Do you want to feel old?  15 years ago today, Microsoft XBox hit the stores.  I had a friend who worked at Target and he set one aside for me on launch day.  I was so excited to fire this up.  At the time, the PS2 was king and nobody really thought this device would pose much of a threat.  The XBox original may not have hurt PS2 much, but its successors have certainly taken their share of Playstation and Nintendo’s console market.  The launch titles were pretty impressive – I picked up Halo, Project Gotham Racing, Tony Hawk’s Pro-Skater 2, Fuzion Frenzy and Azurik.  I remember it well.  I took it home, popped in Halo and had a ton of fun.

The controllers were initially wired (remember those?) and the controller was HUGE.  They slimmed it down a bit later, but those first controllers were hand-stretchers.  The graphics were unlike any seen up until that point and it had *gasp* an internal hard drive!  You no longer needed memory cards, although you could still use them if you wanted to take your save data with you.  It had a built-in ethernet port for online capability.  I was able to burn music to the hard drive and play it as a custom playlist in many games.

I really loved this old system and I have one today to play some of my favorites which haven’t been ported to the newer XBox consoles (namely SSX Tricky).  15 years really flies by when you’re having fun.