Imagine sitting in a boardroom while an entire company laughs at you for an hour. That, more or less, is how the Xbox began.
In 1999 Microsoft was nervous. Sony had announced the PlayStation 2 and was briefing it as the computer that would live under the television — a direct threat to Windows in the living room. DirectX engineer Seamus Blackley pitched Bill Gates on a console of their own, built from standardised PC hardware and PC tools, aimed squarely at Sony. Internally it was the "DirectX box", and the name more or less stuck.
The problem was games. Microsoft had money but no franchises, so they went shopping. EA said no thanks. Nintendo were approached about being acquired and, by one executive's account, laughed for the best part of an hour. A deal to buy Square collapsed over price. What they did get was a small studio called Bungie, working on a strategy game that became Halo: Combat Evolved.
The machine was a PC in a black box the size of a small suitcase: a 733MHz Pentium III, an NVIDIA graphics chip, an Ethernet port and, a first for a home console, a hard drive as standard. The controller was so enormous it earned the nickname "the Duke"; Japan got a smaller one almost immediately, on the reasonable grounds that human hands exist.
In America it landed properly, with Halo selling alongside more than half of all Xboxes in its first two months — the game that finally made shooters work on a console. Xbox Live followed in November 2002 and became the blueprint for every online console service since.
Britain was a harder sell: the March 2002 launch at £299 went slowly enough that Microsoft quickly cut the price to £199. But we got there in the end - Halo 2 shifted 260,000 copies in its first British week, the third fastest-selling title in UK history at that point. Microsoft lost billions on the hardware, and it was money well spent. The OG Xbox built the platform, the service and the audience that became one half of the console duopoly we still live with today.