Xbox 360 Launch - Announcement

Announcement

The official unveiling of the Xbox 360 occurred on May 12, 2005, on MTV in a program called MTV Presents: The Next Generation Xbox Revealed. The special was hosted by actor Elijah Wood and featured a musical performance by the band The Killers. The Xbox 360 was also featured on the cover of TIME Magazine's May 23, 2005 issue with an article written by Lev Grossman. The cover shows Microsoft chairman Bill Gates holding up one of the units. In the article he says "It's perfect... The day Sony launches (PlayStation 3), and they walk right into Halo 3." Read more at wikiquote. Microsoft executive Robbie Bach later clarified this statement, saying "Philosophically the point Bill was trying to make is that we're not just going to ship and not have great stuff coming up." Gates himself later clarified that "Halo 3 will ship when Bungie is ready." Microsoft chose a November 2005 release date not because they wanted to be first to market but because they thought Sony would ship their PlayStation 3 at that point.

The system, along with some playable games, was shown off at E3 2005. The demos were running on "Xbox 360 Alpha Development Kits" which were Apple PowerMac G5s, chosen due to the PowerPC processor architecture that the machine shares with the Xbox 360. Microsoft claims that most of the games were running at 25–30% of full capacity because they were not running on actual systems.