Xbox 360 at 10: How XBLA changed the industry forever

[Administrator]

The Xbox 360 turned 10 this week and there's a lot to admire about how Microsoft's second console forever changed the gaming landscape. It brought us all sort of neat goodies like a multimedia dashboard, the almost definitive gamepad, and loads of influential titles like Gears of War, Mass Effect and Crackdown. But my favourite aspect of the Microsoft's decade old console was Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA for short), a digital service archiving older titles as well as offering new and exciting independently made adventures at budget prices.
XBLA began as little more than a novelty on the original Xbox in December 2004, but it only ever distributed 27 old arcade games on Microsoft's first console. It wasn't until the almost-always online era of the Xbox 360, when high speed internet became the norm, that XBLA turned into the expansive showcase we know it as today.
Initially XBLA primarily catalogued older arcade games, with Hexic HD a pack-in title tucked away on the console's hard drive. Many of XBLA's launch titles were ports of 80s Midway games like Joust, Smash TV and Gauntlet. Shortly thereafter, big name publishers like Capcom, Konami, and Namco Bandai got in on this by releasing archived titles like Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting, Frogger and Galaga. As the service rose in popularity, publishers were putting more ambitious evergreen classics on the platform like Doom, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and Marathon: Durandal.
Read more…


More...