The launch of the Xbox 360 was the birth of the current generation of consoles. We still were unsure of many things: online gaming, the necessity of HD capabable machines, and this "achievement" thing Microsoft seemed to be pushing. At the time of launch some four years ago today, details weren't completely given for the Wii or the PlayStation 3, so anyone looking to try something new had to buy an Xbox 360. I mean, it was either that or continue playing Gamecube and PlayStation 2 games, and with the promises of much better graphics it was hard to justify picking up any other controller. Lines started, people took out their credit cards, and the system's launch began... and it was a rough one.

The first day it was available I put in my pre-order. I didn't know why, at the time, but pictures of Gears of War (which I thought was a game about killing giant monsters like in Shadow of the Colossus for some reason) made the choice an easy one. When the strange pricing was announced, which gave birth to one of this generation's strangest issues - multiple SKUs - I was angered, but dealt with it. How? By putting my Xbox 360 on Ebay the moment it was in my hands. Yes, that's right, I tried to flip my Xbox. It was unsuccessful, however, and I needed to deal with owning the system. For the first few months I played nothing but Hexic and Geometry Wars, eventually buying Dead or Alive to see what the next-generation could present. I still had an SDTV, but it had component inputs, so I was able to play games like Dead Rising without worrying about the text.



But that was just my Xbox. At the time of launch, I worked at a LAN center called Cyber-Stop, and the boss bought two systems. Within a month, both had red-ringed. I remember the first time, only a week or two after the system had landed on shelves, that I looked up "blinking red lights Xbox" on Google. There, I saw it: The Red Ring of Death. I spent the next few months making fun of the system, and laughing about how silly it was that the current generation started with harddrive failure.

So, yeah, I was a self-hating Xbox 360 owner, but that slowly changed. Big games like Gears of War in 2006 made it much easier to justify owning the console, and the lack of quality in the launch of the PlayStation 3 (and the lack of graphical capability in the Wii) made it obvious that, at least early on, the Xbox was the system to own. The price and graphics might have been stuck in the middle, but everything else was at the top, and even the largest issues with the system, over the years, seem to have dissipated. Things that seemed trivial early on, like the Xbox Live Arcade, eventually birthed Braid and Trials HD, indie hits that would have never made a mark before. The promises of the "next-generation of gaming" may not have been what we thought they would be, but they certainly ended up being... better.



I'm not going to lie: the future looks strange for the Xbox 360. It's surely going to have plenty of more great games, there's no doubt about that, and there are a handful of exclusives that already stand out as potential hits. However, with the company shifting towards supporting Natal, no one really knows how things will be. Either way, we celebrate the Xbox 360's 4th birthday with optimism and nostalgia, remembering when we first heard of the "RROD" and first laid our eyes on high-definition gaming in its earliest stages. Happy birthday, Xbox, you've grown up so fast.