The Xbox brand celebrates its tenth anniversary today, and we are here to celebrate. When the original console launched, the world was a different place: the PlayStation 2 was still fresh and new, the Sega Dreamcast was a system with active support, and the GameCube showed that Nintendo could make money with a system where most of the big releases were first-party franchise titles.

On second thought, some things haven't changed.

Gaming was already crowded in 2001, and there was some question about whether there was room for another console. There was also the question of aesthetics, as the Xbox was considered to be a large, heavy, and ugly system compared to its competition. Even the original controllers were huge, and were later replaced with the much smaller Type S controllers. Microsoft had one ace up its sleeve, though: it launched with Halo.

Where the Xbox succeeded

Before we get to why Halo was important, we need to talk about the early lessons Microsoft learned from the Xbox, and why the company's DNA helped to make the system a long-term success. The original idea was to create a DirectX Box, a gaming console based around PC components and Microsoft's DirectX software. The name was later shortened to Xbox, but the idea stayed constant: why not just turn a computer into a gaming console?

Sony had tried to reinvent the wheel with the PlayStation 2, using the brand-new and costly Emotion Engine architecture. Unlike the original PlayStation, which gained acceptance partially due to the ease with which developers could create games, the PlayStation 2 could be tricky during the development process, and it took some time before games were released that took advantage of the full power of the system.

The Xbox, on the other hand, used off-the-shelf PC components, and the results were immediate and spectacular. The CPU was a 733MHz Pentium III chip, and the console featured a 233MHz nVidia NV2A as its GPU. The system had 64MB of RAM, compared to the PlayStation 2's combined 36MB. It came with four controller ports standard, while the PlayStation 2 required an adaptor to play with three friends.

The system also came with a hard drive, which is another add-on that was later adopted for the PS2, but never fully supported. The controllers on the Xbox featured breakaway cables so the system wouldn't come crashing down if you tripped on the way to grab a soda. The Xbox featured an Ethernet connection out of the box while Sony, yet again, would later offer an ethernet solution as a for-pay add-on.

The system was the future, and it showed the industry where gaming hardware was going. In the next generation hard drives were common, systems came with ethernet ports, and four controller ports were standard.

So why was Halo so important?

Microsoft purchasing Bungie may be one of the savviest moves in video game history. The game looked much more advanced than its peers, and showed off the power of the system, even as a launch title. You could play against up to four players in splitscreen, and you could network multiple systems together to play massive multiplayer games.

In short, Halo made us understand why the hardware decisions in the original Xbox were so smart, and the game showed us how they could be used well. This was well before the debut of Xbox Live, a service that revolutionized online gaming for consoles, and has left Microsoft's competitors struggling to keep up in the online space to this day.

The Xbox didn't do much to erode the market share of the PlayStation 2, but it put Microsoft in the position to take a leadership role when the Xbox 360 was released, and Microsoft is now a major player in the world of console gaming. Microsoft had both money and patience, and the Xbox was the beginning of a war, not a mere skirmish. It was also launched alongside a game that continues to define the hardware, and it's hard to separate the two when discussing how far the Xbox brand has come in the past decade.

So here's to you, Xbox. I'm looking forward to at least 10 more years.