Great games, great menus, terrible Gamertags: 20 years of Xbox Live

On November 15, 2002, Bill Gates himself (we assume) flipped the enormous Dr. Frankenstein-style switch on Xbox Live, the online gaming and digital media distribution service of its Xbox family of video game consoles. Though not the first time online multiplayer was possible on consoles, Xbox Live brought the concept under one umbrella and introduced a handful of revolutionary new services and features that changed console gaming forever—all for one relatively tolerable monthly fee.

These 20 years of Xbox Live have seen countless important innovations, but more important than that, they have also seen the release of countless iconic and unforgettable video games. Some of the greatest multiplayer games of all time have only existed because Xbox Live’s ubiquity made them possible—but to be totally honest, we fell short of our goal of playing through every single online multiplayer game ever released on the Xbox family of consoles before this anniversary came along. We know that, say, Elden Ring is really cool, but we never got around to playing Chromehounds. Was Chromehounds any good? We don’t know, but because we don’t know, we can’t finish our 3,000-page ranking of every Xbox game in the history of Xbox. (Number one would’ve been Brute Force for some reason, we don’t make the rules.)

Instead, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 best things to come out of Xbox Live in its first 20 years of Xbox Life, including The Best Competitive Game That Accidentally Influenced The Next Decade Of Competitive Games, and The Best Reason Not To Give Microsoft Money. So, here’s to 20 years of making friends, getting bullied by children, and paying a monthly fee to get absolutely nuked in online multiplayer games with Xbox Live!

The Best Competitive Game That Accidentally Influenced The Next Decade Of Competitive Games: 1 Vs. 100

This list could comfortably be nothing but 2009’s 1 Vs. 100, and it would still be a comprehensive list of everything good about Xbox Live—but we don’t think we could get away with a one-page slideshow, so we threw in some other ones to pad it out. Still, 1 Vs. 100 is (or was, R.I.P.) incredible for two reasons: For starters, it was a really fun game, based on a short-lived real-life game show, where one contestant had to try and answer more correct trivia questions than a panel of 100 other contestants who were all on a team together. If the solo player beat all 100 other players, they would get a real-life prize in the form of digital Xbox currency.The other reason 1 Vs. 100 was great was that it accidentally influenced the entire future of online competitive multiplayer. One person against 100 other people, all playing at once, trying to complete some task before everyone else does, and the last person standing gets a prize? That’s just .