The XBLA period of Xbox 360 is still something a ton of gamers are nostalgic for. It came at a unique point in time when digital gaming wasn’t all the rage yet, and Microsoft’s gaming brand still had a proper identity.
While glimpses of the old Xbox are still in there, it feels like this is a part of the company that’s only brought up once or twice. Then again, some could argue that the publisher’s reliance on digital gaming sparked with the success of this era.
During the late 2000s and early 2010s, gaming was going through something of an identity crisis. Various developers thought console gaming was going to die, and that mobile gaming was the future. The popularity of Angry Birds, Cut The Rope, and more made publishers think everything had to be on phones.
Enter Xbox Live Arcade, often shortened to XBLA by fans of the period.
It turns out that fans liked having these bite-sized gaming sessions on consoles and phones. This led to the popularity of games like Splosion Man, Bastion, Castle Crashers, and Braid, amongst other titles. Many felt these games were a breath of fresh air, especially for those who didn’t like the brownish grey colors of AAA titles from that time.
Shorter games with old-school gameplay are what made XBLA a really popular commodity. Because these older gameplay mechanics started appealing to players, developers started bringing back previous franchises to this platform. Mega Man 9 and 10, Sonic 4 Episodes 1 and 2, Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and more found homes here.
This also happened at a time when Microsoft used a “points” system where players would buy points that would then buy games. It was a silly system that would eventually be replaced by real money, but fans appreciated the novelty of it. Nintendo had a similar system for the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS, but these were also eventually replaced by a convenient real-money system.
Having this balance of big AAA games and smaller old-school XBLA titles is why Xbox 360 was the original 7th generation king. While these games would also appear on PlayStation 3, that system’s identity was all about power, so it made their availability seem like an oddity. PSN was also less memorable than XBLA, if we’re being honest.
With the rise of indies on all platforms, the novelty of XBLA faded, and Microsoft doesn’t really use this branding anymore. Indie games also became more associated with handhelds like the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck, taking that identity away from Xbox as well.
These days, Xbox has made Game Pass its identity, for better or worse. Choosing to be the Netflix of gaming, this lets players enjoy a ton of games for a yearly or monthly price. It’s a convenient way of playing multiple games, but doesn’t really have any charm because of this.
But every once in a while, we see releases like Cuphead or Hi-Fi Rush, and it feels like the spirit of XBLA is still there. An experimental phase that mixed new visuals and old-school gameplay, it’s easy to see why so many gamers miss this era.
Xbox will live just fine with Game Pass, but it felt alive with XBLA.