Overview

Development
Known during development as Xenon, Xbox 2, Xbox FS,[7] Xbox Next, or NextBox, the Xbox 360 was conceived in early 2003.[8] In February 2003, planning for the Xenon software platform began, and was headed by Microsoft's Vice President J Allard.[8] That month, Microsoft held an event for 400 developers in Bellevue, Washington to recruit support for the system.[8] Also that month, Peter Moore, former president of Sega of America, joined Microsoft. On August 12, 2003, ATI signed on to produce the graphic processing unit for the new console, a deal which was publicly announced two days later.[9] Before the launch of the Xbox 360, several alpha [disambiguation needed] development kits were spotted using Apple's Power Mac G5 hardware. This was due to the system's PowerPC 970 processor running the same PowerPC architecture that the Xbox 360 would eventually run under IBM's Xenon processor. The cores of the Xenon processor were developed using a slightly-modified version of the PlayStation 3's Cell Processor PPE architecture. According to David Shippy and Mickie Phipps, the IBM employees were "hiding their work from Sony and Toshiba."[10]

Launch
Main article: Xbox 360 launch
The Xbox 360 was released on November 22, 2005, in the United States, Mexico and Canada; December 2, 2005, in Europe and December 10, 2005, in Japan. It was later launched in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and Russia. In its first year on the market, the system launched in 36 countries, more countries than any console has launched in a single year.[11]