Launch window is one of the most crucial times in a console’s life cycle. As we’ve seen throughout gaming history, consoles can come out of the gates at full force, or they can limp onto shelves and find themselves with an uphill struggle ahead of them. Nintendo 64 launching with the genre-defining Super Mario 64 set the system up for greatness from day one, for instance, while Sega’s botched E3 1995 shadow-drop of the US Saturn pretty much doomed it there and then — the console’s hurried launch meant it had just six games available at the time, the sudden nature left some retailers put out that they wouldn’t have stock for what should be a big console launch (which even led some to refuse to carry the Saturn at all), while Sony put the final nail in the coffin that same day, using its own E3 show for a mic-drop moment where it would announce that the imminent PlayStation would undercut Saturn by a hefty $100. Ouch. Closer to home and more recently, Microsoft managed to avoid and even come back from a Saturn-style situation with the Xbox One. Making Kinect mandatory with the console pushed the price above that of the more powerful PlayStation 4 — between that and the bad taste left by the ‘always online’ back-and-forth from the original reveal, Microsoft had its work cut out righting the ship. But thanks to some smart plays like dropping Kinect to allow for more competitive pricing and reclaiming the power lead with the mighty Xbox One X, it managed to do just that. Going back to the beginning, our second defining moment can only be the November 2001 release of the first Xbox console. Oversized controller aside (again, Microsoft would fix that later), the original Xbox launch has to be seen as one of the strongest in modern gaming, and that’s not just because the big black box was the most powerful console we’d ever seen. No, that processing grunt will have been a draw for many, but it’s all about the games. One game in particular, actually, and no prizes for guessing which. It’s Halo. Obviously it’s Halo.Bungie’s Halo: Combat Evolved is the kind of launch title a platform holder can usually only dream of — a genre-defining exclusive release from a studio at the top of its game, and one that will be a benchmark for other releases to fall short of for years to come. You can pretty much count on one hand the number of launch games of this pedigree and influence in gaming history, and Halo could have probably single-handedly carried Xbox to success. It left an immediate impression with its punchy, precise combat and open sandbox-like level design where most of its peers were still funneling players down generic corridors, and the power of the Xbox made Halo a real looker at the time, too. I still recall a friend of mine importing a US Xbox at launch (us Euro folks didn’t get it until four months later, in March 2002) and spending hours just zooming in on foliage or rock textures, pointing at things, yelling, and leaping around like a hyperactive child… it was a lot, but it always serves as my touchstone for just how much of a generational leap Halo was over other console FPS titles of the era. And it didn’t stop there. The rapturous critical and commercial response to Halo quickly turned it into Xbox’s trump card, a flagship series that has been there since the start and one that has always been hard — if not practically impossible, back in the day — to beat. Gaming media would spend a good few years after Halo’s release throwing around terms like ‘Halo beater’ when talking about upcoming FPS games, usually incorrectly as Bungie’s shooter remained the gold standard pretty much until the studio decided it would make its own golder standard with Halo 2, the poster game for Xbox Live in the same way Combat Evolved was to the original Xbox.While Halo was no doubt the star attraction of the Xbox launch lineup, it’d be remiss to not discuss just how strong many of its companion launch titles were. Racing legends Bizarre Creations delivered the superb Project Gotham Racing; Team Ninja came out swinging with fantastic fighter Dead or Alive 3; Neversoft gave us the definitive extreme sports game of the time with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2X (basically a version of THPS 1+2 that predates the modern release by a good two decades); Fusion Frenzy was a thing, and people apparently like that terrible party game for some reason, so let’s give that a shoutout as well. Fast-forward to the European launch and the those extra four months make the lineup even better — we lost two NFL and two NASCAR games (oh well) but gained the likes of Sega’s stylish combination of tagging and tricking, Jet Set Radio Future, Rockstar’s showboating noir shooter Max Payne, DICE’s RalliSport Challenge, solid first-party snowboarding game Amped, and we even got upgraded to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. The EU Xbox launch lineup is legitimately up there as one of the best of all time, and while its earlier US counterpart was undeniably strong, it’s all really just ‘Halo and friends’ at the end of the day anyway. Not like that’s a bad thing…Next time in this #Xbox20 feature series: the first major studio acquisition for the Xbox family. For now though, how do you rate the original Xbox launch lineup? Which, if any, have been better? Any other fond memories from the early days of Xbox to share? Get involved below!
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