Xbox

Xbox exists because a handful of Microsoft engineers were worried Sony was about to turn the living room TV into a computer, and Microsoft would get locked out of it. In 1999, a small internal team, several of them former DirectX graphics engineers, pitched a games console built on PC architecture instead of the custom chips every other console used. The early codename was literally DirectX Box. Shortened, that's Xbox.

Bill Gates himself unveiled it at CES in January 2001, walking on stage alongside pro wrestlers, which tells you exactly how hard Microsoft was swinging to look like a games company and not a software company cosplaying as one. The console launched in North America that November, going head to head with the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube.

The original controller, nicknamed The Duke, was enormous, built for average American hand size data that turned out to be wrong for a lot of players, and got quietly redesigned smaller within a year. Halo, meanwhile, did what the hardware alone couldn't: it gave Xbox an actual reason to exist next to two console makers with decades of head start.

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