That’s pretty cool, @WhiteDeth
You say you built those kiosks? What’s the story there?
Also, the lanyard on the dude in the foreground on the second picture has me curious. It looks like an astronaut, and the M-ish shape on his chest makes me think of the MTV astronaut, but it doesn’t really look like him. Was MTV part of this balloon house party? If not, do you know what’s going on there?
we had lanyards for each event, every city we went we had a different event lanyard, passed em out to the public who visited. ha no MTV folks were around, we partnered with SOBY for a ton of events, and in the SW stag chili lol mmm i think i have all the lanyards in my garage still - some were pretty cool, they were intended to be along the lines of a VIP concert lanyard take home kinda thing, if you didnt win any xbox swag while you visited.
It’s cool they went with widescreens, which I assume means HD since I don’t think SD widescreens were much of a thing in North America.
The Xbox supporting HD was one of the things that drew me to it, as I had a spiffy new HDTV to go with it.
for sure we all forget most gaming was not HD when the console came out, but yeah the widescreen were all HD - one of the trucks had wall mounted ones inside as a VIP lounge play area
Awesome photos! Those old days when Internet wasn’t fast enough to download full demos, lol. Try the latest games from the trunk of an SUV!
Agreed. Love those pictures. Thanks again, @WhiteDeth and if you’ve got more I’m sure I’m not alone in being keen to see those, too.
I also loved the first three episodes of this doc. They were about 40 minutes in length each, and took us from the beginning with the DirectX team to the day of launch of the original Xbox. They seem to have gotten the majority of the who’s-who to speak on camera (save for Gates and Ballmer) and even this guy has a few lines.
One of the more ingenious and entertaining parts is using videogame footage as b-roll. Like most docs, they do use archival footage where they can, and stills, and even some animated reconstructions, but the inventive use of gameplay footage really stood out as something special.
Sometimes it’s just footage that fits what they’re talking about (like Robbie Bach discussing the E3 presentation and using words like “crash and burn” and them using footage of a videogame plane crashing and burning) but sometimes they’re going the extra mile, like illustrating the Windows CE / DirectX face-off with Mortal Kombat characters adorned with those respective logos.
It sounds kinda hokey when I describe it like that, but it really worked for me. Obviously it’s the factual content that’s the main star of the show, and I really like how candid and forthcoming everyone seemed, and it was all put together in an entertaining package. The two hours just flew by, so I heartily recommend it to anyone interested enough in the topic to visit this thread. 
Can’t wait to check out parts 4-6, which will take us to present day.
The documentary should be coming soon now?
Early access was today with first 3. Tomorrow it’s for public with all episodes.
that glow when no one is around…
Yeah, that’s probably my favourite of all the pictures you’ve posted so far. Beautiful. 
It’s available as of today. I’ve embedded the first episode in the OP, and included links to the individual parts, as well as a playlist for the whole thing.
the kiosks were double sided stand alone, after about a month i cracked them all open again and put in cross over cables, we could swap games out in the kiosks so could get some head to head action going on all the kiosks… remember SystemLink??? 
Imagiiine GTA 3 as an exclusive. This would undisputedly have been the best launch line up ever and probably changed the course of Xbox and Playstation significantly. Man what a huge miss.
Pretty slick. No chance of watching each other’s screens that way. 
Do you know what happened to the kiosks afterwards? Disassembled or sent out to game stores or what?
Possibly. Another version of the timeline is similar to our current one. Meaning, the original Xbox gets the GTA exclusive and becomes a big hit, without having to wait for the 360 to come around for true success. But then the Xbox One comes along with the TV-TV-TV mantra and a $499 price tag, squandering all that goodwill, and thereby sending droves of players to the Playstation 4.
Hard to say if that extra generation’s worth of brand loyalty would’ve prevented the Playstation migration. If probably would’ve lessened it, making last gen a little more even in sales, but I suspect we could very well have ended up more or less where we are now, even with a GTA exclusive. That pivot to all-in entertainment device was an enormous misstep.
I’m amused by the mere existence of this article, but it fits right in with the topic of this thread:
For the second day in a row my Google newsfeed is serving me an Xbox history article from the Verge. Makes me wonder if they’ve got a series going…
Anyway, here’s the piece:
Maybe I’ll be back with more tomorrow. 
I picked up a box of old XBox Magazines from FB marketplace this morning, many of them still sealed. Looking forward to going back in time and seeing the world of XBox in 2003!
