Xbox Live (Original Xbox Era)

Xbox Live launched for the original Xbox on November 15, 2002 in the US and Canada with the $49.95 Starter Kit — a bundle that included a one-year subscription, online trials of THQ's MotoGP and Microsoft's Whacked!, and the Xbox Communicator, a wired headset that plugged into the controller. At launch there was no wireless audio option; if you wanted voice chat, you were literally tethered to your controller (an officially licensed cordless headset, from Logitech, didn't arrive until late 2004). The service boldly required broadband only — no dial-up support — at a time when much of America was still on 56K modems. The Xbox had shipped with a built-in Ethernet port, a bet that the connected future was coming; the Starter Kits virtually sold out at retail in under a week.

Xbox Live introduced two things that seem obvious now but were genuinely new to console gaming in 2002: the unified Gamertag — one persistent identity across every game — and a Friends list that followed you between titles. Console multiplayer had mostly meant the couch; Xbox Live filled living rooms with the voices of strangers, trash talk, and ambient competition. When Halo 2 launched in November 2004, it became the service's defining game — the after-school ritual, the reason friends begged for broadband, the lobby where millions learned that internet strangers could be both hilarious and enraging.

Microsoft shut down the original Xbox's Live service on April 15, 2010 — but not abruptly. Players already signed in weren't booted, and a dwindling band of Halo 2 diehards kept the last sessions alive for weeks, nursing fragile connections to stay online. The final holdout, gamertag "Apache N4SIR", was disconnected on May 10, 2010 — the last person in the building as the lights went out, seven and a half years after the service switched on.