Xbox One launched on November 22, 2013, in 13 markets, including the United States. Microsoft put a lot of emphasis on making it the center of the living room. Games, television…

Xbox One launched on November 22, 2013, in 13 markets, including the United States. Microsoft put a lot of emphasis on making it the center of the living room. Games, television, entertainment apps, and Kinect voice controls were all part of how it was introduced. Even the name fit that all-in-one idea. When you go back and look at the original presentation, you can see how much of the pitch was about moving between different things on the same device. The system changed quite a bit over its lifetime. Backward compatibility for selected Xbox 360 games arrived in November 2015, which gave people a way to bring part of an older library forward. Then the smaller Xbox One S arrived in 2016, followed by the more powerful Xbox One X in 2017. Those were revisions within the Xbox One generation, and the One X gave supported games more room for higher-resolution visuals and other improvements. Games including Forza Motorsport 7, Gears of War 4, and Halo 5 received enhancements. Game Pass also started during this generation, launching broadly in June 2017 with more than 100 games. That's a pretty important piece of the history considering how much it became associated with Xbox afterward. Between the hardware revisions, backward compatibility, and that subscription library, there's a lot more to the Xbox One years than just what Microsoft showed at the original reveal.