Microsoft still hasn’t recovered from the Xbox One reveal. It was a paradigm shifting moment in the gaming industry that turned what was once a leader in overblown console wars into a laughing stock. High on television, Kinect, and its own misguided view of a connected future, Xbox stumbled out of the event with over a decade of lost ground to recover. We still love to crack jokes about Don Mattrick’s awkward rambling of buzzwords associated with sports and TV, all while trying to sell us an overpriced console with not enough games and far too much baggage. Years later and Phil Spencer is still struggling to pick up all the pieces.
I was still in school at the time, and in my immaturity was a Sony Pony who loved to dunk on Xbox despite my love for Viva Pinata and Halo. Tuning in for this reveal event and watching as Microsoft pushed itself into a meme-ridden corner was solid gold. Though some consumers and industry talent spoke out in defence of a system that misunderstood gaming and wanted to push it in a direction that focused on other media, it was a foolish and clumsy travesty. A month ahead of E3, Xbox had kindly dug its own grave.
The event itself was a casual affair. Microsoft had erected a fanciful black tent on its Seattle campus where press gathered to witness the Xbox One reveal. Rumours ahead of the show claimed that the company was refusing to backtrack on its always online DRM policy that would limit the compatibility of used games, which in itself was enough to draw ire from fans willing to jump the fence over to bluer pastures. We came in with trepidation, but there was an overriding confidence that complaints were being listened to, and we weren’t walking into a corporate laden nightmare of obtuse marketing bullshit and almost no video games. Though Call of Duty: Ghosts made a brief appearance, it was all Skype, Bing, and TV.
A full hour dragged on at a glacial pace as Phil Spencer walked out to promise a grand total of 15 exclusives in the console’s first year, all before showing us a trailer for Quantum Break that was mostly shot in live action and featured character designs set to be radically altered in the years to come anyway. Then it was back to television, with an exhaustive amount of time spent on selling us on the wonders of a voice-activated cable box which also doubled as a fantasy league machine and glorified webcam for chatting with your mates.
Xbox Snap was a weird idea to begin with, acting as if a secondary thing popping up on your display which not only tanked performance that wasn’t optimal in the first place, but proved entirely pointless given all of us have smartphones to search up required information anyway. It was so needless, and out of date the moment we saw it revealed. It went down very badly.
Then there was even more television. 343 Industries’ Bonnie Ross emerged to talk up the future of Halo and how Master Chief was no longer confined to the medium of video games. Nope, a live action television series was in the works with none other than Steven Spielberg at the helm. He recorded a video message and sent a couple emails before vanishing from the project altogether, which itself didn’t see the light of day until 2022. It also didn’t involve Xbox’s newly formed television studio, which shut its doors years earlier.
The majority of features and ideas explored in this presentation were either cancelled out of desperation or backtracked on in a similar avalanche of lies. Mattrick once said Xbox One is never going to ship without Kinect, a decision which was reversed very quickly in order for it to stay in the race, while Mattrick departed the company not long after its release. Damage was done, and it was abundantly clear this bloated new vision was a failure.
2013 saw us enter a generation of gaming where online discourse was more common than ever, which when paired with widely streamed press conferences meant that reactions were sudden and biting, immediately honing in on criticisms and highlights. Xbox had nothing but Ls for us, so the memes came quick and fast. It was glorious, and the dragging persisted as E3 came around and Sony used every opportunity to paint the PS4 as a console that loved used games, was notably cheaper, and had way more going for it. All gaming and very little busywork, an identity it has long abandoned in favour of past hubris in recent years.
It is hard to overstate how big an impact this single hour had on the gaming landscape. Xbox is still licking wounds afflicted from a console reveal that reduced almost a decade of good fortunes to nothing. It gave everything up, believing that a console that combined all parts of our entertainment centre under one roof was the future, while failing to realise the importance of video games that turned Xbox into a household name to begin with. Maybe it was right in the end, but it was far too early and had no idea how to reach fans. Powerful new consoles, Xbox Game Pass, and a consumer-friendly attitude thanks to Phil Spencer and company still aren't enough, and I’m hesitant to believe they ever will be.
Gaming would be so different if this reveal event never happened, likely reshaping Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo into different beasts altogether through an unavoidable butterfly effect of changes both massive and minute. Hard to believe it’s been ten years, or exactly how much has changed in the face of a beautiful disaster.