The 10 Xbox 360 games that mattered the most

At the tail end of 2024 the original PlayStation turned 30 years old. While the Xbox 360 is only hitting 20 and it’s not an industry shaker to the degree the PS1 was, there’s no doubt it earned its place as one of the most important consoles of all time. Xbox managed to challenge Sony in the traditional home console space the PlayStation had dominated with PS1 and PS2, and the console’s brilliant line-up of games played a major role in that.

We’re avoiding listing our picks for the best Xbox 360 games (something done to death over the last two decades), so we’re putting forward our choices for the Xbox 360 games that mattered the most. There’s no other criteria, and what “mattered” means can be interpreted in many different ways. Is the game looked back on fondly by players? Did the industry shift after the game was released? Would a whole genre simply not have existed if the game hadn’t been made? And crucially, was it particularly important to the fate and legacy of the Xbox 360 itself?

It’s been tricky sticking to a list of 10 games (our apologies to the glorious Doritos Crash Course, amongst many others), but we’ve stood firm on that number so this list actually means something. The more games you add the less weight each entry carries. We’re sure you will read this and immediately throw your fists into the air in a fit of indignation, but tough, it’s our list. Sorry.

Do feel free to share your picks in the comments, though – just be nice about it.

Halo 3

It’s hard to overstate how important Halo 3 was for the Xbox 360. Aside from being one of the best first-person shooter campaigns to ever hit our pads, and a brilliant showcase of what the Xbox 360 could achieve in terms of graphics and scale, the game popularised something that would become the lifeblood of the entire generation: Xbox Live.

The vast majority of console players, at the time, had never really been online. Maybe you’d had a LAN night with some mates, or done some couch PvP in GoldenEye or Timesplitters or something, but Halo 3 and its lobbies – quite literally – changed the game. For the cost of a couple hundred points to get yourself on Xbox Live proper, you could start hashing it out with people on the other side of the world. I remember, vividly, the transition from playing with mostly UK- or Europe-based players after school, into the late hours at night where US players would start to come online. I still have friends today that I made in those lobbies. That, in itself, shows me how special Halo 3 was back then.

But it wasn’t just a case of right place, right time. Halo 3 would have been nowhere near as popular if it wasn’t for the fact that the game was good. The maps were all-time classics. The modes were creative and fun (shotty snipers, anyone?) The whole thing felt like it was toxicity-proof – at least to some degree – because the whole damn thing was so utterly goofy. The legend around the different armour sets – remember the flaming samurai helmet? – became iconic. Cosmetics that were earned through skill (or, let’s face it, luck) became bragging rights for kids, teens, and adults alike.

Halo 3 felt like a cultural moment: a crucible in which so many different types of gamer could meet, socialise, and aggravate each other. Yes, the PC had a plethora of games before this that did something similar – and even the original Xbox had Halo 2 – but with Halo 3 it felt like Microsoft had finally cracked the code, breaking through into the mainstream and demonstrating that pretty much anyone and everyone could jump into the moshpit of frantic multiplayer and have a decent time with it.

Halo 3 was the marker of a moment, the lightning rod for the success of the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live experiment, and possibly the high tide for Microsoft’s whole foray into gaming in the first place. It’s amazing how different things can feel, 20 years later.

– Dom

Gears of War

Has any game showcased what a new console is capable of in a more head-turning way than Gears of War. Now 19 years removed from its release, it’s easy to look back on the original Gears as a brown, sludgey game, complete with some quite rigid movement and hammy writing, but that isn’t being fair on a game that offered the kind of visual spectacle we get less and less these days. These unmatched visuals combined with third-person cover-based shooting, and an emphasis on co-op play, helped Gears of War become a benchmark release for the Xbox 360, and it established itself as one of a handful of games synonymous with the Xbox brand.

Dropping it right alongside the PlayStation 3’s launch was the kind of confident move modern Xbox simply doesn’t have the stature to do any more. A real, “we’re here and not going anywhere,” kind of statement, with a game that put all of Sony’s early PS3 games to shame from a graphical wow factor point of view.

Epic’s technical showcase might be the poster-game for the bro shooter of that era, but it did it so well. For a series that can be boiled down (a little unfairly) to mostly big dudes fighting, the series’ story the original game began has a surprising amount of heart. That iconic Mad World trailer was sneered at by some, but it worked – beyond the ooh-rahs and chainsaw mutilations, there are few games whose characters the community cared about as much as this lot.

– Tom

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion

A system-seller exclusive, a technical showcase, a jolly good video game – Oblivion is a pretty classic example of a game that helped define a console’s success. But it matters as much here, if not more, because as well as all of those things it was also weird. Its decades-long memeification is the natural result: Oblivion defined a generation’s sense of humour as much as it did the shape of the 360 generation. Oddly-proportioned faces, a goofy character creator, a collection of wonderful voice actors recording their lines, infamously, in alphabetical order as opposed to in conversational sequence, leading to burned-into-the-mind orders, reactions, arghs and oofs and reeblereeblereeble BLARGH!s galore.

It’s arguably – there’s no settled opinion on this, which I love – Bethesda Softworks at its design zenith, too. A game of anecdotes generated by what has sounded, at times, like development-by-anecdote too. Former Bethesda devs tell stories of just doing stuff, adding things – like the brilliant, easily-missable secret Goblin wars – because they thought they’d be cool, entirely outside the literal definitions of their job role. It created a kind of unsummarisable Bethesda-ism, an ineffable quality. Creativity, human nature and magic all together. All the elements of alchemy that made the Xbox 360 era what it was. And all the things Xbox has seemed to lack, at least in sufficient quantity, in the many years since. It mattered because look at what happens without it.

– Chris

Dead Rising

Why on earth does Capcom need another zombie series? That was the first thought of many, myself included, when I first read about Dead Rising. But then you saw it. The sheer scale. The image that sticks in my mind is the trailer shots of photojournalist Frank West atop a delivery vehicle in the Willamette Mall’s underground parking lot, surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of zombies. Instantly, the game justified its existence. It also justified something else with all that scale: this was a true next generation title.

I remember Dead Rising sitting alongside Oblivion as one of the first games that truly felt to justify the power, the expense, the melting CPUs, and the subsequent red rings. The fact you could pick up ‘anything’ in the mall and use it as a weapon felt truly revelatory. The granular details of the world felt like one of the earliest justifications of going out and buying an HDTV, too.

But on top of all of that, Dead Rising is just a simply remarkable and brilliant game. It’s prickly and unfriendly in just the right ways, while gripping and thrilling all at once. As an exclusive, it also represents a key victory of the 360 era – an Xbox slowly but surely winning the support of Japan’s biggest developers, who went on to build some truly brilliant games with Japanese sensibilities but surely tailored to Xbox’s demographic. Of those games, Dead Rising is also surely the best, too.

– Alex D

Bioshock

What BioShock did so convincingly for Xbox 360, and for gaming at the time, was make a case for games as sophisticated things that adults could enjoy. Shooters, especially. Here was a shooter drenched in story and atmosphere that told the cautionary tale of an underwater utopia gone wrong. It was dark, it was at times disturbing, and it was meant for adults to play. And okay, yes, it had shooting in it, and some jump scares, but as much of the experience was about exploring the abandoned dream-gone-wrong world of Rapture and wondering why it fell apart. Wondering about the folly of Man. A memorable tale, and one helped no end by an iconic twist and a wonderful anti-boss-fight piece of misdirection. An arty shooter, that’s what BioShock was, and the many rosettes it won brought much prestige to Microsoft’s machine. What an autumn in 2007 that was.

– Bertie

Fable 2

In video games in general and especially in those of the role-playing variety, we talk a lot about choice. We also overstate choice in games often; those big branching storylines often don’t amount to as much agency as we’d hope. Every so often, though, a choice sticks with you. Every so often, a game puts forward something that makes you pause for a moment and go – wait… do I… should I…? For me, Fable 2’s ending presented one of those rare choices.

Peter Molyneux’s bluster is infamous – and the 360 era is where it reached its zenith, with bloody Kinect and Milo, and over-promises about all sorts of things including, yes, Fable 2 and 3. But of all those games with promises of freedom, choice, and emotional resonance… Fable 2 is one of those that really rings true. It’s a defining 360 game for many reasons – accessible combat, a strangely silly-yet-thoughtful morality system with meaningful consequences, and just a charming atmosphere. Fable was one of those games that proved that the then-Microsoft Game Studios wasn’t just a shooter house – it could produce and grow other meaningful properties and games, too.

– Alex D

Mass Effect

Microsoft had helped BioWare bring Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Jade Empire, to the original Xbox, but Mass Effect was the birth of something new. It was a generational leap in the kinds of road-trip role-playing games BioWare would make. Really, it was an action game that was also a role-playing game – the kind of thing we see frequently now. But back then it was new. For the first time in a BioWare game, we’d actually be doing the shooting, as if we were in a shooter, while supplementing the action with our RPG abilities. Unreal Engine 3 made it look generationally more impressive than the studio’s other games, and the camera was pulled in tighter both in action sequences and and conversations to frame the game more cinematically. I remember being so excited to learn you could even cinematically interrupt conversations mid-flow when prompts appeared – smashing someone in the face with the butt of a gun, say, if they’d pissed you off. It was genuinely next-generational stuff.

Curiously, Mass Effect 1 didn’t really – excuse the pun – take off. The series had a slow start. But the groundwork that game laid was what Mass Effect 2 built on and soared with. Without Mass Effect 1, one of gaming’s greatest ever trilogy of games might never have gotten off the ground.

– Bertie

Viva Pinata

Asked what the ultimate video game from Rare is, people will likely be most minded to say Banjo Kazooie, or maybe a Donkey Kong game. Some might say GoldenEye. All of that is fair enough. But I’d also argue that if you want a real distillation of the true energy of classic Rare, of the sheer vibes that made it a perfect acquisition target for a Microsoft desperate for gaming credibility, you should look no further than Viva Piñata.

Ultimately, Viva Piñata is a relatively frivolous but boundlessly lovely life simulation and management game. It’s got the things I always associated with Rare, from a narrative that sits at a curious crossroads of whip-smart and silly, to gorgeous visuals, and extremely tightly-wound gameplay loops. And lovely music, of course. It represents an era when Xbox was thinking more broadly than it does now, even though its studio structure is now broader than ever. It also represents a Rare that, for a time, was still clinging to the vibes that made it such a beloved piece of Nintendo’s portfolio. Much has changed now – and Viva Piñata feels like more of a relic than ever. It remains a brilliant, compelling, lovely big old hug of a game, though.

– Alex D

Geometry Wars Retro Evolved

Honestly, and not to take anything away from Retro Evolved’s place on this list, but we really struggled to pick the most important Xbox Live Arcade game that was released on the Xbox 360. There are many games that arrived on the service that made their mark, but In the end it simply had to be Bizarre Creations’ day one release, which cost just 400 Microsoft Points (remember those?) and came to symbolise one of the console’s most defining features: online competition.

Being good at a video game used to be little more than someone’s confident bravado. Alright, mate, I know you say you are the world’s best Pac-man player, but I’ve never seen you play and there’s no arcade machine within walking distance, so I’m going to take that with a large degree of skepticism. Games like Geometry Wars Retro Evolved changed that forever, thanks to online leaderboards. While not a new concept, the Xbox 360’s industry-leading online services combined with high-score chasing games like Retro Evolved, to bring people together despite not actually playing with each other. You knew if you were good, not only amongst your friends but the whole gaming world.

– Tom

Rock Band / Guitar Hero 3

Is it a cop-out to have these two games taking up one slot? No. Because the rivalry was the point. Who didn’t have a couple of plastic, rickety guitars taking up space in their homes back in the 00s? Activision’s takeover of the Guitar Hero brand meant Neversoft was brought in to make the third game, whilst previous custodians of the franchise, Harmonix, moved over to making Rock Band for rival publisher MTV Networks. They say ‘a rising tide lifts all ships’, and never has that maxim proved more accurate than in the 2007 battle for the living room.

By the time these two games were hitting the shelves, peripheral-based rhythm games were mainstream news. South Park parodied the trend, Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy (the founders of Harmonix) were together named in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2008, and Bruce Springsteen’s guitarist went on the record as saying “in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, Rock Band may just turn out to be up there with the rise of FM radio, CDs, or MTV.” That might sound dramatic, but as a teenager at the time, I know more people whose music tastes were shaped by Rock Band and Guitar Hero than, say Radio 1 or MTV. Who here could honestly say they’d know about Dragonforce if it wasn’t for these games, hm?

Guitar Hero continued outselling Rock Band for the first year of the upstart’s life, but very quickly, the contender to the plastic throne was making over $600 million per year. That said, Harmonix and MTV still wasn’t turning a profit due to the cost of manufacturing the instruments, and so focus shifted to selling DLC add-ons, eventually creating a library that felt so comprehensive and complete, I still treasure my Xbox 360 hard drive with a (mostly) complete set of tracks to this day.

These games not only shook the video game industry, but the music industry, too, giving artists another viable lane to try and make money in an era where online streaming and piracy was threatening to undercut the traditional market. For bands like Judas Priest, new songs were getting more downloads on Rock Band than they were on the then-fledgling iTunes store. Bands started doing Rock Band promos (Pearl Jam, for example, ran a promotion that said ‘buy our new album, get tracks for free in Rock Band’).

Rock Band and Guitar Hero were a cultural moment outside of just video games, and their association with the Xbox 360 was as integral to the success of the console as any Halo, Fable, or Gears game.

– Dom

The Xbox 360 turns 20 years old on 22nd November, so we’ve put together a week of coverage that looks back on Microsoft’s most successful games console.