Five years ago, Xbox LIVE went live.

And what a trip it’s been! …and there’s still much fun ahead.

I remember reading about it… at the time I didn’t own an Xbox: I was busy playing Halo multi-player and Tribes on a PC. Or at least I was trying to: the networking stuff wasn’t all that… good, really. It was in a right state back then – you either had to wait several minutes without finding a game to play or go set up your own server. Not that much fun when you’re on DSL, trying to host a server based game.

By the time Halo 2 came around, I already had an Xbox and a LIVE account. Gone were the days of trying to find a game – games were waiting for me.

Three years after that, I’m steaming music from my PC, I’m downloading videos to watch, sampling game demos or trial Arcade games, and talking smack to people I know, people I may meet some day, and people I will never meet. Hey, I even send IM’s online, via LIVE.

Today, we all piled into Millennium F for a bit of a party. We all got Xbox LIVE jerseys with our Gamertags on our back, along with a “5” (although mine isn’t in yet, boo!) Trixie was photo-blogging the party; Major Nelson was grabbing film for a podcast (or an internal report.) Original Xbox LIVE team members were all over the place, a number of them still with the team. Xbox consoles with the original controller were running. Even my teammates blogged about it (and snagged a photo op with the first Emmy Microsoft has ever won!) After a bit of Jell-O, pizza, beer, and cake… even I stood still long enough for a photo or two. When I wasn’t being threatened by the photographer. Who talks smack about GH3 playing ability. *ahem*

And yes, XNA LIVE Server works with the whole shabang – in fact, if you didn’t hear about it, PGR4 is about to add Tournaments via DLC… yeah, our group did that [I can’t personally take credit – I hadn’t joined the team yet! although I did help do some play testing with it!]

The icing on the cake was knowing that we all had a lil something-something waiting for us at our desks… that we won’t be able to play until Tuesday.

All part of the job – more on that next week.