Xbox Live Beta Tester 2002

Let me set the scene: It’s 2001, pre-9/11, high school.

Having finally accepted the Dreamcast’s fate and being a major anti-PS2, Dreamcast fanboy (cut me some slack, I was 18 and lived in my parents’ basement), I became enamoured with Microsoft’s first foray into console gaming: The Xbox. I bought one on day one, fervently posted on all of the major forums, racked up hundreds of hours in local multiplayer Halo…

Then, to my happy surprise, I was to be part of the Xbox Live beta test. I was a bit of an online PC gamer at the time (Tribes 2 ftw) and had played quite a few hours of online console games on the Dreamcast.

Fast forward 12 years, and here we are.

I have been re-organizing my office since a number of people have given me boxes of their old videogame collections. In one of my chests, I found my Xbox Live beta tester box, which I received from Microsoft in September of 2002. Here are some snaps!

Original Xbox Live beta box
Original box – names removed to protect the innocent :)
Xbox Live Beta Test Discs
This is before consoles tracked how many hours you’ve played each game, but I bet “hundreds” for MotoGP and Re-Volt, each.
Xbox Live Beta Test Discs
Welcome to the future of gaming!
Xbox Live beta end of life
Set your clocks: 11.15.02.

By 2004 I had moved almost exclusively to the PC. I bought an Xbox 360 but sold it to a friend shortly thereafter, unimpressed. I was also very disappointed that they gave away my Xbox Live GamerTag, which was supposed to be ours for life.

C’est la vie.

Totally Loving Blippr

I found out about a really awesome site this week. It’s called Blippr. It’s basically Twitter but for game, music, movie, and book reviews. You have 160 characters to let the world what you think. It’s really addictive.

After creating a profile, you can link to your Facebook and Twitter accounts so any blips you write will be displayed there. This is great to help build some incoming links and keeps your Twitter fresh, which then pushes your profile page up in the search rankings. For a while there my Blippr profile was showing at the top of search results while searching “Rocky1138” on Google.

If you end up joining, add me as a friend and we’ll see how we stack up against each other in game, music, book, and movie reviews.