Xbox

Xbox is a series of video game consoles sold by Microsoft since 2001.

Consoles

Xbox (original)

The Xbox

The original Xbox was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market and competed with the PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, and Nintendo GameCube. The integrated Xbox Live service allowed players to compete online and download additional content for its games. The Xbox was launched on November 15, 2001 in North America; February 22, 2002 in Japan; and March 14, 2002 in Australia and Europe.

The console featured a 32-bit 733 MHz Pentium III-based CPU and 64 MB DDR SDRAM at 200 MHz. The Xbox was the first console to feature a hard disk drive as a standard issue feature, which was largely used for storing game saves and content downloaded from Xbox Live. This eliminated the need for separate memory cards. The Xbox was also the first gaming product to feature Dolby Interactive Content-Encoding Technology. The Xbox is based on commodity PC hardware and is much larger and heavier than its contemporaries, largely due to a large tray-loading DVD-ROM drive. The console had less than 1000 commercially released games, the most notable games including Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, MechAssault, and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. More than 24 million Xbox units were sold worldwide.

Production of the original Xbox console ceased on August 2005, a month after the public unveiling of the Xbox 360, due to Nvidia ending production of the console's GPU. Despite this, game publishers continued supporting the original Xbox with new games until 2008. Microsoft later discontinued technical support for the console in 2009, eventually ending its Xbox Live support as well in 2010.

Xbox 360

The Xbox 360

The Xbox 360 is the second video game console manufactured by Microsoft. It is the successor of the Xbox. The Xbox 360 competes with the PlayStation 3 and Wii. The Xbox 360 was released on November 22, 2005, in the United States, Mexico and Canada; December 2, 2005, in Europe; and December 10, 2005, in Japan. Various models were released throughout the console's lifetime, such as the Pro, Premium, Arcade, and Elite, with each offering different specs such as hard disk space. Some Xbox games are compatible with the Xbox 360 via an update.

The Xbox 360 features a port on the top when vertical to which a custom-housed hard drive unit can be attached in sizes of either 20, 60, 120 or 250 GB. Inside, the Xbox 360 uses the triple-core IBM designed Xenon as its CPU, with each core capable of simultaneously processing two threads, and can therefore operate on up to six threads at once. Graphics processing is handled by the ATI Xenos, which has 10 MB of eDRAM. Its main memory pool is 512 MB in size. A motion controller titled Kinect, was released November 4, 2010, in North America, November 10th in PAL regions, and November 20th in Japan.

On April 20, 2016, Microsoft announced that they'll be ceasing production of new Xbox 360 consoles, but will continue to support its online service.

A new version for the Xbox 360, called the Xbox 360 E 4 GB Console, was also released, which was modeled after the Xbox One.

Xbox One

The Xbox One

The Xbox One is the successor of the Xbox 360. It was released on November 22, 2013. An upgraded version, called Xbox One X, was announced at E3 2017 on June 11, 2017. It is a hardware version of the streamlined console Xbox One S, and was released in November of that year.

Xbox Series X and Series S

The Xbox Series X

The Xbox Series S

The Xbox Series X and Series S are the successors of the Xbox One. They where both released on November 10, 2020. The Xbox Series X and Series S competes with the PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch.

Relation to the Metal Gear series

Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, the expanded edition of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, was one of the first titles Konami released for the original Xbox. It was initially announced in 2000 under the working title of "Metal Gear Solid X", leading to some early speculation over its exact nature, due to Metal Gear Solid 2 at the time being announced only for the PS2. While the initial Sons of Liberty edition ended up being released only for the PS2, the Substance edition was produced as a multiplatform release, with the Xbox version being released four months ahead of the PS2 and PC versions in North America. Despite this, no other Metal Gear titles were released on the original Xbox, as Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (and its Subsistence revision) remained exclusive to the PS2 for several years.

While Kojima did showed some interest in developing for the Xbox 360 prior to its launch in 2005 (including an ad by Microsoft in Konami's Show Maybe? pamphlet urging the developer to support the system), no Metal Gear games were initially announced for the system, as Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots ended up being made exclusively for the PS3. This later changed in E3 2009 with the unveiling of Metal Gear Solid: Rising during Microsoft's press conference, which evolved into Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (released in 2013). Prior to Metal Gear Rising, Kojima Productions released the Metal Gear Solid: HD Collection for the Xbox 360 (in addition to the PS3) in 2011, which contained HD conversions of Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, as well as the PlayStation Portable game Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. This was a result of Kojima Productions shifting focus from developing primarily on PlayStation consoles to becoming a multiplatform developer, which resulted in the creation of Fox Engine to ease this transition.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain were originally announced only for the Xbox 360 and PS3, but were later unveiled for the Xbox One and PS4 as well. The Xbox One version of The Phantom Pain in particular was unveiled during Microsoft's E3 press conference in 2013. The Jamais Vu mission was initially exclusive to the Xbox versions of Ground Zeroes, in contrast to the Déjà Vu mission available only in the PlayStation versions. The Version 1.02 patch released online on May 1, 2014 made both missions available on all platforms.

Neither, the Xbox version of Substance nor the 360 version of Metal Gear Rising were released in Japan due to the unpopularity of the Xbox brand in the region. Despite this, the 360 version of Ground Zeroes ended up getting a physical disc release in Japan, while the Xbox One version was a digital download only in Japan, as the console wasn't available yet in the country when the game was launched. In contrast, The Phantom Pain was a digital download only on the Xbox 360 in Japan, whereas the Xbox One version got a physical disc release due to Microsoft's early discontinuation of the 360 in the region.

List of games

• Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance (Xbox, 2002)
• Metal Gear Solid: HD Collection (Xbox 360, 2011)
• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Xbox 360, 2013)
• Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (Xbox 360, Xbox One, 2014)
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Xbox 360, Xbox One, 2015)
• Metal Gear Survive (Xbox One, 2018)
• Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater (Xbox Series X/S, TBA)

See also

• Platform

External links

• Official Xbox website