By Tom Orry,Alex Donaldson,Dom Peppiatt,Robert Purchese
Publication Date: 2025-11-18 09:45:00
When something is 20 years old it’s easy for memories to focus on the best things. The Xbox 360, Microsoft’s best attempt at shaking up the games industry, wasn’t perfect (hello RROD, hello a pivot to Kinect), but it’s a console that for many is remembered as their console – the one that arrived at just the right time and offered exactly the right experiences.
We’ve cast our minds back to that time, when unbelievably PlayStation was often playing second fiddle, Xbox Live was booming, and the future for consoles looked great.
Alex: I skipped school. I would’ve been 16, so this was GCSE year, and for whatever reason my mum let me pull a sickie on the Friday of the 360’s release. I was old enough that I could That’s not massively in character for her, and I’m still not sure why she let me do it. In 2005, I’d been doing video game blogging and fan sites for several years – but 2004/5 was when I’d figured out internet advertising and I had started making actual…
