I remember the coming of Xbox live.
It was late 2007, I was visiting a friend’s house in the countryside.
He had just got a card with a code that entitled him for a month of Xbox live Gold. He invited me over because I was the one who knew computers and could make it work. The 360 had no wifi support, so I sent him to find an ethernet cable. We hadn’t an ethernet cable that was long enough, so we brought the console to his living room - where the wifi hub was. We kicked his younger brother off the TV and used that to set up the console.
We were driven. We had a goal. We had a new console and we were moments away from playing it ONLINE for the first time!
The setup process was arduous. I couldn’t be bothered with all the typing when it required signin with a Hotmail address, so I mentioned the two USB ports at the front of the console and sent him to retrieve a USB keyboard. To my delight, it worked with the console. We typed in the scratchcard’s code, his Hotmail username and password, created a ‘Gamertag’ and with that we were live.
The first game we played was Halo 3. I’d already played the campaign with them using split screen, but we went straight into the deathmatches here. We were blasted as we awkwardly found our way around the maps like Sandtrap, Valhalla, The Pit and Narrows.
The Hardware Quality, or lack thereof (RROD and the towel trick)
After being sold on it via my friend (whom I visited as often as I could to play), I acquired an Xbox 360 for Christmas 2007. This original console died from the notorious red ring of death (RROD) in mid 2008. This was a very common problem - if it didn't happen your Xbox you knew someone else whose had banjaxed itself.
The death was caused by an overheating CPU that eventually cooked itself. There were numerous guides online that claimed to remedy it, the most outrageous was the 'towel trick' which involved leaving your powered Xbox 360 under a damp towel for several hours. I didn't fancy that, so instead I smashed my original Xbox 360 into pieces and that ensured I would have a replacement bought. This replacement understood the message; it still boots up today. It was easy to migrate, you only clipped out the hard drive and plugged it into the new one. Everything booted up from where you left off.
Towel trick videos from back in the day, shall we smother or not?
Ready, Headset, No?
The Xbox 360 came with a headset that plugged into its controller, encouraging sociability, coordination and exchanges of kind encouragement during gameplay. I spoke with many randomers around the world during this time. The headsets were notorious for breaking their connecting cables after a few month’s use, and there was an entire industry on eBay supplying replacement headsets. Often the replacement headsets' headbands were half an inch narrower than the official models, and made from very rigid plastic. They dug in to my skull when I wore them. One solution I tried was disassembling the cheap headset and sticking it inside a cap; this worked for 5 minutes until the pieces fell out.
When Bungie Finally Gave Us Halo 3, the firestorm of 2007
The pre launch hysteria was captured perfectly by Sarcastic Gamer's Halo 3 Hoedown.
Before MW2 was the most hyped game, that title belonged to Halo 3. It wasn't a launch title for the Xbox 360 but it became emblematic of it. HALO 3 was the sum of all our hopes and expectations for the console, and embodied the soul of the Xbox 360 in a way that no other title released for it ever did. Even though I had never played any of the previous titles, I was immediately invested in the last ditch effort to save humanity from alien foes bent on our extinction. I read everything I could to explain the campaign and its happenings.
Bungie had every Halo match result recorded on their website, this website lasted into 2021 even after Halo 3 on the 360’s heyday had long passed and Bungie had handed development of Halo off to another company. Lest we fear the data lost, someone has stepped up and archived it.
The forge and map packs
Halo 3 had a mode called ‘forge’ where you could fly around the map and rearrange many elements - walls, barrels, vehicles, weapons and spawn points. Other players could be invited to participate in the renovations, or join private games hosted in the maps.
Through its lifespan Halo 3 released multiple map packs, these cost under £20 each and added 4 multiplayer maps to the game. Most people bought them, they didn’t feel exploitative like micro-transactions or card packs in current games. You purchased these with Microsoft Points, an intermediary currency which had to be pre-purchased before buying anything on the Xbox store. This currency existed from 2005 until 2013 when the State of Microsoft withdrew it, and no one had heard of crypto currency back then.
Microsoft points card. Probably a stabler currency than the one issued by your government.
The making of awwfeck
One such map included in the Halo 3 Map pack was called 'Foundry'. This map comprised a large warehouse with shipping containers, and a gangway partitioning the warehouse through its middle. Inside the gangway I created a cage of death and filled it with player spawn points, set it to periodically spawn a large amount of explosives overhead which would fall into the cage, killing its unlucky occupants. The amount of player spawners I placed there meant there was a 50% chance you’d enter the map there at the start of the game or after being killed. I christened this map 'awwfeck', which was a play on my gamertag.
Online encounters
Once had Americans quiz me on whether I found the 28 days later films offensive, because they portrayed Britain as being so grim. I hadn’t seen them (18-rated films were forbidden for young me), so just said ‘no I think they make it look great’.
In the Halo 3 pregame lobby, a map could be skipped if enough players pressed the button to 'veto' it. The short word was perfect to chant, and when a map came up that the masses really didn't want we had a chorus of ‘veto’ singing in the lobby which went on to carry the vote.
The genre-setting shooter Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare steamrolled Halo in mid-2008 among my peers. This was to my dismay. Over a few weeks, every time I came online with my Halo 3 disk in the drive, all I saw was a list of names 'IN GAME' playing Call of Duty 4. I could not persuade them back to fight the covenant hordes in the name of the UNSC. I had to adapt or die.
Stocks were low, so I ordered an Australian released Call of Duty 4. This was rated by the Aussie film board, and unlike the British board it had a max rating of 15. I thought this was funny, and I knew my parents couldn't complain because the notorious '18' triangle was nowhere to be seen on the box. I had a mate in a similar situation, his parents even more strictly against 18-rated entertainment, so he asked me to get him an Australian Cod4 as well. Thanks, Australia! I'd have opened a tin of Foster to that but I was under 18.
The shrewd bandwidth-saving devs opted to have peer to peer hosting for matches in CoD 4, meaning that the users' consoles would act as game servers, and this saved them a hosting bill. Though the downside was this depended on everyone's sense of honour. When playing a match in CoD 4, once the match abruptly ended and the message ‘the host has ended the game’ appeared on screen. Now the host was one of the opposing players who had been getting a drubbing from us. We were having none of it. The lobby erupted in a chorus of ‘The host is gay, the host is gay, the host is gay’ to the tune of ‘a-whim-away’ from In The Jungle, Lion King.
Code Of Conduct, Code of Conduct
On Xbox live you had a gamertag (handle), a slogan and a bio where you could write anything you wanted for other players to see.
Being an online service it had a ‘code of conduct’ which stated that if you ever put anything untowards in those text fields you’d suffer the grand punishment of having your bio or slogan replaced with the text ‘Code of Conduct’. So you’d open someone’s profile and see ‘Code Of Conduct’, ‘Code of Conduct’, ‘Code of Conduct’, and this was taken as an honour. One individual put explicit Eminem lyrics on his profile, conveying a wish to sexually denigrate another while a more senior rap performer filmed it. Even the excuse of quoting artwork would not excuse him, for his precious lyrics would become ‘Code of Conduct’ in time, such was Microsoft’s censorship of the arts.
Call of Duty: Black Ops post game exchange of choice words, circa December 2010
Party Chat, that killed the party
Before party chat you’d be available to speak with everyone in the pregame and postgame lobbies, and all your teammates during game, no matter whether you had met them before or not. There was a lot of abuse hurled back and forth. I never found my acerbic tongue - I was too Christian to use any bad words - but I heard plenty of it.
Then when Xbox added party chat - invite-only multi channel chat voice, separate from in game chat - they killed the lobby conversation. The games themselves had less socialisation with strangers. All my school friends and I used party chat lobbies to have group voice calls outside of school hours, especially during 2011 and 2012. But it meant less encounters with strangers, unless one of them had a suggestive gamertag. In that case he was invited to our private chat room for interrogation.
One such fellow was one with a gamertag of ‘IRISH x IRA’ and we pinned him down for an interview, it happened that he was American and very oblivious of the political situation in Northern Ireland. Our group comprised both sides of the divide, and we mutually agreed to troll him - his provocative moniker which under interrogation revealed he was what we’d then term a ‘r----d’ actually did more to heal the Irish/British divide than promote the IRA’s brand of Irish nationalism.
Two years is all the time this lasted. This is a flash in the pan now, but it was an eternity then.
We're Gonna Hit The Dashboard Like A Battering Ram
The Xbox 360 booted into a menu screen offering access to games, media, and Xbox live user management. This area was known as the 'dashboard' but we made it a verb. Dashboarding was when being the host of a Cod 4/WaW/MW2 game, you could hit the Xbox button and then press ‘return to dashboard’ - this would terminate the match, boot everyone from the lobby and ensure no stats were saved to the servers. It wouldn't even display 'The host has ended the game' as you'd expect. It was the nuclear option.
I was among the first in my area to get the semi-fibre connection with speeds of up to 20Mbps in 2010/2011 and therefore would almost always be the host due to my strong connection and low latency. Thus, I always held the nuclear option and exercised it more than once. If I wished to ragequit, I'd do it with a bang.
Call of Duty: Black Ops defeat screen, circa December 2010
I Desire Only 69 Friends
I insisted on having 69 other users in my friendlist, if it ever went over I removed someone, if it went under I would add a randomer from a recent game. This was easy to do, because the Xbox menu showed a list of recently encountered players.
Xbox Live added integration with MSN messenger. I want to pretend that I used it a lot more than I did, but I didn’t. The console was for gaming and voice chat with school friends, the computer was for messaging your crush and getting no replies.
Xbox Live Gold was necessary to participate in online multiplayer or voice chat. It could be paid monthly by direct debit, but I found that it was £5 cheaper to buy the 6 month subscription passes on eBay, and had questionable sellers email me scans of the scratchcard number. Each time they redeemed successfully, so no complaints.
Among my peers the majority were proud owners of Xbox 360s, some had PS3s, one recluse had a Wii. No one had both consoles. There were many debates over the merits of the 360 and the PS3. The Wii was a non-starter. The consensus was that the PS3 had better graphics, the PS33 owners also boasted that PSN was free, but the 360 owners said that the xbl service quality was better because you paid for the servers. This stance was ultimately vindicated because PSN was pwnt in 2011.
The Most Anticipated Launch Of All Time
MW 2 was said to be the ‘most anticipated game launch of all time’, a fellow went around the school and asked teachers, “Sir/Miss, have you preordered Modern Warfare 2?”.
When it finally arrived there were queues outside the local Xtra Vision (a now-defunct Irish movie and game chain store) up until midnight on its launch night, the numbers wrapped the building as each awaited his copy. I preferred a good night’s sleep and preordered mine online instead. The game arrived on the launch day, and I began the campaign which started with a rather grisly level called "Remember, No Russian" where Russians pretended not to be Russian and shot everyone in an airport. They were definitely pushing limits.
Our shopping centre had a lift that took you to the top level of its carpark, revealing an exposed open area. We went there once after school because there were never any cars there. You were left alone to a great view of the town. When the lift got to the top floor and the doors were about to open, one of the fellows turned and said “Remember, No Russian”.
Thankfully we hadn’t any SMGs in our schoolbags. The carpark was safe on that day.
MW2 vs. GCSEs, charted.
While in school we just had our GCSE exam results and were invited to an award's night. During the night we were shown a chart that depicted a continuous increase in the GCSE results reported each year until our year when there was a big dip. We were under no illusions as to why - this was the year that MW2 came out and its online multiplayer was captivating, addictive, enthralling, and it single-handedly ended our school's GCSE killstreak.
A local Xtravision similar to how ours was in 2011. Now there are none anywhere. Src: Geograph/Kenneth Allen.
Trigger happy
The Xbox controllers - at least those available through 2008 - were easily modifiable to make the trigger rapid fire. This meant instead of mashing the trigger repeatedly per shot, you could press a single button on the controller and it would turn any pistol into a SMG.
The mod was easily done - all you needed was two wires, a hold-to-activate switch, and a soldering iron. During the summer of 2008 I bought Xbox 360 controllers from eBay, made the mod, then sold the controllers for a profit. It was as simple as wiring the trigger's soldering joint to another joint on the circuit board. My methods weren't entirely clean - to make a hole in the controller for the trigger button, I used the soldering iron to melt the plastic. The fumes and their toxins filled the room, and I've probably no brain damage from it!
This was inspired by a guide like this on Instructables. I've one remaining controller from this era, and I'll update this article to have a photo.
This lasted until Microsoft revised the design of the controller's circuit board, and the old trick no longer worked. So ended my modding aside.
I'm going to start a World Tour from my bed.
The popular plastic button hammering instrument simulator reached its fourth edition in 2008, with Guitar Hero: World Tour. This I requested as my Christmas present. The World Tour edition comprised not only the game, but a guitar, drum kit, and most unforgivable of all was the microphone. Now pretend guitarists could be joined by pretend drummers and tone deaf vocalists.
Before the game launched, rumours abounded. It was supposed that you could form a band in the game, and my school friends and I planned out our band. Who would play what, and what we'd name ourselves. It was also supposed that you could record your own music, and compete with other bands for popularity. As it happened, none of this transpired. The game was basically the same as previous GH games except that you had the additional instruments to play on songs.
That said, it was a blast for parties. The kit always came out when I had a group visiting the house. It introduced us to many classics of Rock and Roll, like Living On A Prayer by Bon Jovi, The Eye of the Tiger by Survivor, and Today by the Smashing Pumpkins. The game stages that depicted Lateralus by Tool were particularly mesmerising. My GH skill never advanced beyond 'Medium' though we knew one lad who could play on 'Hard', and we feared any sweat who played on 'Legend' difficulty. Still, no one could ever sing and the USB microphone ended up being used with the PC for voice calls instead. After I finished school, the drums sat in the cupboard until I sold them on eBay in 2016. I still have the guitars, though. Maybe we will have them out for one last jam some day.
Xbox NXE era profile screen, circa December 2010
World at War's Nazi Zombies (2008-2009)
Imagine you've just finished a global conflict spanning two theatres. You've toured with two armies, one of them bringing down the fanatical and indomitable land of the rising sun, then also toured westwards to take down one of the most formidable powers to rise in Europe. After the credits roll, just when you think it is over, the screen blackens and then fades in to reveal a loosely barricaded bunker. You are trapped inside, you have a pistol, and you hear moans and cries from desperate figures approaching outside.
It happens that some grisly experiments have allowed the enemy you thought defeated to return for revenge. Fueled by hungry desperation, they come in swarms. You've a long night ahead of you. This is Nazi Zombies. The map's name: NACHT DER UNTOTEN.
Nacht Der Untoten, it begins.
The Random Room
In this first room, you had the choice of either unblocking the stairwell or opening the other ground floor room. Sage advice dictated that you immediately opened the other ground floor room, also known as "The Random Room" for inside lay a wooden chest which would accept a sum of cash in exchange for any random weapon in the game. The door into the Random Room had the word "HELP!" scribbled across it, presumably because of how helpful its contents were.
The Final Crawler
The game had distinct rounds, whereupon all the zombies were killed this meant the round concluded. The zombies would return in greater numbers for the next round. However if you wished for a reprieve to repair the barricades and gamble at the Random Box, you could leave one zombie alive at the end of the round. This meant the game would not advance the round and the horde would be held back.
Most desirable of all was a "crawler", i.e a zombie who has no body below the torso and propels himself by sheer upper body strength alone. They were dangerous in crowds but comical to watch alone. Some crawlers were fast, others pitifully slow. The slow ones were best for round ends. Skilled players could turn regular zombies into them with clever use of a Stielhandgranate.
The Belfast Experience
Once the random box granted me a double barreled shotgun and then on a second roll, petrol bombs. I was the last man standing, the rest of my squad had fallen to the horde. The windows were smashed open and the same random room flooded with zombies, I began chucking my petrol bombs. The horde was aflame and closing fast on me. It started to resemble a riot and the petrol bombs reminded me of certain of my countrymen's favourite passtimes, so I yelled "It’s the Belfast Experience!"
The phonecalls on Sundays to get on
One of the fellows in the group would frequently phone my mobile to ask me to come on zombies, this could happen any time of the day outside of (and sometimes during) school hours. Once I was even phoned when I at church, and had to explain in front of some worshippers why I couldn't immediately boot up my Xbox. This was before WhatsApp and group chats on your mobile, but even then he was certainly brash for calling rather than texting.
This same fellow had something of an obsession. Once during a maths lesson, he crawled under desks in the classroom (4th set maths, known as spaz maths, so this was not out of the ordinary) and when the teacher enquired why, he replied “sir, I’m a crawler”. Another day the room was silent and he broke the silence by yelling, “sir, the zombies are coming in through the windows!”
When We Were All GB Pros
Normal online matches on Call of Duty happened ingame against randomly selected opponents. But there was no contest, no competition, no leaderboard with a top scorer to unseat. There was a need to compete, where your skill was truly put to the test. Enter GameBattles, aka MLG (Major League Gaming).
During 2010-2011 it was in the eyes of every serious console gamer. You would register to compete solo, 2v2, or in teams. Then the system would match you with an opponent, you'd join a private ingame lobby, and commence battle. At the end, the scores would be uploaded by both sides to GameBattles, and your ranks would be updated to reflect the win or loss. GB did not integrate in any way with the Xbox live system so this process relied on a system of honour and screenshots.
Like everything else with Xbox, the language seeped into everyday conversation. We would describe anything we liked as 'best X EU' because the server was called GameBattles EU and if you got good your name was to be forever vaunted at the top of the leaderboard. We followed the YouTube channels where the most famous GB Pros documented every aspect of their lives.
A true sweat had TurtleBeach headset, which supposedly delivered 5.1 surround sound through a stereo headset, making you more sensitive to the sounds made by the movements of opponents as they approached. It also and had the advantage of mixing voice chat with game audio through a series of wires that came from your TV and required an EE degree to get right. I never had one, good ones started at £70 and that was a lot of money when you had none.
GameBattles website in 2009. Credit: YouTube/DaYeZGraPhics.
Dispute Percentage: 100
Most infamous of all were the GB Disputes. If you and the other player disputed the outcome of a game, or if another player broke the rules during gameplay, then you'd file a dispute with the GB platform and invite a moderator to mediate. This happened to us during a game in December 2010. The match was not going in our favour, but a godsend occurred when one of the our opponents' friends joined the game midway through our match. According to the GB rules, this would mean a forfeit for them; therefore a win for us. As luck had it, I was filming the game on my digital camera pointed at the TV. So after the match concluded, I uploaded the proof video to YouTube then opened a dispute.
Instead of the blind eye of justice, I received the surly stonewall of a jobsworth. Just after sending one message with the proof video attached, I got a harsh dismissal saying:
"I DO NOT ACCEPT 'PROOF' VIDEOS"
I did wonder how someone would consider herself a dispenser of justice while also admitting she doesn't care about silly things like evidence. Worse, I must have caught her on a bad day, because she then opted to suspend my account for one month! No more GB matches for me over the Christmas holidays. Or would there be?
My solution was to rename my Xbox gamertag and reregister on GameBattles to evade the ban. This worked for that month, and so I spent those holidays in my pursuit of a GB rank of any sort under my new guise. After that month I renamed it back to the original because it was iconic. To this day that name appears in unlikely forgotten corners of the Internet.
Call of Duty: Black Ops leaderboard, during the above dispute of mine. Circa December 2010
Of course, sometimes disputes went completely in your favour. Sometimes Lady Justice was in a good mood. I knew a man who lost a FIFA match, disputed the result, then uploaded an edited screenshot that he'd doctored in Microsoft Word to look like he was the winner. The GB moderator agreed, and his opponent carries the shame to this day.
As a fun artifact of this time, see this Flickr page which comprises only GB dispute screenshots.
Tragically, GameBattles closed in 2023. All the data is gone. I never saved a screenshot of my GB profile, though I've included one above for illustration.
The Summer Ends
Summer 2012 saw us briefly engage with Minecraft. We built a map together. We picked a spot by the vast ocean to found a seaside town. One of us took to the mines and dug a perfectly cubical mine underground, and ceased all mining once the huge cube was perfected. I built an indefensible folly and named it Fort Daft; yet no one came to attack. The map was forgotten after a month and has been lying on my Xbox 360's hard drive for 12 years. None of us got into it as much as my younger brother and his friends. We were losing interest in gaming.
My generation saw its sunset with the coming of Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops 2. This was circa 2012, we were bound for university and gaming had to take a backseat. There were other things to distract us. A few of the others graduated to Fifa, but not me.
These were fun times, but reviewing my past I do not experience much nostalgia for them. The stronger nostalgia is for missed opportunities. I'd have gotten more from learning guitar, going to concerts, going out with friends, travelling, pushing past my inhibtions and seeing myself do new things. Xbox Live, for all its rancour and boisterous competitveness, did not push me far in any of the directions that bring personal growth and self-actualisation.
My message for anyone younger who currently considers gaming as a major passtime, if you also share a zest and longing to do more, lay down the controller and follow it now. Before long it will become regret.
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