and welcome to the ultimate Xbox comparison.

- When I started here back in 2000,

the most recent console that we were all playing

was Dreamcast, we got it on 9/9/99.

In many ways, that was there's a lot of special spiritual

connections between the Dreamcast and original Xbox.

You know, it ran actually Windows CE as an operating system.

We had partnered with a lot of the folks at Sega

to bring a lot of that content also to Xbox

and we were learning a lot from them.

- [Distorted Voice] Its thinking.

- The Sega Dreamcast was the first time

that a version of Windows was found on a home console.

The inclusion of Windows CE meant that developers

had options for much more advanced

development tools from the PC such as DirectX.

The problem here was the Sega

had their own custom development tool

which in a lot of ways actually made it much simpler

for developers to take advantage of the limited resources

that were available on the Dreamcast.

The titles that did take advantage

of Windows CE were pretty cool though.

We're talking Tomb Raider,

the original Rainbow Six as well as Resident Evil II.

The Dreamcast didn't exactly set the world on fire,

however, it did plant the seed of an idea over Microsoft

to start their own console business.

Despite having high profile PC exclusives

such as Age of Empires as well

as Microsoft Flight Simulator,

Bill Gates was nervous about the upcoming success

or potential success rather of the Sony PlayStation 2.

(upbeat music)

When Seamus Blackley, a graphics programmer at Microsoft

approached gates about an idea for their own console,

it was very quickly greenlit.

Blackley led a small group of people at Microsoft in 1998

to start working on the Midway Project,

which fun fact was named after the Battle of Midway

with US decisively beat the Japanese, aka console wars.

- Well, there was a small group of folks

that have this like big idea that had worked

on DirectX technology on the PC side

and said, hey, what if we took this technology

and Microsoft had made a bunch of PC games,

so we took that technology and we built it

into a plug and play kind of appliance

like console for the living room.

And we felt like we had the tech,

we have the operating system capabilities,

we had the online networking capabilities,

we actually had game studio,

so we had a lot of the internal gradients to make it happen.

- Other PC tech including using an internal hard drive,

something that hadn't been done on consoles yet,

as well as taking advantage of an internet connection

which would work right out of the box.

In the end, Microsoft opted to load

the Xbox up with a custom version

of Windows 2000 for the operating system

as well as running DirectX for the actual games themselves.

Now the DirectX portion of this

actually is a pretty important point.

So not only did this have a ton of different names

when it was being developed,

but the most common one was the DirectX Box,

which of course was shortened to Xbox, a much cleaner name.

The Xbox was officially announced at GDC in March of 2000,

coincidentally about the same time

that the Sony PlayStation II went on sale in Japan.

With that console quickly looking to become a juggernaut,

there was a huge uphill battle for the Xbox to go.

I mean it's sure of course you know

it's Microsoft and it is huge company,

but its easy to forget not only just how difficult

and expensive it is to create a console,

but of course, how expensive it is to spend

all this marketing dollars and all this stuff

to get people on board to actually buy your brand new Xbox.

To combat this, Microsoft aggressively marketed

the Xbox in the run up to E3 of 2000.

Now at the show there they met a developer

which would end up completely

changing the future of the Xbox, it was Bungie.

And very quickly they purchased the studio for $30 million

and the Xbox had its killer app.

Now Bungie had been working on Halo since 1997

and it had a very, very long lifespan

to get to the point where it actually launched on the Xbox.

First of all it started out as a real time strategy game,

which then morphed into a third person shooter

and finally landed as a first person shooter,

which of course really kind of revolutionized the genre.

Now of course today Halo is synonymous with Xbox

but back in 1999, it was good old Steve Jobs at Macworld

who was showing off the brand new Bungie title Halo.

- This game is gonna ship early next year for Bungie

and this is the first time anybody has ever seen it,

its the first time they debut it,

and so I'm very happy to welcome on stage

Jason Jones, who is the co founder of Bungie

and the Halo Project lead, Halo's the name of the game,

and we're gonna see for the first time Halo.

- Halo was originally going to be a Mac title,

and in fact, it did actually ship on the Mac

but even though this version was a little bit rough,

you can still see a lot of similarities between this

and the final version was shipped on Xbox.

Bill Gates revealed the final Xbox design at CES in 2001

and he didn't do it alone,

he had a little bit of help from The Rock.

And no, not like The Rock as we know him today,

I'm talking The Rock in full character,

because 2001 was a really weird time.

- Good morning, and Bill Gates,

you have some pretty cool catch phrases as well.

What are some of your favorite?

- My favorite is probably writing

hardcore C to create slick type code.

(audience laughing)

- The Xbox officially went on sale

at midnight on November 15 2001 here in the United States

and it followed up in early 2002 in other parts of the world

such as Europe as well as Asia.

And it didn't exactly will catch on

anywhere else around the world.

By the end of its lifecycle,

the Xbox had only sold a mere 450,000 units in Japan

and only about 2 million in the entire Asia Pacific region.

That was a massive failure,

although it did perform a little bit better in Europe

where they sold a grand total of around 6 million Xboxes.

Halo really is the reason that they sold the Xbox at all.

In the first few months of being on sale,

they sold over 1 million copies of Halo,

which is a lot especially by 2001 standards.

- You know, the team had a big vision

and had a lot of crazy ideas,

and it was just fun to like kind of figure out

how do we pull that all off and then content.

I remember when we first showed Halo

for the first time at E3, original Halo Combat Evolved,

people were kind of like, I'm not sure,

I mean, first person shooters

really hadn't existed with a controller

and mapping the keyboard and mouse controllers

to a controller was a new thing,

people took a little while to get used to it,

but then as soon as we launched,

it was clear that we had something special

and but not only did Halo take off

but then we launched Xbox Live the next holiday,

it really took off from there.

(intense music)

- Less than a year after release,

Microsoft did give the Xbox a price cut

going from $300 down to 200.

Now this meant that they could

better compete with the GameCube

as well as hopefully with the PlayStation 2

but it did mean that Microsoft

was selling the console at loss,

and at the end of the day, no console of this generation

could even come close to the kind of sales numbers

of the PlayStation 2 set down.

Inside, the Xbox was very clearly

the most powerful console of this generation

and that is almost entirely due to the fact

that they did opt to go for a very PC like architecture.