After 5 years, Xbox 360 still a big winner

From CNET News.com: If there's one thing that I recall more than any other from "Zero Hour," the 30-hour Xbox 360 launch event on November 20 and 21, 2005, it was the sight of dozens of gamers literally passed out on beanbags, their controllers still in their hands.

Despite absolutely frigid conditions, more than 2,000 gamers showed up in Palmdale, an aerospace town about an hour northeast of Los Angeles, for the chance to be among the first ever to play and buy an Xbox 360.

And after those 30 hours, their patience was rewarded: a fleet of Best Buy trucks rolled into the giant hangar where the event was taking place, and the Xboxes flowed

Because my memories of that event are still so fresh, it's very hard for me to believe that it's been five full years since the launch of the Xbox 360--the release that heralded the first shot in the next-generation console wars among Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. The latter two companies would release their PlayStation 3 and Wii consoles a year later, in November 2006.

But back then, the PlayStation 2 was still the most dominant console on the planet, and no one had ever heard of the Wii. For its part, the Xbox 360 was an unknown--the original Xbox, released in 2001, had been a highly unprofitable loss leader, and now the world was waiting to find out if Microsoft was ready to be a real player in the console game.

And did they succeed? By almost any measure, they did.

"Microsoft has come such a long way," said Dean Takahashi, the author of "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked," and like me, one of only three reporters there throughout the Zero Hour event. "In planning the Xbox 360, they expected to get maybe 20 million units sold in five years. In fact, they were able to do more than 40 million. This console generation has worked out far better than they thought."

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