Yesterday, as a part of “The Game Awards 2019,” Microsoft revealed their next console in quite the theatrical video. Quite the work of art, the video showcased a monolithic, tower like machine drastically different from previous designs in the Xbox family, The Controller is, incidentally, quite familiar and mostly traditional — save for the “Sega Genesis” styled D-Pad, but the console itself is something unique, to say the least.
Something to take away from the end of the video, for what it’s worth, is the size — this is going to be small – a 5 by 5 by about 10 inches, I’d say. Not as monolithic as many thing, or at least, not as massive I should say. This comes, naturally, as a side effect of efficient engineering and the improvements made by AMD in the core processor type that the upcoming systems will use. Such is the nature of technology, after all, especially when it’s been refined as it has over the past 7 years.
They also announced the name of the console, or at least, a name for a console. We know very little beyond basic hardware specs at this time, but the name presented is “Xbox Series X.”
This, actually, isn’t all that bad. I quickly, as many others did, gave it the short name “Xbox SX” which has a nice sound to it and, incidentally, isn’t anything too odd to me – many dance game arcade cabinet models had similar identifiers (DS, SX, GX, etc) and so this sounds natural to me.
It does also make me wonder… given the physical design, and the “Series” identifier in the name makes me wonder… will this be an “upgradable” console, like any given computer is? There’s no actual difference between this an any given gaming PC in any meaningful architectural way, and there hasn’t been a barrier since the arrival of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 — the tech in all reality allows for such (as shown with the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4) so modular upgrades that the end user can purchase would be practical. This isn’t anything verified, of course — simply me thinking out loud, so to speak. I’m not trying to start rumors – far from it, I actually hate and try to stop the hype-filled rumor mill surrounding new consoles, but that’s another story.
Whatever case, here’s the “world premier trailer” for the Xbox Series X. I honestly love what I see here, and will certainly be covering it in more detail in the next year.