April 15th: Last Day To Play Original Xbox Games on Xbox Live. Is Death a Cure or a Curse?

In the words of one my favorite bands: “Death isn’t [always] a curse” and in the case of Microsoft shutting down all the original Xbox game servers on Live, this is the best advice I can think to give.

So you still have no idea what Ib am talking about right? It is a little confusing. Here’s the jist. After April 15th, no one will be able to play any original Xbox games on the interwebz any longer. That means no Halo 2, Stars Wars Battlefront 2, that Tetris game you got when you bought your console, nothing. Obviously, that doesn’t render the games unplayable in single-player mode or split screen multi-player, so they still are useful for that. But really, who is still playing Halo 2 online? Just pluck down the cash and get yourself the 3rd game already!

On the other side of the argument, I can see how people would be pissed. See, at one point, you probably bought Halo 2 stoked on the fact that you could play online with your friends and whiny 14 year old strangers. You have enjoyed this to no end over the years. After a while, you get tired of the game and put it aside for a while and play other things. Years pass and you start to feel that tinge of nostalgia for some Halo 2 online battles. You put your perfectly taken care of disc in your console, boot up your system, sign into Xbox Live and then realize the service is no longer available to you. What!?

The madness! You paid, with your hard earned money from working at McDonalds, for the ability to play these games on the Internet, some games you even bought specifically to play online. Though it is kind of a stretch of an argument (seeing as how probably 6% of the population will actually be in this situation) you are stuck in this weird limbo of paying for something you can no longer use from no fault of your own.

Think about it this way. You bought a Super Nintendo Entertainment System back in ‘94 and it was a huge part of your youth. As you grew up and began to think that polygons meant better games, you stored away your SNES in your parents basement while you blasted n00bs in Counterstrike instead of focusing on your college degree. Now that you are a graduate and poor, you move back to your parents house and decide “Hey! I would love to revisit some classic gaming instead of finding a job!” You dig through your basement and find your perfect condition SNES, hook it up, and pop in Super Mario World. After you play a few levels, the game magically shuts down and an error message pops up that says, “Sorry, but Nintendo can no longer allow you to play this game to its fullest potential because we can’t support the technology any longer. Sorry!” This might be Nintendo’s way of making you do something with your life, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be angry!

Yeah, it’s kind of like that. But hey, at least now we might get to have over 100 friends on our Xbox Live Friends list?

All sarcasm and sass aside, the real scary thing to me is how far this could go. Right now its just losing the online capabilities over time, but with the entire industry moving more towards downloads and storing games on servers rather than in-store purchases and physical discs, the possibilities of your consuming losing value over time is not something to far off. What will this mean for the entire industry? At this point it is really hard to say, but the only thing I do know is that life can be always be referenced by quoting bands, and in the wise words of Bob Dylan, “the times they are a-changin’”