Twenty-five years ago, Microsoft entered the console market with a hulking black machine, an enormous controller and a game called Halo. What followed changed the industry in ways few could have predicted, and today, the original Xbox is finding an unlikely new home in our pockets.
The OP frames storage, networking/online services, and a single studio’s game design decisions as revolutionary.
These were not new ideas. I never really considered Xbox as a innovative console
No the article is not. But then again you apparently read “the Xbox had an ethernet port” as “Xbox LIVE was the first online service on consoles” and thought bringing up SegaNet was a total counter.
You didn’t read the article.
"The article does make some interesting arguments about the changes, here are some excerpts:
“Without purchasing”
“Caching data and reduce load times”
Having to purchase an extra storage device that was slow and with extremely limited space is not equivalent to including a hard drive.
xbox started off as essentially a cheap PC, but limited software choices.
It was revolutionary to people who wouldn’t , or couldn’t, get a pc.
That the Xbox had an x86 CPU didn’t make it a PC. Otherwise game consoles as a category don’t exist. Because the PS3 originally could run desktop Linux, the PS4 has an x86 CPU with a PC SSD and the Switch uses an Arm CPU like Tablets.
I think it was also a very similar gpu to one in retail graphics cards and i think it also used win2k or a win NT kernel or something and, as the article says, direct X.
Probably compiling software for windows pc and xbox was very similar - which was probably part of the idea. Making it easier for developers to do both. Also i guess they didn’t need to roll their own silicon so could get to market fast.
Those others are a long time after xbox - they probably had to generalise to catch up. But i think back in the days of ps2, dreamcast and earlier consoles were much less like a general pc using more custom silicon – so porting between them and PC probably a lot more work.
I’d argue that with the xbox, and a lot of what came after, the games consoles are suddenly rejecting a lot of their specialised arcade machine heritage, and a becoming lot more like general pc running an arcade-ish user interface. I think the category of consoles did materially shift especially in terms of hardware, and probably software development too.
Then you obviously never owned one.