewhat simple compared to a lot of more modern Western kind of PC-style RPGs. Like, you know, I would say the Witcher 3, for example, is a direct descendant of the Cotor kind of model of things. But at the time, if you were on console, it was a mind-blowing experience, the amount of choices that you could make, the amount of freedom that you had. And, of course, Star Wars at the time, was deeply uncool. It did not hurt that it came out right after, like a year after Attack of the Clones. And people were like, oh, my God, finally some Star Wars that I care about and don't have

to be embarrassed about. You can have this robot calling you a meat bag. You can throw Jawa's into a trash compactor. love this. Yeah, it was all of the BioWare, like, BioWare had done all that with Baldersgate, too. But this was all fresh and new to console games. They're like, oh, HK, you're hilarious. I think even for people who had played Baldur's Gate, they might have seen Cotor as more simple. I remember the PC guy on the staff at the time. Like, this is the worst. It's so terrible. This game sucks. I don't understand why people like it. But, you know, at the same time, it did represent a move forward and presentation from the sort of, you know, the, what was it called?

Infinity engine that Baldur's Gate ran on, the sort of top-down Ultima-esque view to, you know, an immersive 3D view. And that game was pretty janky, like the pauses during combat and, you know, not deliberate pauses, but just like the way they were like, the system would just kind of freeze for half a second and then everything would go back into motion. It was rough, but it was a 3D immersive adventure into the world of Star Wars, a facet of it that had never been seen before. And it was on PC, but, yeah, like, it was a really compelling exclusive for Xbox on the console space.

And, yeah, you're right. It was BioWare's breakout moment, but that did a lot to lift Microsoft's brand and kind of in the same way the Final Fantasy 7 did for Sony. Cotor and Marlwind were the one-two punch that changed RPGs on consoles in many, many ways in that generation. Yeah, I mean, you had these two companies bringing their PC development expertise to bear on consoles and kind of reshaping it to work on a console space. And that's kind of the future of games right there. And it would come to fruition fully with Oblivion and Mass Effect the following generation.

But this laid all of the groundwork for the future. So someone added to the notes, this was the first console to offer downloadable content. Does anyone have an example of that? Oh, I mean, there had to have been DLC at this time. Oh, my gosh. There was definitely DLC for stuff like Splinter Cell. I thought that Halo 2 had at least one map pack. Oh, okay. I mean, having thought about that, I mean, I suppose on the Mega Drive, you could download

more levels for Garfield, but that doesn't really consider anything. Yeah, the map pack was a disc, so it was like an expansion in that sense, yeah. I could have sworn me off a DLC on the Xbox. We didn't really start thinking about D.L.C. until the Xbox 360. Horse armor. Horse armor. That was the one. That was not Morrowind.

That was Oblivion. I will say, you know what started on the original Xbox was Xbox Live Arcade. That's true. You got a little disc with Miss Pac-Man, and you can have your little dinky arcade games that way and upload leaderboards or whatnot. Yeah. So there was original Xbox DLC that was removed for Splinter Cell and, Halo 2. There was content.

All right. So that's where that all began, too, based on consoles. There were patches as well, title updates. Oh, yes, of course. The other, finally, the other kind of big strength of the Xbox

was the accessibility for developers, the ease of use. You know, the emotion engine on PS2, Sony made a lot of noise about that, but it was a very complicated system to program for. And I think, you know, just the ubiquity of PS2

and the popularity of it gave developers a long time to really get comfortable with it and you did see some really impressive stuff come out I mean like Final Fantasy 12 holy crap just unbelievable that was a PS2 game but you know

there wasn't there didn't have to be that kind of steep learning curve with Xbox because if you had programmed on PCs for Windows you basically you know that was you could kick off the training wheels right away and just go cruising down the hill it was it was very accessible and you know that's that's the direction everyone has gone in at this point

it took some hard lessons for several several generations especially for Sony but we did we did get there and um you know that is that is something that has become just irrefutable that your system needs to be easy for developers to work on otherwise they have so many other options why would they want to program for your system yeah and at that and that and that kind of led to the Xbox having a reputation for being, well, I mean, certainly from a pound-to-pound hardware perspective, it was the most powerful. But it tended to, if you did a head-to-head, and this was the beginning of the head-to-head kind of comparisons. I guess they did that with SNS and the Genesis back in the day. So you've heard of Aladdin, right? Yeah, okay. Sorry.

But I'm thinking- The character of those comparisons really evolved into like, you know, The reason I was thinking about this was I was having a conversation the other day about So Calibur 2, which obviously came on on all three platforms, and it had different characters, exclusive characters for each. We had Link on the GameCube, which I think is the most popular one, spawn on Xbox and Hi-Hachi on the PS2. And there was the head-to-head competition between the three. And actually the GameCube, not that far off from the Xbox. in terms of graphical prowess,

but people dismiss the GameCube and said this is the kids' console. And the Xbox was like, this is the serious, this is the serious console that can do all the things. 480P, progressive scan. It does all of it. Which GameCube had for some games

and you held down the B button when you started up. I think there were some games late on the Xbox that could do 720P, I'm sure of it. I can't name them. No, there was one. Double Steele 2.

Ah, oh, there we go. Everyone wants to play Devils Deal 2. I'm just saying. It's a killer app. Reckless 2. Yeah, I think that when you compare, when you compare the Xbox, sort of, the game's built for the Xbox, like stuff like Halo 2 or the Chronicles of Riddick to the most sort of contemporary stuff at the time, I do feel like it does feel like a huge leap to me,

like the scale of something like Halo 2 and the visuals of the escape from Butcher Bay or even ports like Doom 3, which I don't think turned up on any of the other consoles. That's right. I forgot Doom 3 came out on console. It only came out on Xbox, I believe. And it had, and it was great because they threw in the old Doom games, and they also made the whole of Doom 3 co-op by making the corridors all wider, which is quite bizarre. That's how I play.

Because that's not really a co-op-focused game. So I would love to, I would love to try that. I have to say, I wish they would re-release that version. But apparently I could go and buy a disc right now, stick it in my series X and it would work. So I guess I could do that. Well, you know, the shift to the PC-style architecture also really proved to be important for Xbox

and for Western developers the coming generation when everything shifted to HD because, you know, it was very easy for PC developers who had to work with, you know, multiple resolutions and think, you know, like three years ahead, how is our game going to look on the most powerful hardware when consoles moved to HD, they basically had that groundwork already laid for them. And this kind of created that big divide between Western and Japanese developers

because Japanese developers just were used to working with a different pipeline, with proprietary hardware, creating their own engines, and things like that. And it took them, you know, basically the better part of that first HD generation to kind of recalibrate themselves. and change their workflows. And, you know, that's why you had a decade ago all those dire articles about, is Japan doomed and filthish speaking fiery, spicy words, and so on and so forth. I mean, now those look really ridiculous, because look at how many great games are coming

out of Japan these days again. It just, you know, the sort of Japanese business approach is to not commit to something and change the way of doing things until, you know, everyone kind of signed. lines off on it and it's proven. So there was that awkward transition, whereas Western Development Studios were just like, okay, cool. It's just like, you know, this is just what we've been doing already. Let's jump, let's go.

Yeah. The bum mapping is shinier? Great. Let's pay for the license. We can highlight some speculars. Yeah. Weird Xbox footnote. Shimigami Tensei 9.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I don't think we're going to have... Shimigami Tensei game came out on this thing. Exclusively. It wasn't good either. Apparently, it's really bad. It's very bad. It's exclusive and it's there.

Have you played it? No. Okay, I played Imagine. It came out, so it was basically turned into an online game. Okay, so Imagine was based on... And put on PC, I did play Imagine. Imagine was very bad. I think

co-host Bob Mackie actually worked on localizing Imagine for a while at Alice. I could be mistaken. I wish you were here to talk about that. It was kind of the dot.

Okay, so SMT has always been about like digital devils and the internet. But it was sort of the dot hack on the Xbox, right? You had the whole Xbox thing going, sorry, you had the whole internet thing going on where you're on an online world

fighting demons that are noise and all of that. But, yes, it was very bad. Yeah, I don't think we're going to have time to talk this episode about interesting Xbox exclusive software. That could actually probably be an episode of its own. But I would like to wrap this episode by talking about the places where Xbox struggled. Like, it did a lot right and was a very impressive piece of hardware. But, you know, it did stumble a few times out of the gate. And, you know, it was definitely a learning experience.

I lost a lot of money for Microsoft. And, you know, as Ray has said, that was kind of by design and had its tactical advantages. But there were places where it struggled. And, you know, first and foremost was definitely an appealing to Japan. We've talked about that a little bit. But I don't know. I feel like maybe, Ray, you could talk more to the Japan side of the Xbox experience. Yeah.

Well, a lot of what we talked about does have ties to how it was doing in Japan. For example, the fact that, you know, it was kind of like a PC architecture. You had a lot of publishers and developers that were coming from the PC side in Japan, which largely meant companies that would make like dating zims and other sorts of adventure games. So you had a lot of those types of games, but of course they were also pretty obscure even in Japan. So none of them really came out here. But then you had, you know, the higher tier sort of Japanese developers. Sega, from software,

Techmo, like we mentioned, who were taking to the system more often and basically treating it like the proper third platform that it was at the time. But yeah, the situation in Japan is really weird in terms of marketing as well because Japan, excuse me, Microsoft Japan, didn't really seem to fully get it.

And then that communicates also to the consumers who then also don't get it. so you have like weird ad campaigns based on things that don't really work out and you know they don't know who to appeal to or are they going to appeal to the otaku you would be interested in the military games and all that stuff well yeah but you know you got to also try to find some appeal to the other like family type audiences and such so that didn't really work out either um but then there were also uh endeavors by Microsoft Game Studios in Japan to make original games for the Japanese market.

Some of those came out here, like, let's say, blinks and sneakers. But then other games, such as Jockey's Road, which is a horse racing kind of RPG adventure game, and then Magatama, which is very steeped in Japanese mythology, you know, yokai and demon sort of action game, a little bit like Ninja Guideon in that. sense, but even more, like I said, more steeped in Japanese mythology type of stuff. So again, meant to appeal to Japan, even though it probably would have come out here in a better situation. But yeah, that's just like a really, really, really tiny nutshell. The best I'd explain it in our limited time so far.

You said Microsoft Japan didn't really get it, but wasn't there a guy over there who worked in marketing or something who really was like super. invested in the platform and really, like, gave his all for it. I seem to remember reading an article about him at some point, but I don't remember who that was or if I'm even getting the details right. It's been a long time. I think it depends on who you're talking about, but I think the main guy who was there the most had come from Square Unix.

But what I was really describing was just like marketing efforts. Like a marketing team is not the same as the guy in charge. Right, right. No, no, absolutely. Yeah. Like, so you're one person who gets it. it in a corporate situation, especially when you have like a large corporation

plus a large corporation in Japan. Like there's only so much one person can do to fight against the flow of the ocean, basically. Yeah, right. I'm agreeing with you. Like, I'm recollecting now that Microsoft Japan or Xbox Japan's efforts were really sabotaged its ability to do basically anything

because there's a real tone. deaf nature to how it was marketed. That's a key thing, too. I want to say, I just don't want to blame, like, one whole team at Microsoft because they were not treated well in the retail space either. You hear the stories and see the pictures of all these Japanese stores where the Xbox thing is just shoved in a corner. Meanwhile, the rest is like PS2 and GameCube.

So you have situations like that, too, where it was, you know, partly unfair to Microsoft as much as they were also struggling to appeal to the I mean, regardless. So, yeah. But, you know, you mentioned there weren't a lot of, you know, sort of family-friendly games for Xbox. And I feel like that was a weakness of the system, even outside of Japan.

Like here, you didn't have many games that really catered to casual audiences, you know, be they children or women or people from the older generation, whatever, you know, marketing kind of pinpointed as not us. Like, it was a very teens and 20-year-old men-oriented, system. And, you know, when you saw something like Barbie horse adventure show up on Xbox, it was kind of, you know, like, wow, what's, what's that doing here? That seems way out of place. That's, that seems like a Nintendo game. So I think that was, um, just kind of endemic to Xbox. And I really, maybe, you know, to some degree to Sony also. And I think PS2 had more of a broader

appeal just because the library was so vast and there was so much more room for things to kind of pop up, but it wasn't really until, you know, after the success of DS and we, that everyone said, oh, right, it's not just the boys who liked a video game. Right, right. So this is where I'm going to come out and say that actually, at the time, I hated the Xbox. Okay. And I've come today to come to appreciate to the Xbox and, like, kind of its history and its legacy and everything that it's done for games, but it did not feel like it was for me.

It felt like it was catering to almost everything I disliked about video game culture, circa 2001, the hardcore do-the-do, true crime, GTA. They didn't even have GTA, but you get what I'm saying. Like that culture. They did have GTA. It did. Eventually. They got a port.

Eventually. The trilogy, yeah. And I could not identify with that culture. Yeah. But that's what it felt like Xbox was leaning into really heavily. and it continued to lean in heavily through the 360 era. And also, I think that one of the things that is disappointing about the Xbox is PS2 continued all the way until, like, 2010, especially in Japan.

Like, Sony kept supporting the thing. Developers kept supporting the thing. Xbox was like, as soon as 360 came out, they dropped the original Xbox, like, a bad habit. They were like, we're done with this thing, get out of here. And they treated that console as very disposable. And then they named their next console Xbox One, just to kind of say, well, this is what everyone calls the first Xbox. Let's just totally erase it from history.

And that's the thing that frustrates me a lot, actually, about Microsoft in general, is that they treat all of their consoles as very disposable. Yes, they have an altruistic attitude toward back. backward compatibility, and I appreciate that. They do have some sense of history now, especially now that Xbox has been around for 20 years, which is wild to me. But over the years, they're like, new thing,

get the old thing out of here. We've got the new thing now. And I think that's been the habits going all the way into the Xbox Series X, honestly. I feel similarly to you about the original Xbox and that, I mean, now, But back in the day, I didn't care about Halo. I didn't really care about first-person shooters that weren't time-splitters.

And other than that, in the library, there was nothing that was really catering to my interests or to my interests now. Because I've gone back and I've found solutions for playing GameCube games. I found solutions for playing PS2 games because there are games in those libraries that I wouldn't want to not have access to. And when I look at the Xbox sort of library, specifically of exclusives, nothing jumps out of me that I think I need a means to play this forever, if that makes sense. Like they, with respect to the quality of the games that are on there, there are a lot of good games on there,

but they're either available on modern consoles anyway via remakes or back compatibility, or they're just outmoded or bettered by stuff on other systems, unfortunately. I mean, the PS2, this huge esoteric library, it's just, I mean, you know, there's nothing like, I don't know, Guitarin Man or like Gregory Horror Show or anything like that on Xbox. It's all very, I don't know, vanilla, I guess. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just, for me, it doesn't really have much of their identity as a result. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's like a unifying style to Xbox games. It's just, everything just kind of feels a little murky.

It really does feel like kind of the prelude to the following generation where I was like, The color of the generation is brown. Everything's going to be brown. And it really feels like Xbox kind of, you know, was a leader in that direction. I feel like with the 360, they did manage to sort of close that gap a bit. Because with, while there were a lot of the more, you know, dude bro kind of shooters and that sort of thing, because of the live arcade coming to sort of prominence, you did get 2D games. You did get fun, silly games as well.

And there were a lot of them and they were very popular. So I think that the 360 was, as talked about earlier, if they were considering this one just kind of a dry run, I do feel like they kind of knocked it out of the park with the next console. So I think that was one of the best consoles ever, personally. I spent a lot of time with Xbox 360, for sure. I think that particular generation, the PS2 Xbox GameCube generation,

like a lot of people lauded as a very special era where there was so much creativity and everything. But I recall it as being a very tough time if you were a fan of kind of more retro style games, platformers, 2D games, that kind of thing. Yes, we got the odd Katamari Damashi and everything, but I feel like it wasn't until the Xbox Live in indie games that we started to see a blossoming again of smaller, more a game set could cater to a diversity of taste, as it were. Now, when it comes to the original Xbox, now I was just saying how, like,

Xbox didn't do very well by his legacy and that kind of thing. However, there is such a thing as original Xbox nostalgia, and there are people who really, really love that particular era of games. They talk so fondly about Halo 2 and that kind of thing, and the Duke. Yeah, I mean, when they reissued the Duke, people were really excited. There are some people who really love that controller. Yep. But I kind of feel like that goes...

But I am grateful to that. It goes extremely large hand in hand with their kind of focus on a specific audience. Like it really feels like this was a system that was playtested by grown-ass men and no one else. Like no consideration given to the fact that, hey, maybe like an 11-year-old might want to play this system. And so you did get this just absolutely enormous controller, which, you know, if you like it, you like it. and it's just the most comfortable thing ever. But, yeah, it was the controller S, the much smaller one that I think was where I finally said, okay, yeah, this works for me.

I don't have a basketball player's physique. I'm a small person, so I need a small controller. Sorry. I'm actually kind of curious. So, like, I'm not entirely clear on what the original Xbox's legacy is in the UK, because I think of the UK as being PlayStation mostly and then there was a period where the 360 was more dominant and then it went back to being PlayStation again

and so I'm curious, was the Xbox somewhat popular and somewhat cool in the UK as it was in America? I mean, I can only speak anecdotally, obviously, but I mean, from my perspective, not at all. Like I said, I think of the entire period, I think I knew one person who had an Xbox or even talked about Xbox. It just felt like a very distant third to me, the other consoles, based on price and all sorts of factors. I mean, we had terrible internet as well, so that wasn't a huge factor. But then the 360 came along and absolutely cleaned up.

So, yeah, I think Xbox branding over here still has some. kind of issues despite despite how popular the 360 was. Everyone does kind of gravitate towards PlayStation but don't ask me

why I have absolutely no idea. Some kind of psychological association with their clubbing days maybe I have no idea. They did try to win us over by

buying rareware but then rareware made grabbed by the Goalies instead of something interesting. My favorite thing about that and I'm sorry

I know we're running out of time. Grab by the Goalies as everyone knows. Goalies is a British slang fuel. you're genitals. Specifically, you're testes.

So that is a game that is literally called like just grabbed by the balls. Yeah. And it stuns me that Microsoft paid however much stupid amount of money for rareware. And they're like, right, okay, you know, let's have something, give us one of you, give us one of your Nintendo classics. They were like,

right, okay, what we've made here is essentially the Spectrum game Attic Attack, but the title is about testicles. I mean, that was... What do you think? That was very much, you know, in the spirit of Conquer, so I kind of feel like that's what Microsoft wanted. But then they remade Conquer, and they took all the swearing out, so all that was left is a not very fun platformer.

But at least you got some Matrix references, like five years after they were fun. Microsoft bought Rare. And people are like, oh, Microsoft ruined Rare. No, Microsoft was like, rare. Go be rare. Yeah. Rare magic. And actually, the owners of Rare were like, actually, we're going to cash out.

Peace out. Get all the money. Yeah, that's what you do. Bye. Everyone was thinking, oh, well, maybe when the 360 comes out, they're going to finally get back on form. And then they make cameo elements of power, and nobody even knows what that is.

Perfect dark zero. Oh, boy. Good bricks. Good bricks in that game, though. God, it can't fault the brickwork that they rendered. That's true. All right, some fine masonry there on Xbox 360, a legacy of the generation. Anyway, this was a little more of a sedate conversation than usual, but I don't know.

I feel like we did justice to the Xbox. Like, it really was this sort of foundational effort. and, you know, it wasn't really fully formed on its own, but it had so many important ideas and brought so much to the games industry. It really, it just really revolutionized the console space and kind of led the way toward the HD generation and beyond. So it's a weird system because, like, on its own, it's kind of there and it had some interesting exclusives, but, you know, those all kind of,

pale in comparison to the enormity, the enormousness of PlayStation 2's library and just the sort of Nintendo in desperation mode of GameCube. You didn't have either of those things with Xbox. So it kind of struggled with its personality aside from the really big hits like Ninja Guidon and Halo. But yeah, just in terms of what it meant in terms of a foundation for future things, it's just an essential console. Would it have been basically, the stadia of its era if Xbox hadn't purchased Halo I don't know

I think they would have had something else we all dream we could be that good I asked because Halo carried it for like a year or more it was the Super Mario 64 of its generation it was it really was Halo made Xbox

for all of the marketing dollars spent on that thing in 2001 it was all about Halo because there was nothing at launch. Nothing. If you take away Halo from the Xbox it's left with its only other lasting legacy,

there are one thing you can ever take away from it, which is that unlike the other two contemporary consoles, if you drop an Xbox on someone's head, they die. That's true. Their skull is caved in and they are dead forever. GameCube comes with a handle

and you still couldn't create like a killing velocity swinging. I don't know. You can swing it. It's a deadly weapon. You might raise a weld. You can probably use the Duke controller on its wire, like it's sort of a bowler as well. Yeah.

Anyway, so I think this is the point where we have to jump off the train. But thank you, Stuart and Kat and Ray for all joining for this conversation about Xbox. And thanks everyone for listening. And thanks Microsoft for doing something interesting with video games. like the 360 was was a big deal for me and I spent a lot of time with that and we wouldn't have gotten that without Xbox so even if Xbox on its own is kind of like a hmm kind of just a little spot in history it's just super essential for what it led to and that's that's it for this episode of Retronauts thanks everyone for joining us and we'll be back as always in the future and if you would like to listen to those future episodes about the past. You can subscribe to the show at

Retronauts. Or no, sorry, at patreon.com slash Retronauts. We are crowdfunded and supported that way. And by subscribing, you get early access to our podcast with high bit rate quality and good, yada, yada, yada, all that stuff. If you subscribe for five bucks a month, you also get two exclusive podcasts each month

and a mini podcast and column each weekend by Diamond Fight and Discord access, which is a pretty solid deal. I highly recommend it. The price of a very large, sugary drink at Starbucks will get you a ton of great podcast content

and it's healthier for you. So I recommend it patreon.com slash retronauts. Ray. All right. Well, if we're not going to talk about individual games, I will plug the Xbox game, Phantom Crash. You should play that.

That's all I'm going to say. Other than that... That's where you can find Ray on the internet. Yeah, playing Phantom Crash. I'm on Twitter R-D-B-A-A-A I have a podcast No More Whoppers, No More Woppers.com.

You may have heard a promo for it on another show like this. Unless you're a Patreon subscriber. Oh, maybe. Damn. Well, you know, maybe. I'm with you. If you're big in Palat podcasts,

you might have heard it. And I have a game company called Buy Petal Dog and made a game called Blast Rush and there you go. That's the big stuff. All right. Stuart. On Twitter, I'm at Stupacabra, and I'm going to rush through this because I have too many things.

Oh, you can listen to me doing Retronauts episodes in the future, including one about Halo that's coming up. Are we allowed to spoil those? It's literally going to be the week after this episode, so it's an exciting preview. Okay, that's really good synergy, Jeremy. I know, right? It's almost like I planned it to be timed with the launch of the system of the game. Almost like that.

but not. You didn't, obviously. No, it was a crazy content. Yeah. Anyway, podcasts. Animani chat, reviewing every episode of Animaniacs, which I hate. That's the twist. The Dillcast, reviewing every single individual Dilbert strip, one strip per week. Dilbert sucks, that's where it's fun.

Arshaelvania, very, very rarely doing that one, but it's me and Andy Hamilton coming up with bad takes about video games that we then tweet, and we laugh uproariously at the people who think that we really think that. Does it sound like trolling? Yes. Is it trolling? Yes. But it is fun.

And also, I'm going to plug my comic, Maryhillcomic. Thank you. Finally, Kat, where can we find you on this crazy thing we call the World Wide Web? Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at the underscore Catbot. And also I'm the host of Axel Blug God, an independent RPG podcast. It's basically the sister show of Retronauts. Jeremy Parrish came up with the original version of it. We're on Patreon at patreon.com slash

Blood Got Pot, and my day job is IGN where I'm a regular contributor to Nintendo voice chat. Let's see me talk about all things Nintendo. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on the internet, as GameSpite on Twitter. You can find me on YouTube as

Jeremy Parrish, doing video games stuff each week. You can find me on Limited Run Games.com sometimes with stuff that I write or put into game boxes and also here on the show, Retronauts, pretty much every week. So that's it. That's our bona fides. And I don't know about you, but I feel like I could really go for

some Xbox gaming right now. Maybe some, I don't know, what's a good one? Kung Fu Chaos. Outrun 2. Ooh, Outrun 2. I like that. Panzer Degoon Orta, which we've never discussed. Yeah, we've got to do an episode on Xbox exclusive games and original Xbox games. Yeah, yeah. Because they're that's a conversation to be had, but not this episode. We are out of time. Good night, everyone. Thank you.