Platform: Xbox

The Xbox was originally proposed as the "Direct X Box", because it utilized Microsoft's DirectX technology. It was later shortened to Xbox.

The original Xbox prototype was built using dismantled Dell laptops.

The Xbox controller was redesigned to appeal to Japanese gamers because Microsoft had trouble selling the Xbox to a Japanese audience. In the end Microsoft came up with the Controller S, an Xbox controller which was more compact and attractive to the Japanese demographic. This design would eventually be adopted in America as well, and a decade later became the standard.

Sega's then president, Isao Okawa, wanted Microsoft to include Dreamcast backward compatibility in the Xbox, but negotiations fell through when Microsoft refused to include online play for Dreamcast games.

When the original Xbox was made, Microsoft lost $125 per unit sold. After 4 years, Microsoft had lost $4 billion.

The Burger King Xbox 360 trilogy are the only Xbox 360 titles which were backwards compatible with the original Xbox; a previous console generation. This decision was made due to the original Xbox having a bigger install base than the Xbox 360 at the time, but Microsoft only wanting to promote the 360 and not original Xbox on TV.

After the console has been on for a while, obscured noises can be heard over the top of the normal ambient background noise. Microsoft stated that they are actually tweaked and modified public domain sounds from the Apollo days of NASA.

Pressing X and Y at the same time while playing music on the Xbox's Audio CD player will display colorful visualizations to complement the music.

A lengthy hidden developer credit for all those who worked on the Xbox console can be found by inserting a music CD, going to the Audio CD menu, selecting and pressing Copy, Select All and then Copy again. You are then taken to a menu to name the Soundtrack you have just selected, where you should enter the following name (without quotation marks): "[two less-than symbols]Eggsßox[two greater-than symbols]"

When you hit Done, the Xbox loading screen appears and will take you to a credits sequence, thanking the developers who made games for the Xbox and their playerbase before giving thanks to The DirectX Team, Microsoft Hardware, Worldwide Operations, The MSN Gaming Zone, Windows Core, and the entire Xbox Team and their families for tolerating the long work hours it took to create the console. The credits end with "XBOX 2001".

In 2021, an anonymous Xbox developer informed Kotaku of an undiscovered developer credit on the Xbox. To find it, insert a music CD, and from the Audio CD screen choose Copy, Copy, and then New Soundtrack. Delete the default soundtrack title and replace it with the following name (without quotation marks): "Timmyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!"

Wait for the CD to finish ripping and then return to the main menu. Now going to System Info within the Settings will reveal an updated screen crediting the four programmers that made up the Xbox Dashboard Team. The replacement title is a reference to the animated series "South Park", where the developmentally handicapped character Timmy can only say his own name.

According to Seamus Blackley, the creator and designer of the Xbox, there is one more Easter egg in the console that has yet to be found as of November 2021. It is related to the Xbox's boot animation and he believes that it cannot be accessed through certain controller inputs during the animation.

The design for the Xbox BIOS was pitched by freelance graphic design artist Seton Kim. Although he was fired from the job for the imagery of "Hello Kitty trapped in an alien pod" in a mock up of a memory card screen featuring the PlayStation games Hello Kitty's Cube Frenzy and Metal Gear Solid, the final BIOS would be very close to his designs.

The Burger King Xbox trilogy - Sneak King, Big Bumpin', and Pocketbike Racer - has an unusual packaging and disc design, bearing the aesthetic design of the Xbox 360's packaging art, but simply saying "Xbox" due to the game disc containing files for both Xbox and Xbox 360 versions of the game. This is exclusive to the Burger King games, with original Xbox games released after the trilogy still having the original Xbox packaging template from 2001. The concept of a unified "Xbox brand" box design shared between all platforms would eventually see wide use with the release of the Xbox Series X|S, which would clarify which only feature the Xbox brand logo and clarify which platforms the disc is compatible with.

Between January 1 and December 31, 2009, Microsoft collected data on the most popular Xbox Live games of that year based on unique user connectivity. For the original Xbox, which had been discontinued in 2006, this would be the final year that Microsoft would collect its player statistics for online games, as the console's support for Xbox Live would be discontinued just three months after the data was published in January 2010. The list of the top 20 most popular games goes as follows:

1. Halo 2
2. Star Wars: Battlefront II
3. Fable
4. Counter-Strike
5. Conker: Live & Reloaded
6. Doom 3
7. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
8. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
9. Star Wars: Battlefront
10. Star Wars: Republic Commando
11. Burnout 3: Takedown
12. Fable: The Lost Chapters
13. Call of Duty 2: Big Red One
14. Call of Duty 3
15. Call of Duty: Finest Hour
16. MechAssault 2: Lone Wolf
17. Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge
18. Guilty Gear X2 #Reload
19. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3
20. Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows

Bleem! was a PlayStation emulator released for Microsoft Windows 98 and the Sega Dreamcast. Unlike the vast majority of emulators before and since, it was released as a paid product on store shelves. Bleem!, although very impressive for the time and capable of running on low-end PCs, had many compatability issues, with the only game that ran perfectly on Windows Bleem! being the US version of One, while the only games that could be run at all on Dreamcast were Tekken 3, Metal Gear Solid, and Gran Turismo 2, all with specialised emulators released on their own "Bleemcast" discs.

Sony would sue Bleem! twice over alleged copyright infringement, and despite all odds, Sony lost due to Bleem!'s use of screenshots in promo material and the PS1 BIOS being protected by fair use. However, a mix of legal fees and Sony threatening retailers stocking Bleem! products with subpoenas would force Bleem! off of shelves anyway, and its website would be replaced with an image of Sonic The Hedgehog mourning at a grave with the Bleem! logo carved on it. Bleem! would countersue Sony for anti-competitive activity.

The popularity of Bleem! would lead both Sega and Microsoft to attempt to work with Bleem! officially to make PS1 games run on Dreamcast and Xbox, though these plans fell through due to Sega being afraid of Sony's litigation, while the developers of Bleem! simply felt Microsoft wasn't paying high enough for the license for Bleem! (something they had come to regret in the years since).

Despite being positioned as the Xbox's mascot by the gaming press, Blinx the Time Sweeper was not created to fill that role or rival the likes of Mario and Sonic. Despite an internal push from the Blinx team for the character to become the platform's mascot in Japan (of which executive producer Ed Fries claims to be "not sure how seriously [the Blinx team] took it"), as well as the desire of Bill Gates for Microsoft's gaming department to have a mascot, the character was not officially used as an Xbox mascot. The game did still get a major marketing push in Japan thanks to convenient timing during a Christmas dry spell of game releases and being a Japanese game.