Revisiting the Official Xbox Website, Circa 2001

This past weekend was the 19th anniversary of the release of the original Xbox, so what better time than now, with the release of the latest Xbox, to go back and look at how the original Xbox.com website looked at launch?

(Okay, so maybe last weekend would have been better. Give me a break, I’m still catching up on a backlog of article ideas.)

As a disclaimer, I got nearly everything here from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. That means that some of the images here are broken, while others aren’t, and I could find no fully-functional versions. Heck, even the top part of the header image was actually taken from the developer website, as that was more intact than the regular homepage.

In addition, I tried to get everything as it was on November 6th, 2001 — as close to the day of the original Xbox’s launch as they have available without redirects. But with how Internet Archive works, sometimes you follow a link and that page is from a week before or ten years after. I tried to stick with the stuff that was as close to the launch date as possible, but full disclosure, there’s some wiggle room here.

But why Xbox? Besides the aforementioned new console launch, Xbox is the only current platform holder that entered the market when the internet had become commonplace (I hesitate to say “fully formed”, as things continue to change). The earliest entry for PlayStation.com, for instance, is December 11th, 1997, more than two years after its North American release, and that is completely broken, anyway. (Curiously, Xbox.com dates all the way back to late 1998, but that version is too broken to glean anything from.)

Suffice to say, if there’s interest, I may look at some of the others on key dates. Or I may not. Or I may just do it anyway.

With that said, let’s see what we’ve got!

There’s what the front page actually looks like on the Internet Archive. As you can see, it’s a bit broken, with most of the links that would tell us where to go being casualties. Fortunately, those appear to be mirrored at the bottom, so we can still look around as we please. First up is the News!

As a quick heads-up, I’ve had to crop some of these so they don’t take up huge chunks of the page. Just right-click the image and open in a new tab (or just click on it for a windowed view), and you can see the full image! Now, with that out of the way…

In addition to the most recent news of the day here, there’s a whole archive accessible at the bottom. We’ll check out a few handpicked stories from each here, starting from the most recent.

Official Xbox Magazine!

Back when the Xbox launched, magazines were still a, if not the, primary way to get the latest gaming news. YouTube was years away, and what videos you’d find on various websites were still usually pretty small and grainy. Nevertheless, we ate it up, as getting to see anticipated games in motion before they were released was practically unheard of.

But back to the magazines. Every platform holder had an official magazine, so why should Xbox be any different? However, whereas Nintendo handled their magazine, Nintendo Power, in-house for most of its life, everyone else went with Future — and eventually, Nintendo would as well. So why not Xbox?

This also meant that some familiar faces would help bring the monthly publication to life — well, familiar to fans of other Future publications. If you read Game Players back in the day, Mike Salmon would be the first editor-in-chief for the magazine. He was joined by other Game Players alumni, Frank O’Connor (who would go on to work at Bungie and then 343 Industries on various Halo projects) and Francesca Reyes (who would become editor-in-chief of the magazine in 2006).

Another difference in the landscape is that before there were downloadable demos for consoles (or much of downloadable anything, really), there were demo discs featuring trailers, playable demos, and sometimes other exclusive content. And Official Xbox Magazine was no different with their Official Xbox Magazine Game Disc, which was included with the magazine until 2012.

Sadly, the magazine was shut down in April 2020, with the early pandemic being cited as one of the reasons.

Okay, I said I was going in reverse-order, but making one small exception here, as these two are related.

In January 2001, SEGA would announce that after more than 15 years, they would be exiting the console space and continuing on as a third-party developer and publisher. By the end of March, they’d signed on to produce games for Xbox, and this was the announcement of that move.

There had been talk previously of Microsoft acquiring SEGA, the Xbox being compatible with Dreamcast games, and other potential partnerships, but (somewhat) sadly, none of those ever came to pass.

Nevertheless, SEGA would either port or make sequels to a variety of Dreamcast classics exclusively for the Xbox, with SEGA GT, Panzer Dragoon, and Jet Grind Radio Future revealed here. Along with other factors, from the Xbox’s similar controller to both running off of modified versions of Windows, some SEGA fans would effectively adopt the Xbox as the unofficial “Dreamcast 2”.

Come May, SEGA would have a little more to say about their immediate plans for the console.

In addition to the aforementioned, SEGA of America President and Chief Operating Officer Peter Moore (who would later go on to become Corporate Vice-President of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business division, overseeing the Xbox consoles) revealed that Crazy Taxi: Next (later renamed Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller, which remains a console exclusive for the original Xbox to this very day — come on, backwards compatibility!), House of the Dead 3, and SEGA Sports releases NFL 2K2 and NBA 2K2 were coming as well. What’s more, the SEGA Sports releases for the following year were all promised to take advantage of the Xbox’s broadband online service, something which has effectively become a staple of sports games today.

And of course, if the 2K moniker seems familiar, it may not surprise you to learn that SEGA would sell their developer, Visual Concepts, to Take-Two Interactive in 2005, where they’ve gone on to produce 2K sports titles for 2K Games, for better or for worse.

One of Xbox’s biggest “gets” in the early going was the fighting game Dead or Alive. Earlier entries had bounced around between the arcade (using SEGA hardware) to SEGA and PlayStation platforms before making a firm home for itself on Microsoft’s new platform, where the franchise would remain exclusive until the departure of developer Team Ninja’s head, Tomonobu Itagaki, from Tecmo in 2008.

Dead or Alive 3 did little to innovate over its predecessors, but arguably didn’t need to, as it instead pushed the power of the Xbox graphically, and to create larger stages. The game also featured an option to use the controller’s analog buttons in such a way that holding them down more would see different moves performed. Dead or Alive 3 would also introduce five new characters to the series, including fan favorites Christie and Hitomi.

Like Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller, Dead or Alive 3 remains exclusive to the original Xbox — come ooon, backwards compatibility.

Now here’s some news I can sink my teeth into!

Back in the day, Xbox and Taco Bell partnered up to “deliver Microsoft’s largest consumer promotion in company history.” Later in the year, we would come to find out that this meant giving away Xbox consoles, a game controller, and a game to more than 6,700 sweepstakes winners of a “Scratch ‘Til You Win” sweepstakes. Interestingly enough, the initial release above mentions Canada being a part of the promotion, yet I can’t seem to find anything about it in the later link, or anywhere else.

In any case, while Xbox/Microsoft would find other partners for future promotions, they recently made another run for the border for the launch of the Xbox Series X — but only in the States. My disappointment that it didn’t also run in Canada is tempered by my disappointment that UberEats has the two locations that will deliver to me perpetually closed until “tomorrow” (but tomorrow never comes…), so I likely wouldn’t have gotten to enter, anyway.

On September 20th, 2000, Microsoft revealed the names of several third-parties who would join them in ushering in their new console, and it paints an interesting picture of how the gaming landscape has changed since this was published. Capcom, Konami, and Activision are still around, largely unchanged, save for the latter’s merger with Blizzard. But the rest here…

Bandai and Namco have now merged to form Devastator Bandai Namco, Eidos has become a part of Square Enix (who themselves were just SquareSoft and Enix until 2003), Hudson Soft was acquired by Konami, Midway went bankrupt and was bought up by Warner Bros. Interactive, Sierra was bought by Vivendi (who was subsequently bought by Activision), THQ would shut down before being purchased and reopened under new management, and Infogrames would buy and become Atari, which is a whole kettle of soup in itself.

Oh, and they revealed their new logo, too! Which, ironically, does not seem to be a part of the article, even accounting for Internet Archive’s brokenness. Going by the headline, I’m going to guess it was this one.

And the last news item I’ve dug up was another major coup for Xbox — quite possibly the biggest one, one that would shape their business for years to come.

In June 2000, Microsoft acquired Bungie, who had been developing a new title called “Halo” for Mac OS and Windows. Of course, this put the kibosh on that, delaying the PC version for a couple of years and nixing Mac’s outright. As a result, Halo became the flagship title for the original Xbox, and its protagonist, Master Chief, became something of a de facto mascot for the console.

Interestingly enough, however, Microsoft’s purchase didn’t get them everything from Bungie. As the article indicates, Take-Two Interactive got some of the titles they’d been distributing out of the deal, including the strategy game Myth and third-person action game Oni.

Okay, so that’s enough news. Let’s see what else they had to offer back then, starting with the next item in line on the menu: Games!

You can’t have a good game console without games, and fortunately, Xbox was ready.

Some notable highlights here include several aforementioned titles, such as Dead or Alive 3, Halo, and the SEGA bunch. Madden NFL 2002 was probably nothing to sneeze at, there was Unreal Championship, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2x, Star Wars: Starfighter, Project Gotham Racing, Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and of course, everyone’s favorite flagship title and Super Smash Bros. nominee, Shrek!

Many of these were slated to be released at or near launch, but one other title caught my attention at the time: Whereas the PlayStation had become the home for WWF SmackDown titles, the Xbox would get WWF: Raw is War. This one got shunted back to 2002, during which time it dropped “is War” from the title, as the September 11th attacks saw the TV show it’s based on do the same. What’s more, with WWF changing its name to WWE, this would be the last title to bear the original initials as well.

I remember being impressed with the visuals when I saw it on display at the Yorkdale EB Games, but didn’t get to play much of it. To hear others tell it, I didn’t miss all that much.

Next up, you’ve got to talk about the hardware, right? Games are great, but people need to know what they’re getting right out of the box (so to speak)!

Highlights of the console included four controller ports, a front-loading DVD disc tray (that could actually play DVDs, if you wanted to shell out for the DVD Playback Kit that helped cover the licensing fees), a built-in ethernet port for broadband online play, an Intel 733MHz processor (“the most powerful CPU of any console”), and for many, the true prize: an internal hard drive, allowing for the storage of game information (and so much more, depending on what you did with it).

As you can see, Microsoft felt the Xbox controller would warrant its own separate page from the console it came with, which makes a certain amount of sense — there are four controller ports, and there’s a chance consumers would want to buy more, so this way they could see what they were getting from the official first-party product versus whatever MadCatz or whoever came up with.

This original version, known affectionately among fans as “The Duke,” featured everything you would want in a controller at the time: two analog sticks, an eight-directional D-pad, two shoulder triggers, two memory card slots (for bringing data to a friend’s house), rumble, and a whopping six buttons on the front (two of which, Black and White, were meant for auxiliary functions like Teamspeak). However, its size overwhelmed a lot of players, leading to the later release of the Xbox Controller S, whose form factor (with a shift from Black and White buttons to shoulder bumpers on the Xbox 360) would inform the brand’s controller design for years to come.

Oh, and it came with a cord that was nearly ten feet long, dwarfing everyone else’s cords by far.

Both also came with that snazzy green “X” jewel in the middle, too.

Last, but not least (as there’s not much to say about “My Xbox,” “Feedback,” and “Newsletter”), there was the Community section.

This section looked out at what was happening with Xbox and its fans on the “information superhighway” (was that term out of use by then?), linking to various other outlets covering the news, as well as a number of fan sites. Who remembers Planet Xbox (or just “Planet” sites in general) and GamePro? Sadly, most of these sites no longer exist, except as part of the Internet Archive itself (Xbox Addict is still hanging in there, though, and Active Xbox hasn’t been updated in years).

There are also some transcripts of chats with Xbox creatives linked on the side that are archived (some of them, at least, so check those out at your pleasure). Finally, there’s another link on the side where you could get a collection of free desktop wallpapers and screensavers, but sadly, that only leads to a 404 error message and redirect to a later version of the site now. Makes me wonder if anyone still has those digital curios, though.

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And there we have it, a fun little trip back in time to see where things started when the original Xbox launched nearly 20 years ago. Of course, Xbox.com still lives on and remains rather informative about their current product line, but there’s a certain charm to the original site that one can’t help but wax a little nostalgic for. Maybe someday Microsoft will see fit to preserve it somehow; retro.xbox.com, anyone?

I hope you enjoyed this blast from gaming’s past, and that maybe it even brought back a few memories, whether or not you were an active Xbox player at the time.

Thanks for reading!

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David Oxford is a freelance writer of many varied interests. If you’re interested in hiring him, please drop him a line at david.oxford (at) nyteworks.net.