The original Xbox made its worldwide debut on November 15, 2001, and Microsoft has been celebrating 20 Years of Xbox with special Anniversary Edition swag and the #Xbox20 hashtag all year long. The consolemaker will also roll out a six-part documentary series, Power On: The Story of Xbox, in December.
But first, they’ve opened the virtual doors to an Xbox Museum at Xbox.com.
Stirring up memories of early virtual reality applications and our dreams of what was then called “Cyberspace,” the Xbox Museum exists within a virtual 3D space that allows visitors to move around in a third-person or first-person view and explore 132 “Moments” from the Xbox’s past history. Videos, photographs, design documents, and other bits of supplemental material accompany most of the exhibits, which can also be accessed outside the virtual museum via a scrolling timeline.
It’s rather fun to wander around the museum’s neon-lit hallways and rediscover nuggets of trivia about the pitch process for the Xbox (“A Video Game Console from Microsoft?”) or why each new Xbox console is bathed in different shades of green (“The Meaning of Green”). There’s even a parallel track charting the rise of the Halo franchise. But I think the most interesting part of this digital history is that Microsoft doesn’t shy away from their mistakes with the Xbox platform.
Before the Xbox was ever known as the Xbox, Microsoft tried to buy respectability among gamers by attempting to purchase Nintendo in Spring 2000 (“Microsoft Tries to Acquire Nintendo”). According to the story, Xbox engineers traveled to Japan to pitch Nintendo on the idea, but their executive team burst into raucous laughter instead. Microsoft was also rather forthcoming about losing billions on a manufacturing defect with the Xbox 360 (“The Red Ring of Death”) and the lackluster response to the Xbox One’s Kinect requirements and $500 price tag at E3 2013 (“Xbox One’s Debut”).
The Xbox Museum really does seem to offer a complete picture of the good and the bad in Microsoft’s history, though these misfires are just a small part of the timeline. After all, millions of people have owned at least one Xbox-branded console over the years, and museumgoers who want to explore their history with the platform can use their Xbox account to view My Xbox Museum, a personalized section of the site that shines a spotlight on their own experiences with the Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
So congratulations to the Xbox team on this milestone anniversary. And here’s to another 20 years!