The Missing Spark of Xbox Summer of Arcade
The Xbox brand has been a joke for the past decade. Actually, jokes are usually funny or have a purpose- so saying that is an insult to jokes. And the frustrating thing is- it didn’t have to be this way. Xbox proved to us with its first two consoles that it not only cared about being a great place to play games- it also cared about giving its players great games. I loved my Xbox 360! Like many people, I played tons of multiplayer games on it almost every single night during my high school days. When it came to third party games, Xbox 360 was the place to be. Xbox Live was a better service than PS Plus. And because Sony decided to build the PS3 with the bizarre Cell processor, many third party games just ran better on Xbox 360. Legendary games like Skyrim actually ran like crap on PS3 when compared to its competitor. There was a time when Call of Duty kinda felt synonymous with Xbox, and not just because Microsoft bought Call of Duty. And of course, who can forget the onslaught of high quality exclusive games like the entire gears of war trilogy, Halo 3, Halo Reach, Lost Odyssey, Fable 2 and MANY more.
I did what many people did, and probably what you did too. I grew up with the PlayStation 2, but for some reason by the time I got to high school, all of my friends were on Xbox 360. So I jumped over to the 360 as well. And then, when E3 2013 happened, I was more than ready to give Microsoft my money for their next Xbox. But the travesty they called a showcase proved me wrong. And then Sony came in and just seemed so confident and ready to give me good games. The Sony “this is how you share games on PS4” video was absolutely brilliant . It felt like something Sega would say about Nintendo during the SNES vs Genesis days. After that E3, I jumped back to PlayStation and never looked back.
It felt like this- imagine you’ve been married for five years, and then you and your significant other go on a game show where you have to answer trivia questions about each other. And then, over the course of the game show, you find out that your significant other doesn’t know anything about you. They don’t know your favorite color, your favorite song, what job you have, your little quirks- NOTHING.
You would probably feel kinda betrayed and sad, wouldn’t you? And yes, I know I just described an episode of Parks and Recreation.
That’s what happened when Xbox did their E3 2013 showcase. It proved to me that they didn’t know why we loved them for the past half decade. We loved the good online services, we loved the exclusive games, we loved the digital storefront. And instead of just focusing on those things and improving them, they went a totally peculiar route. They focused on being a multimedia machine. And a lot of Xbox fans like to say that Microsoft “predicted the future” by going this route, but I just feel like thats such a cop out. Things were already heading that way once Sony made the PS2 read DVDs. You could watch Netflix with your friends on the 360 and Blu Rays on PS3. Consoles were already becoming multimedia devices.
That’s the most irritating thing about Xbox nowadays. Everytime they are clearly getting dominated by PlayStation, they start moving the goalposts. Xbox no longer talks about how many games they sell or how many Gamepass subscribers they have. They just talk about how many “users” log into their services. They act like they chose to become some forward thinking entertainment platform, when the reality is they lost almost 30 million customers and took extreme damage to their reputation. That would be like if Coke sales suddently destroyed Pepsi sales and the Pepsi CEO was like “Actually its not about the soda for us, its about the EXPERIENCE of drinking the soda.”
It’s a paper thin veil.
But yeah, Xbox used to be a great place to discover and play games. One of their many ways of introducing their players to these games was the Xbox Summer of Arcade.
This might be hard for you to imagine if you’re like 16 or 17 right now, but back when I was that age, there were many moments in the year where no big games came out. Everything came out in like October, November and the first week of December. Every publisher tried to get their big AAA games out before Christmas. You might get like a random February game or something, but it wasn’t common. You had your big winter games that you asked for Christmas and lasted you through the first 2 months of the new year. Then you just had a couple months of nothing. No big games at all. We would either keep playing the same multiplayer games or went outside a lot more. Nowadays there’s like 2 big AAA games and 200 indie games coming out every week. And I feel bad for indie devs now because there’s a greater chance that when their game releases, its like a fart in the wind. For example, Bat Boy is like the best indie 2D platformer in a while- arguably since Shovel Knight, and that game struggled to even hit 100 reviews on Steam. I even asked the developer behind Bat Boy some questions, and they told me how difficult it can be for indie developers to stand out nowadays.
Speaking of indie games, back in the Xbox 360 days they had of course been around for a while. But it was around the time of the seventh generation where indie games were starting to become commonplace for home consoles instead of just PC. And it wasn’t just indie games starting to hit consoles- but smaller games overall. We were used to paying 50 or 60 bucks for a game. But thanks to digital storefronts, we were now introduced to five dollar games, ten dollar games or twenty dollars games. And yeah, these games aren’t gonna last you 40 hours like a AAA game, but they’re still gonna be an extremely fun and interesting five hours. Big publishers like Ubisoft were comfortable with releasing smaller gems like Child of Light or Valiant Hearts.
The Xbox Live Arcade branding was all about those smaller games. And honestly, without XBLA, things might be VERY different nowadays. By 2007, seven out of ten Xbox 360 owners were downloading smaller games off XBLA. And one of Xbox’s many cool ways of bringing us these games was Summer of Arcade!
Between 2008 and 2013, Xbox held a “Summer of Arcade” every year during the titular season. Every week for like a month they released one of these smaller games with a bunch of fanfare. It was really cool to buy a game, play it for a week, and then see what would be released the next week. And this whole thing started off with two incredible years. For year one- the two big bangers were Braid and Castle Crashers. Year two gave us Marvel Vs Capcom 2 on consoles for the first time in six years. We also got Shadow Complex which remains an excellent and fascinating Metroidvania that honestly deserved a sequel. The year after that gave us Limbo. The year after that Bastion. The year after that we got Dust an Elysian Tale. The final year gave us Brothers a Tale of Two Sons. Obviously not every game could be an absolute banger. But still- just think about these:
Marvel vs Capcom 2, Shadow Complex, Braid, Bastion, Castle Crashers, Brothers.
I even skipped over a lot of games people love like Trials HD, Spolsion Man and the Tomb Raider game that came out. I can’t understate the success of the Geometry Wars series either.
Xbox Summer of Arcade was just one of many ways that Microsoft proved to gamers and game developers that they were not only capable of creating good games, but they were capable of discovering and providing players with hidden gems. Xbox became THE place for indie games. When Super Meat Boy came out, guess which platform it first launched? Xbox 360. It totally skipped the PS3! Microsoft sought out FEZ and acquired a year of exclusivity for it- which turned out great for them because even today, much like Braid- FEZ is seen as a quintessential indie game. At the time, Minecraft was still an indie game, and what was the first console it released on? 360.
There was a time when the Xbox brand really meant quality. There was a time when they wouldn’t have released Redfall. There was a time when the brands Halo and Gears of War truly meant something. And I miss those days. I miss feeling like the company whose console I bought genuinely gave a shit about providing me good games. Say what you want about Nintendo, but here I am eight years later still playing my Switch regularly because there’s so much good stuff on there. Back in the Xbox Summer of Arcade days, I remember coming home during summer vacation, taking a shower to wash off the sweat from a long day of playing at the park with friends, and playing games like Castle Crashers until three in the morning. When you look at where Xbox is at now, selling even worse than the Xbox One and now putting their games on their rivals consoles just to survive; I think it’s clear that just focusing on the big things like acquiring Bethesda and Activison can’t save you.
You have to start with the little things.
