In a wonderfully bizarre snapshot of my 33 year-old life, I was working my boss’ rock show last night. For (needed) context, my boss and mentor is a community-first, old dog lefty who moonlights as a musician when he’s not providing free therapy to hundreds of people across Toronto. It was a charity show at a low-key nightlife institution tucked away in Yorkville, the tag-popping part of downtown. For his part, boss and the band were good as hell, tight as hell. A cross-generational collection of stone cold rock-n-roll dudes cranking out punchy dad rock. They compared favourably to the spectrum of 90s-via-70s power pop that carried the likes Teenage Fanclub and The Lemonheads.
This is my life now, a budding therapist attending rock shows and community bbqs as an important function of my career. This very morning however, my phone reminded me of something from an older self. An object and an era, that would define my early self-conceptions of my autonomous personhood. That reminder was the release of the Xbox 360.
Now released into the world 20 years to the day, the “360” was the unheralded herald of modern video gaming and it remains our current era’s most important building block. For better and worse, the 360 is, was and continues to BE modern video gaming. I always remember the better first. I remember first time I met gaming's future. Holiday 2005 was a vision of clarity. I walked into the Scarborough Town Centre EB Games, saddled up to a 360 kiosk and played Call of Duty 2. It’s almost quaint to think about how immediately forward thinking that felt. A 13-year old version of myself playing the future on a primordial HD TV. I Gripped the controller, aiming down the sights of the first sequel in the most successful game franchise of all time, a juggernaut with over 25 games to its name. I tasted the future and immediate contrasted it with going home that night and playing my aging gamecube, a relative jalopy, in disgust. I can reach out and grab that night fresh from my memory banks.
I didn’t get a 360 of my own until the following Christmas, right on the back of the Wii and PS3 launches. Once again, it was the 360 that was showing the way. 360’s 2006, already loaded with hits like the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Dead Rising, saved its biggest gun, almost literally, for that November. Gears of War, the big, burly bunch of bros that graced 720p-capable screens, defined a generation in graphics, gameplay and greyness. Gears of War was an enormous leap in overall tech and possibility. To see Gears in motion, punctuated by the infamous mad world trailer, was to be astonished. It was a measuring stick game, the kind you’d show people who aren’t in the know, but knew enough to see the light years it traveled beyond 2D Mario. I got 2 copies of Gears 1 that Christmas, one from my uncle and my mom. I hocked the second copy for a memory card (remember those?) the next day.
I played Gears of War obsessively as a teenager, then I played Halo 3 obsessively, then Call of Duty 4, then Mass Effect 1, then Fable 2 and so on. Each year with my 360(s) got me deeper into thinking about games and filtering my reality through the design of guns and swords, RPGs and loadouts. I began muddling through writing my shitty Gamefaqs reviews with heart, believing in the importance of these worlds and mechanics before I ever had the vocabulary. The 360 inspired me to write and feel like it made so much possible.
Essentially, possibility was the 360’s single greatest strength, its primary currency. It was an underdog console that represented the best of the Xbox brand at the time; an unpredictable, hungry company committed to scratching and clawing its way to the inside track. Here was a console following the ultra-modest inroads of Microsoft’s original hulking black and green beast (Xbox 1, not Xbox One, very stupid name I know). The 360's tech profiled as weaker than its direct competitor, the PS3, and it wasn't nearly as novel a concept as Nintendo's whole new ball game, the Wii. It launched early to get a desperate jump on steep competition. It’s machine failure rates were legendary. It didn't even emerge as the declarative winner of that generation of consoles. Yet with all these years later and all their hurdles, the xbox 360 still remains a singular engine of possibility. The 360 was the blueprint for online gaming and therefore laid the groundwork for all that would come to pass. It normalized purchasing things through storefronts on console, party chat, indie games sitting along side blockbusters with mainstream awareness. The 360 was always a step ahead with surprises and owned big moments when they mattered most, all of it marked with the ubiquitous whisper of its grinch-green boot screen.
It may have ultimately settled around 3rd in its class by the numbers, but with time, it's value and impact has grown considerably. The Xbox 360's influence looms larger than any of its contemporaries yet its optimistic vision has been twisted for the worse. The 360 itself was not a bad role model, quite the opposite in fact. The games industry, hell, Xbox itself, learned every wrong, greed-crusted lesson possible. The utopic, encompassing immersion of the 360 degree philosophy of entertainment has become a cage. Whereas the 360 ushered in new content to download for beloved games, our modern landscape has taken that and now hoards content for additional, entirely-contrived drip feeding or handcuffs players to radiators in a live-service forever-game model that never lets them go. Gone are cosmetics that rewarded skill and accomplishment witnessed in player to player skirmishes across plasma-soaked gun battles, now people pay $10 for jordans so a $10 Vegeta skin can do a $5 griddy emote. We live with the worst in gaming as day-to-day, axiomatic gravity, like seemingly everything in the world.
It's bleak to think about the path less traveled, player empowerment, and the gridlocked highway choked up with unsustainable, anti-consumer environments the industry now hurdles down. But for a generation, it was golden. The better stretched out far beyond the worse, and that’s how I’m choosing to remember the 360 and its heyday. The web 2.0 era of console gaming, defined by 3 am party chats, pre-ubisfoft’d open worlds and actual racing games, was golden. Ultimately, I’m choosing to remember the beginning of new wide-eyed paradigms in gaming that would build out to the sun. Most importantly, I remembering that the xbox 360 was a hell of a ride.