Great games, great menus, terrible Gamertags: 20 years of Xbox Live

This list could comfortably be nothing but 2009’s 1 Vs. 100, and it would still be a comprehensive list of everything good about Xbox Live—but we don’t think we could get away with a one-page slideshow, so we threw in some other ones to pad it out. Still, 1 Vs. 100 is (or was, R.I.P.) incredible for two reasons: For starters, it was a really fun game, based on a short-lived real-life game show, where one contestant had to try and answer more correct trivia questions than a panel of 100 other contestants who were all on a team together. If the solo player beat all 100 other players, they would get a real-life prize in the form of digital Xbox currency.

The other reason 1 Vs. 100 was great was that it accidentally influenced the entire future of online competitive multiplayer. One person against 100 other people, all playing at once, trying to complete some task before everyone else does, and the last person standing gets a prize? That’s just Fortnite.

Though Xbox Live had been available for a few years before Halo 2 launched, Bungie’s blockbuster sequel was definitely the thing that convinced a lot of people to sign up for the first time. Finally, a chance to play Halo with your friends without having to plug in a second controller or risk the social scandal of organizing a LAN party (simultaneously the dorkiest and most fun party you can have).

But even more than the fun of playing Halo online, Halo 2 was a brilliant advertisement for Xbox Live because its single-player campaign just kind of… stops. The bad guys are about to invade Earth, humans and aliens have formed a tenuous alliance, and Master Chief just declared that he was “finishing this fight.” Woo! Time to rock this shit! And then the credits roll, and suddenly you have to stop playing Halo 2 right when it gets good. Or do you? For a small monthly fee, you can hop online and play some multiplayer! And look, your friends are online! Might as well keep paying, since it only took another three years for Halo 3 to come out and actually finish the fight… until Halo Reach, Halo 4, Halo 5: Guardians, and Halo Infinite.

And hey, if you’re already giving Microsoft money for Xbox Live, why not give it slightly more money for access to Game Pass? The “Netflix for video games” dream made real, Game Pass is a subscription service that offers a huge library of Xbox games that you can download and play for no extra cost beyond the monthly fee. But these aren’t just the video game equivalent of Red Notice or whatever other random bullshit Netflix let a celebrity make for $1 billion, these are real video games! For the most part!

Microsoft puts all of the games it publishes in the Game Pass library on day one, and as the company has continued making aggressive acquisitions in the last few years (including a highly contested buy-out of Activision Blizzard that Sony is fighting like hell to stop), that means more and more high-profile video games are launching directly on Game Pass. At a certain point, it becomes silly to buy anything but a regular Game Pass subscription—and since Microsoft throws in Xbox Live access, that counts as a good thing about Xbox Live.

But at the same time, there are plenty of reasons to not give Microsoft any money every month, and the best one is that free-to-play games don’t require Xbox Live. If you want to play Call Of Duty, which costs at least $60 new, you need an active Xbox Live account. But if you want to play Fortnite or Apex Legends or some weird shit like dragon game Century: Age Of Ashes, you don’t need to pay.

It’s weirdly anti-capitalist, in a world where you sometimes have to pay to park your car at the emergency room, where they will then keep a running list of everything they do to try and make you feel better, and then when you get home you find out how much it has cost you to have the privilege of living. So Xbox Live is better than the American medical system. That’s where we’ve set the bar.

Fwoosh. Boop. Fwish. Beep boop. Fwoosh. No, these aren’t the sounds of a thrilling Star Wars adventure, these are the sounds of the old Xbox 360 “Blades.” That was the name given to the interface of the 360’s main dashboard, with menus tied to curved silver columns onscreen that would slide in and out depending on which ones you were using. They looked like blades, and it was very fast and easy to get from one thing to another, since it was built around what made sense with a controller rather than trying to emulate a standard computer interface or a confusing TV menu.

Need to change your settings? Fwoosh fwoosh. You’re in the settings menu. Want to see what new games are available in the recently launched Xbox Live Arcade store? Fwoosh fwoosh. Done. Need to bully some punk kid and tell him that he sucks and he should give up gaming and learn a more respectable trade, like farming? Fwoosh fwoosh boop boop boopboopboopboopboop (that’s you typing out a message). Boom, he’ll never touch a video game again.

Playing games with your friends? Pshaw. You can play games with your friends on PlayStation, unless they’re too busy with the platform’s dumb library of brilliant narrative games that you can’t get on Xbox, like Death Stranding and God Of War. Pshaw!

However, if you want to play a game with a crew, maybe a pirate crew, then Xbox Live is the place. That’s because it has Sea Of Thieves, a game where you can annoy your mateys by playing loud musical instruments as they try to solve a pirate riddle, where you can shoot them out of a cannon into the middle of the ocean to be devoured by sharks, you can remind them of the difference between port and starboard (one of them means “left” but we don’t remember which), and you can get into screaming matches over whether it makes more sense to raise or lower the sails when you need to make a sharp turn. You can’t do that with your friends, but you can do it with your crewmates, because they sort of work for you.

Or, if you don’t have a crew and don’t want to make any friends, the Call Of Duty series is always there for when you’d rather not talk to anyone, ever. Oh sure, you can play COD with a headset and a mic, and a whole lot of people do, but… maybe don’t? The classic COD shooter gameplay is so frenetic and based on reaction time that strategizing doesn’t really help, so the only reason to have the headset on is to make it easier to communicate to someone that they’re bad at video games and that you want them to permanently give up gaming and take up farming instead.

That person could be a friend or a stranger, but the point is that you’re better off not hearing it or saying it. If you don’t have a headset or mic, nobody can get mad at you and you can’t get mad at anyone… or at least nobody can tell you they’re mad and you can’t tell anyone how mad you are. The world is better off without it. Just play the damn video game and calm down.

In 2014, someone named Ray Cox (identified on Wikipedia as a “gamer”) became the first Xbox owner to break a Gamerscore of 1 million points. Under the hacker alias Stallion83, Cox achieved what was, at the time, the highest Gamerscore in the entire world. Truly a jaw-dropping accomplishment, and one that has given Stallion83 a well-earned place in the history books—unless you don’t give a shit about Gamerscore.

But you should give a shit about Gamerscore, because there’s no better way to prove who is the superior gamer. Introduced alongside the Xbox 360, your Gamerscore is based on the number of Achievements—superfluous in-game challenges with point values attached, like “win 100 multiplayer games” for 100 points—that you’ve earned in Xbox games. Though not explicitly tied to Xbox Live, an Xbox owner’s Gamerscore is always listed next to their Gamertag (that’s their Xbox name). That makes it easy to compare yourself to your friends or enemies or anyone else, at least in terms of how many video games you’ve played and how many … little pointless things you did in that game.

During the holidays in 2007, Microsoft experienced a huge Xbox Live outage due to (supposedly) an unexpectedly big influx of new Xbox 360 owners. As an apology to everyone who couldn’t play online, Microsoft gave every Xbox Live user a downloadable copy of a game called Undertow that had been released a month or so prior.

A 2D multiplayer shooter (a genre that was very popular at the time), Undertow was … fine? We don’t really remember it too well, beyond the fact that it was nice to get it for free. Free is always good. But, to be clear, this was only “free” in quotes, because you only got it if you were a paying Xbox Live subscriber, but the giveaway was so popular that “free” games have since become a regular part of Xbox Live’s offerings. Every month you get a couple of free games with your subscription, and they’re almost universally at the same caliber as Undertow—which is to say that nobody should complain about getting them for free, but you’re probably not going to start cheering.

Speaking of Gamertags, they’re another great Xbox Live innovation. Oh sure, Xbox didn’t invent having a stupid internet name, but your Gamertag is more special than your Steam ID or your old alias on the Something Awful forums, because Microsoft came up with an actual word for “stupid internet name” and—because of the nature of video gaming, which tends to attract young people—a lot of adult gamers are stuck with really stupid Gamertags that seemed cool when they were teenagers.

Imagine a high school principal, someone in a respectable position of authority, who grew up playing Xbox. They still hop on every week or so for Madden or Forza, because playing video games is a socially acceptable hobby these days, but when they boot up their Xbox Series X it says “Welcome, BloodReaper6969” or “Astrofart111” or “XxKi11asaurusR3xxX.” Imagine meeting a new friend and they find out you play Xbox, and they ask for your Gamertag, and you have to say “It’s KillasaurusRex, let me write down how it’s spelled.” Some good advice might be to just own it, say “Yeah, I’m the famous KillasaurusRex, and it’s spelled in a cool way,” but that would be wrong. You should hide your shame. Maybe don’t even tell anyone you play Xbox.