When Xbox players took control of Master Chief for the first time on November 15, 2001, they discovered vast environments that sprawled above and beneath the exotically landscaped skin of the game’s titular alien ringworld. The Xbox and its flagship franchise were behemoths worthy of Microsoft’s market cap.Įven aside from the size of its famous Spartan supersoldier, Halo has always felt huge. Master Chief, the protagonist of the Xbox’s breakout launch title, Halo: Combat Evolved, stood 7 feet tall and weighed 1,000 pounds in his armor (even more than the Xbox). Most video game characters associated with certain consoles-even the ones with an attitude-were cute, cuddly, and a few feet tall: Sonic, Crash Bandicoot, Pikachu, Kirby. And then there was the system’s helmeted mascot. The controller it came with was so strangely rotund that children had trouble reaching its thumbsticks while grasping its bulbous sides. The system itself was a whopper-the largest, heaviest, and fastest gaming machine on the market.

In late 2001, everything about the brand-new Xbox was big.

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