Happy Birthday Live

Today Xbox Live is 5 years young. Because you only turn 5 once, i'm going to go off on a tangent about the dark ages of Xbox LIve. Put the children to bed, this is going to be terrifying.

Once upon a time there was a giant black box. I had one. Summer of 2003 I signed myself up for LIVE. Played some Crimson Skies, ok a LOT of Crimson Skies... ok mostly Crimson Skies, and Halo 2. It was awesome.

I actually purchased my Xbox becasue of Live. I had a close friend of mine that was moving to Korea. We played ice hockey together for 6 years and the idea that we could play NHL2K... whatever, wherever we happened to be living sounded like the coolest thing ever. I got so excited by the notion of Live once I heard about it I bought an Xbox the very next day.

So I had LIVE, Paul, my friend, shipped off to Korea with his Xbox Live Starter Kit (remember those) and everything was going to be fin... except he couldn't get on to Live... because it wasn't available there, damn it. The entire reason why I purchased the Xbox and that LIVE card was just canceled out. Oh well, I had this thing now I was going to use it... and I did. Live changed everything that I once thought a console was.

I would have loved that on my SNES back in the day. Playing Zombies Ate My Neighbors or Donkey Kong Country with Bryan who lived down the block, or Joey who lived across town would have been amazing. And though Live was not exactly streamlined in XBox 1, as it is in the 360, you could see that something was there, and it felt good.

Did we think at the time that Microsoft was going to have huge success with Live? I didn't. I was still a Nintendo fanboy at heart, and Sony was still selling tons more consoles. That left no room for Microsoft. They would have had to make a huge overhaul to get their Live service more to the masses... then they did that with the 360. Awesome.

And so ends our tale. Live on the original Xbox is the reason I got a 360. It's a big part of why I turned my attention back to gaming. Thanks Live.