Xbox was developed by Microsoft Corporation and was released on 15th November, 2001. Xbox is the sixth generation video game console. In Japan it was released on 22nd February, 2002 and in Europe and Australia it was released on 14th March, 2002. Xbox was the first product of Microsoft through which it entered into the console field. This console was produced by collaboration with Sega. Initially, a team of Microsoft developed Xbox for the first time. John Dunkley was the game developer of this team. This console was delayed initially but finally on 10th march, 2000 it was officially confirmed through a press conference that Microsoft is going to launch Xbox which was considered to be the revolution in the digital entertainment. Xbox was produced to compete the playstation-II of Sony entertainment and gamecube of Nintendo.

The most notable feature of Xbox is online gaming service. This is called as Xbox live. This service was launched by Microsoft on November 15, 2002. This service is for playing the Xbox games online. In this the user has to subscribe with the Xbox and then there are many subscribers throughout the world. Each subscriber can play with the other subscriber. They may also play against each other. Xbox has become the first console that integrated a hard disk drive. Xbox runs on the exposed version of windows 2000 core. This console is basically based on the service personal computer hardware. If compared to modern consoles, Xbox is very large and heavy. This is because it includes a dvd rom drive and also a typical 3.5 inch disk drive. Though it is heavy and large, but it also has some good safety features such as: it uses the breakaway cables so that the console is not pulled from the shelf. The original design of the Xbox game controller was very much criticized because of its large size. It was not useful those who had small hands or cramps in their hands. So, to avoid this criticism, Microsoft launched another Xbox game controller console which was smaller in size and was suited to everyone.
The technical features of Xbox include: it uses 32 bit Pentium 3 processor with 733 MHz clock speed. It also has the shared memory subsystem, a graphical processing unit, storage devices, processor for audio plug-in and it can be networked with many computers or consoles. Some famous games which are Xbox console based are: Halo: Combat Evolved, Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding, Dead or Alive 3, Project Gotham Racing, and Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee.

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