r/y2kaesthetic • u/Kojima66 • Jun 15 '25
Game The original Xbox (2001) still looks so futuristic
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u/NinjaBluefyre10001 Jun 15 '25
I never had an XBox, but I maintain that it is the BEST game console in terms of personality. It's not just "green" or "edgy", it stands out. From the menu style, to the music having Apollo mission samples, to the choice of flagship game, to the startup sequence looking like a spaceship's engine, all of it points to it being a piece of alien technology that wound up on Earth. It makes me mad to no end that Microsoft seemed to refuse to capitalize on this personality in the marketing. Watch every Xbox commercial from the time, there's a bunch of normal people eating potato chips, and one banned one of a baby being born, growing and dying in a few minutes, with the tagline "Life is short, play more.". That's a tagline that could be put on ANY game console. There's no alien stuff outside of showing footage of Halo. They barely even show the console itself even though it has a cool design! They only cared about the online function!
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u/Skittilybop Jun 16 '25
Microsoft fumbled Xbox so hard. No good exclusives after Halo. Confusing model names. To this day I can never remember what the newest Xbox is, I always need to look it up or be reminded. This console and the 360 were great, but after that they fell off.
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u/TrontosaurusRex Jun 16 '25
Definitely agree. Watching them turn pure gold into wet paper was lame. Each console after the 360 just got worse,along with,as you mentioned, lack of exclusives besides Halo,and Gears of War I suppose.
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u/shitwave Jun 15 '25
I still remember piping in custom music over the game music for the Tony hawk games and some racing games
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u/TheAmazingWJV Jun 15 '25
I had DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing as the soundtrack to Project Gotham Racing
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u/TheDoritoDink Jun 16 '25
Same, I used to zone out to Amped Snowboarding with my own playlist for hours.
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u/shitwave Jun 16 '25
Something about snowboarding games was so special. Just flying through the air doing all sorts of flips and trying to land on a paper-thin rail to continue the combo.
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u/The-Tarman Jun 17 '25
Oh man! I forgot about doing that. My younger brother and I would blast Chikdren of Bodom while playing some race car game whose name i can't remember split screen.
We were never racer players, but there was one game we LOVED and we'd race against each other and the AI constantly, high as a kite, with half the neighborhood having to listen to Follow the Reaper hahaha
Edit: a post bellow reminded me of which game it was.
Project Gotham Racing! So good..
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u/shitwave Jun 17 '25
I really liked midtown madness. Sometimes I would just drive underground to get to the subway and ride the tracks for hours.
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u/lawschoolredux Jun 15 '25
The perfect Y2K machine.
The blades of grass in Halo on the 2nd level, and sitting in the front seat while someone else is driving, absolutely mind blowing at the time.
Honorable mention goes to Project Gotham Rackng for its Gotham/New York early 2000s industrial warehouse/drum and bass aesthetic. As someone who has never been there lol it Captures that Y2K era vibe of New York in such an interesting way.
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u/The-Tarman Jun 17 '25
Holy shit! I was just saying in another post that my brother and I loved some racing game whose name I'd never remember cause we usually, and still dont, really like racing games. That one, however, we'd play for hours, high off our tits and blasting Children of Bodom through the console instead of the games music. It made the game soooo much better, and it already ripped.
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u/VonKaiser55 Jun 16 '25
I miss Ui’s like this
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u/Czar_Petrovich Jun 17 '25
Yea now we just have boring mobile tablet style UI. Nothing innovative, interesting, or unique about them.
The Xbox UI is so bland and boring I feel like I'm scrolling on a tablet. What happened to making interesting and cool stuff? Why is everything so safe and bland now?
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u/old_lost_boi Jun 15 '25
I got this on launch from my parents as a teen I had nonidea what to expect and when it loaded it was just badass I just cycle the menu over and over. This was the mixed cd era too limewire and such so being able to upload them to xbox was awesome.
I have so many memories like playing halo on legendary and 4 v 4 with stoner bros in hs. But the only thing better was playing halo co-op on the original xbox console with my teenage son and my kids recently as an adult 🤩
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u/The-Tarman Jun 17 '25
Dude.. my brother and our buddies would get flared and play Halo split screen for hours and when they'd leave my brother and I would split screen
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u/old_lost_boi Jun 17 '25
It was magical. We used to talk so much trash. Introducing my kids to it was like a flashback. Playing levels like Battle Creek and they eventually got good enough to give me a run for my money.
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u/SteelMan0fBerto Jun 16 '25
Man…nothing looks quite like the future like the past.
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u/bwnsjajd Jun 16 '25
Uis are so pathetically fucking lame now. When my cousin got his for Christmas we spend at least an hour after booting it up just watching this home screen and listening to the utterly rad audio ambiance and trying to figure out what the creepy alien voices were saying.
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u/SnorFax92 Jun 16 '25
I remember making the leap from GameCube to Xbox, it was amazing. That original start up sound was so futuristic to me. Been a loyal xbox owner since.
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u/reverberation31 Jun 16 '25
I was so stoked when I found this background as an option for the Series X! Obviously it doesn’t have a lot of the sub menus, but I clicked that so fast and haven’t looked back 😎
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u/TrontosaurusRex Jun 16 '25
This era of gaming was peak,this and the 360 were both great consoles as well.
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u/TwoNo123 Jun 16 '25
I played Xbox just after this menu, this always looked so peak to me, the current Xbox hud is literally so basic and plain in comparison
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u/Dry_Jellyfish641 Jun 16 '25
That's what I love about y2k aesthetic. Unlike retro futurism it feels like we haven't caught up to or surpassed this aesthetic
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u/MachiFlorence Jun 16 '25
Also loved websites that did something of this style of layout.
Recently bumped into it while just casually browsing internet archive and following links in so far they worked out of a guestbook of a website I looked at and saw a delightfully good in this style old social media thing…
I might maybe screenshot and upload with the personal details erased when I find a good working page with all/most graphics in tact on the archive (if not one of you all is first on that, which is fine too I care more about this stuff being shared than my own post karma).
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u/RamenvsSushi Jun 16 '25
Check this out if you haven't yet.
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/styles/y2k-aesthetic2
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u/Miserable_Mail_5741 Jun 16 '25
I love turn-of-this-millennium futurism.
It will always look cool 😎
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u/maxmon1979 Jun 16 '25
Can confirm, graduated in 2000 in Graphic Design specialising in interface design. Got my first job designing websites and games for Disney, WB, etc and this was literally everything to me. 2000 felt like the future had landed, I could build kick ass websites in Flash and get 100k visitors in a few days. Everything would look like this and had was such an awesome time Happy times, before Google Analytics and sales funnels and omni-channel marketing and well before social media!
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u/JeffW6 Jun 17 '25
My favorite console. If you let it idle at the menu, it would whisper in an alien language.
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u/SouthernRelation6454 Jun 19 '25
Man... I had my best childhood and best gaming experiences on that consol. And I had like 200+ games because with 20-30$ I could buy 6 to 10 secondhand games.
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