About the Xbox 360
0-9 – A – B – C – D – E – F – G – H – I – J – K – L – M – N – O – P – Q – R – S – T – U – V – W – X – Y – Z
The Xbox 360 is the next generation sibling of the Xbox which was released on November 15th, 2001 by Microsoft. The Xbox 360 was officially unveiled on May 12th, 2005 on MTV. There was detailed game and launch information announced later in the month at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, commonly referred to as E3. The Xbox 360 was the first contender in the battle between the 7th generation console video game systems, which now include the Nintendo Wii and the Playstation 3.
Development
The Xbox 360 as we know it today was known as many different names during development. Such names include Xenon, Xbox 2, Xbox Next, and NextBox. The Xbox 360 originated in early 2003 and in February ’03, J Allard, Microsofts Vice President, headed the planning of the Xenon software platform. On August 12, 2003 ATI, a visual processor unit manufacturing company, signed on to produce the graphic processing unit. The next month IBM signed on to produce the Triple-Core CPU.
Launch
On March 14, 2005 promotion for the Xbox 360 began with the opening of an alternate reality game called OurColony. Throughout the months of March and April OurColony gave various challenges to its community and would reward solutions to the challenges with cropped pictures of the Xbox360 and game screenshots. OurColony ended on May 12, 2005 along with the release of a video of J. Allard showing off the new console system. The official disclosure of the Xbox 360 happened on the same day on MTV in a show titled MTV Presents: The Next Generation Xbox Revealed. In October of 2005 another alternate reality game was created. This game was called Hex168 and was used to promote the system before launch. The Xbox 360 was released on November 22, 2005 in the U.S. and Canada and December 10 of the same year in Japan. There were many other later releases in other areas of the world.