My fond memories of the Xbox 360

By Sam Coles: 

Gaming these days feels a bit lackluster and tiresome, with rehashed ideas with remasters and countless sequels where I find myself going back to the good old days of yesteryear. The Xbox 360 is a console I often go back to, as it was the console I grew up with in my teenage years and early 20s, now this isn’t going to be an article stating old is better and new is bad no far from it but it will be me looking back on my fond memories of Microsoft’s little box.  

Although the Xbox 360 originally came out in 2005, I didn’t get one until my 16th birthday in 2009 where I was absolutely enamored with it immediately as it came with Halo 3 and Mass Effect. It was a console that opened so many opportunities with the worlds I could explore as well as the career path I went down, where I ended up becoming a game critic as well as a video content creator today.  

The core memories stem from not even owning a 360 as a lot of my friends had one, and I just remember them bringing their 360 to my house, and we would play split screen Halo or Call of Duty until the early hours of the morning. Not only that, but it was also the height of the music rhythm game, with Guitar Hero and Rockband serving as excellent house party games which unfortunately became stagnate due to their overabundance. There was something great about mixing music and gameplay together at a party, where most had a few to drink which led to shall we say interesting results when it came to vocal quality with singing.  

As I got older when I got my 360 in 2009, I gravitated towards online play as our internet connection in my family household was more stable compared to our dialup routes. I started playing games like Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 online more, which is how I ended up making friends when I was studying for my A-levels. When Modern Warfare 2 came out, it was a massive social experience, not just because the game was good but that was a big factor but because it brought everyone together no matter your background. People who didn’t even play video games that often or if at all played Modern Warfare 2, that was how much of an impact it had where the 360 was the place to play it.  

However, as I got closer to my twenties, I started to gain more appreciation for singleplayer games. Not that I didn’t have said appreciation before, as some of my fondest memories are from singleplayer games. However, as I got older, I grew to understand art more with games such as Red Dead Redemption, GTA IV, L.A. Noire (a lot of Rockstar titles), and The Witcher 2 showed me how mature the medium could be. This was all in the span of a seven to eight year life cycle too, which seems insane considering how games evolved at such an accelerated rate on a console that had just over 500MB of RAM.  

The Xbox 360 is a console that I grew up with, from my early teens when playing with envy at my friend’s house, to my mid-teens of finally owning one to my late teens to my early twenties of finally accepting the medium as an art form. It shaped the gamer I am today, not only that I developed somewhat of a career out of it as I started to write written reviews about games, which then went onto video content in my later career. It helped shape me who I am as a person today, and honestly, I wouldn’t change any of that.