Original Xbox Live Finally Deceased

Goodbye, my love…

So, it’s finally happened. Despite claims of people hanging on in there, the original Xbox Live service has finally bitten the dust. There had been a few Halo 2 players, getting their fix before the servers finally went down, that had managed to stay online past the plug pulling time of midnight, but alas, they are no more. We can only assume that turning something off as complex as Live isn’t quite as simple as pulling the plug; though we do like the image of a massive switch being pulled.

With the original Live gone, you may not think it’s that big a deal; but we’ve just witnessed the passing of a giant. Without Live, the 360 would be long gone and the online space would look very different. So much innovation and change all sparked in the beginnings of Live and despite the service now being infinitely better, we can’t help but feel that we’re losing part of our gaming heritage. No longer can you play the genre defining Halo 2 online, gone are the opportunities to play Star Wars: Battlefront II (noooo!). But, more than that, we can no longer experience some of the greatest games of the last generation online.

With the Games Room allowing us to play pretty much any retro game we want, isn’t it about time we looked after our recent gaming history? What we need is a massive online library of every game, only not in the OnLive sense. That way, we can all appreciate the titles that we played throughout the years.