Twenty-five years ago, Microsoft entered the console market with a hulking black machine, an enormous controller and a game called Halo. What followed changed the industry in ways few could have predicted, and today, the original Xbox is finding an unlikely new home in our pockets.
The argument isn’t that it did these things first, it’s that it changed gaming by doing all of them well.
Being first to do something doesn’t matter if no one uses it. Xbox objectively popularised all of those things in a way no one had done before (at least in the console market), on a massive scale.