This week is one for bittersweet farewells.
The Xbox 360 has been around for over 10 years, and Microsoft just announced it is no longer manufacturing the decade-old console. This will also be the last n00b News until next semester.
On the blog “Xbox Wire,” Phil Spencer, Microsoft’s head of Xbox, wrote a thank you to gamers for their loyalty. Spencer said there were 78 billion gaming hours played, nearly 486 billion Gamerscore points earned, and 27 billion achievements made in the 360’s lifetime.
“While we’ve had an amazing run, the realities of manufacturing a product over a decade old are starting to creep up on us,” Spencer said in the post.
After being released in 2005, Microsoft sold over 80 million units of the Xbox 360, making it one of the most common consoles in U.S. and international households.
The announcement is no surprise to me since Microsoft announced backward compatibility for Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One, but it is a bittersweet thought knowing the console that helped revive my love for gaming has reached the end of its run.
Alex Lambson, a senior CIT major from Santa Clara, also has fond memories of the day he received his Xbox 360. His family didn’t have $400 to spend on a console, but he got a call from his dad in September 2009 to come home from a friend’s house. There was a massive box in the living room when he got home: a green special edition Halo 3 Xbox 360.
“I was so excited that I just stood there in shock,” Lambson said.
After learning what a gamer tag was, Lambson decided to go with the online alias of “AlexWIWA” in honor of the nickname of his Pantech cell phone.
Lambson and his friend were hit by a bolt of lighting as they were waiting for a ride home from school in October 2010. Lambson said someone at Microsoft heard about the accident and that he was into gaming and sent him a new Xbox 360 Slim.
“I tried to send it back once I found out how screwed up my hands were,” Lambson said. “It would be useless to me.”
Lambson said Microsoft declined and sent him a Kinect instead, two weeks before it was released to the public. He convinced his physical therapist to set up the new Kinect in the hospital break room. They used a safety belt while Lambson dodged virtual obstacles in Kinect Adventures.
As for me, after being mocked too many times in junior high for being a girl who enjoyed gaming, I stopped gaming completely in an effort to blend in. I came back into the fold my senior year of high school when a friend of mine taught me how to kick butt in survival mode in “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II” on his Xbox 360.
Lambson and I are just two of millions who will remember the 360 with fondness.
“I may belong to the PC master race now, but I’ll never forget the Xbox 360,” Lambson said. “Never again will a machine mean so much to me.”