Retro gaming has blown up in popularity over the years as what was new becomes old, and Xbox is celebrating retro gaming in a unique way. The official Xbox website has undergone a retro facelift in celebration of a classic dashboard design.
The Xbox website has returned to the Xbox 360 era with a home page that resembles the original dashboard for the seventh generation console and second Microsoft console. This dashboard is known as the "Blades" design and it launched with the Xbox 360 and remained the user interface for the platform until 2011 when it was revamped as part of the new Xbox experience. Xbox 360 fans who were introduced to the platform with the Xbox 360 Slim may not have come across the Blades dashboard, but others are flooded with memories simply by seeing it.
The Xbox home page flips from one page to another similar to the Xbox 360 UI using the Blades dashboard design. The revamped page currently features titles like Back 4 Blood, Far Cry 6, and Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl within Blades of their own, while small text bubbles take Xbox fans to the Game Pass, games, consoles, accessories, play, and sign-in pages. Taking these links will remove the Blades dashboard aesthetic in favor of the modern Xbox website design, suggesting that the Xbox 360 facelift was customized specifically for the home page.
In 2011, Xbox overhauled the dashboard to use a tile system rather than Blades' rounded edges and Gamerpics that Xbox 360 fans had become accustomed to. Since then, each Xbox that has been released prominently featured the tile design. Microsoft released the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S last year and the consoles maintain the tile design on a grander scale, with pins, games, and apps being featured in full 4K.
The Xbox 360 was originally released on November 22, 2005, and Xbox may have prepped its website early in anticipation of the sixteen-year anniversary. Many of the franchises that started with the Xbox 360 generation continue today such as Alan Wake, Forza Horizon, Gears of War, and Minecraft. It's currently unclear if Xbox has any plans to update the Xbox Series X/S to allow gamers to choose the classic Blades dashboard design in the future.
Xbox fans are no strangers to the Xbox 360 thanks to the full backward compatibility offered through the new consoles and the inclusion of various 360 games on Xbox Game Pass. The Xbox Series X/S also offers a classic animated original Xbox dashboard background that is reminiscent of the original Microsoft console's boot-up screen. The Xbox dashboard has evolved several times over the years and the Blades design from Xbox's website is being celebrated by many gamers online.
Source: Xbox