The Xbox 360 turns 20 years old today, and so what better time to look back at the games that most defined the console. The 360 was the most successful machine Microsoft has ever made and the most beloved too. And for great reason: the Xbox 360 mixed powerful hardware with innovative, boundary-pushing, and risk-taking software to power a memorable generation that lasted eight years – longer than any other Xbox so far. 

So here’s my Top 20 Games That Made the Xbox 360 the Best Of All Time

20. 1 vs. 100

Released: 2009

One of Microsoft’s boldest experiments in the Xbox 360 era was 1 vs. 100, a live game show where most players would be randomly selected to play along in The Crowd, while a lucky 100 would be chosen to be in The Mob and a single person would be chosen as The One. You had to log on at specific times to play 1 vs. 100; it wasn’t available to you anytime you wanted to fire it up. Microsoft ran it with a live host from a studio in Seattle. You would get rewards for participating and winning in 1 vs 100. It was a truly unique social gaming experience and lots of memorable moments happened in that game but sadly its never coming back

19. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

Released: 2008

Nintendo had lost one of their most popular mascot platformers, Banjo Kazooie. Nuts & Bolts is also a huge departure from the series, which previously played somewhat closer to Super Mario 64. This new iteration redesigned the aesthetics of the world and characters, and contained the complex physics-based vehicle customization system that was ahead of its time. It was a very good game but many people hated it due to how it was different from how it started.

19. Viva Piñata 

Released: 2006

Microsoft shocked the world by purchasing a controlling stake in Nintendo second-party powerhouse Rare in 2002 for $375 million – the equivalent of over $600 million today. Viva Piñata wasn’t the first game the studio made for Microsoft – the fine-but-forgettable Grabbed by the Ghoulies came first in 2003 before Rare dropped two solid launch titles for the Xbox 360 in 2005: Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero. But its first hit for Xbox was 2006’s Viva Piñata, a life sim in which you grew and maintained your garden full of adorable piñata-fied animals. It spawned a sequel, a Nintendo DS handheld version, and a short-lived animated series. In hindsight, it was ahead of its time; it would seem to have great potential to thrive now in a world where Animal Crossing is a massive hit for Nintendo. But even back in the 360 days, it was Rare’s first defining moment for its new platform.

18. Lost Odyssey

Released: 2007

No Xbox has ever successfully gained a real foothold in the Japanese gaming market, but you can’t say that Microsoft never tried. Arguably the company’s biggest push came in the Xbox 360 era, when one of the biggest overtures made to Japanese audiences by the American behemoth came when it partnered with legendary Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi to help fund his new studio, Mistwalker. The two JRPGs Mistwalker created for Microsoft live on in Xbox lore: Blue Dragon, a cartoony adventure with art by another legend, Akira Toriyama, came first, arriving in Japan in 2006 and in the Xbox’s home market in the US in 2007. But it’s the second game – the darker, more serious, Unreal Engine-powered, four-DVD epic called Lost Odyssey, that showed the rest of the industry that the Xbox could go toe-to-toe with Sony and Nintendo in the JRPG department and wasn’t just a Western RPG powerhouse. No one questioned Xbox’s RPG credentials after that.

17. Dead Rising

Released: 2006

Capcom’s Dead Rising, which was produced by Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune, was something we truly hadn’t seen before: a triple-A game set inside a gigantic mall with literally hundreds of characters on the screen at any given time. And those characters, of course, were zombies. So, so many zombies. Dead Rising was not only one of the defining games of Xbox 360’s first year, but it showed us that the “HD Era” was truly capable of giving us gaming experiences that we’d never had before.

16. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved

Released: 2005

Xbox Live Arcade – the brilliant indie-turned-small-scale-and-indie game publishing program that offered a curated selection of bite-sized games on a weekly basis (who remembers Xbox Live Arcade Wednesdays?) – did as much to define the Xbox 360 as any triple-A game did. The most-downloaded Xbox Live Arcade game ever was Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. Geometry Wars’s was simple: survive as long as you can while blasting larger and larger waves of encroaching enemies. For a lot of gamers, when they think of Xbox Live Arcade, the first thing they think of is Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.

15. Ninja Gaiden 2

Released: 2008

PlayStation may have had God of War, but Xbox had Ninja Gaiden. The first in Ryu Hayabusa’s modern revival helped legitimize the Xbox as a viable platform for Japanese-developed games, and the Xbox 360-exclusive sequel upped the bar for the more powerful new console. It brought more weapons, more bosses, and more resolution, now that Ninja Gaiden was in HD (fun fact, though: the first game natively supported widescreen way back in 2005!). Oh, and it also served up a whole heck of a lot more blood thanks to the new dismemberment system. 

Ninja Gaiden 2’s action was far more violent thanks to your new ability to slice off the arms, legs, and heads from your foes. It only augmented an absolutely sublime fast-action combat system, even if having all those additional pixels couldn’t quite fix the troublesome camera. Sadly, this would prove to be series mastermind Tomonobu Itagaki’s final contribution to the franchise, but at the time, it asserted the Xbox 360 as the place to go for the best of any genre. 

14. Crackdown

Released: 2007

Crackdown – the brainchild of original Grand Theft Auto creator David Jones – set players loose inside a comic-book world as a would-be superhero with no rigid structure. Instead, you had total freedom to go anywhere and try anything in its Pacific City sandbox. You could go straight for the top kingpin of one of Crackdown’s gangs. You probably wouldn’t be powerful enough to take them down at that point, though – you got literally stronger in Crackdown by defeating enemies and picking up experience orbs of different flavors depending on how you took them down, such as with melee combat, in a vehicle, or with a gun. Eventually, you’d be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, lift cars over your head and throw them, and more. In a time when there weren’t a lot of good sandbox games not named Grand Theft Auto, Crackdown brought something fresh and fun to the table.

13. Forza Motorsport 3

Released: 2009

Why Forza Motorsport 3 rather than Forza Motorsport 2, which was the first entry on the Xbox 360? Easy: because FM3 is where Forza passed Gran Turismo as the best simulation racing series in the world. Visually, the series always set the bar high, and its second lap on the 360 kept the bar high there too. And the car list was never in question. But what Forza Motorsport 3 added was the Rewind mechanic that allowed you to press Y to reverse the action a few seconds if you crashed or took a turn too fast. You could turn it off, of course – Forza Motorsport was always nothing if not customisable – but it added a thick layer of accessibility and approachability to what had always been a pretty buttoned-up, serious racing sim. The Rewind feature only added to what I always called the “soul” of Forza – my vague but I think accurate way of describing the joy and spirit that Forza Motorsport always brought to players, whereas Gran Turismo, for all its simulation racing brilliance, always felt more…clinical. Forza Motorsport 3 was Turn 10’s turning point where the studio passed the competition and never looked back.

12. Minecraft Xbox 360 edition

Released: 2012

Minecraft originally started as a indie game created by Markus “Notch” Persson, which circulated in public alpha form in 2009 before launching in full in 2011. It garnered a growing audience quickly, but things really exploded in 2012 when Minecraft arrived on Xbox 360. Eventually, in 2014, Microsoft would go all in by buying Minecraft outright, leading to the cultural phenomenon we know today where a blocky, crafting sandbox has become the highest-selling game ever and later into a very successful movie. But Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition was an essential part of the franchise’s rise as it was the foundation to the monumental success of the game.

11. Left 4 Dead

Released: 2008

Valve and partner Turtle Rock Studios (who Valve acquired mid-development) practically started the four-player PvE trend in shooters with Left 4 Dead, a brilliant, sometimes scary, and always replayable co-op shooter that had you proceeding through several five-level-long campaigns, surviving waves of zombie attacks thrown at you by the AI “Director” while you clamored for each map’s limited resources, seeking the shelter of the safe room at the end of each chapter. Its mechanics were simple but fun, and thanks to the Director’s always-changing placement of common and special enemies alike, it never quite played the same way twice. Plus, running an entire campaign only took 60-90 minutes to complete. It’s almost impossible to think about now in our current age of longlive-service games that try to keep you on a hamster wheel, grinding to the next unlockable or piece of content. But Left 4 Dead both respected your time and made great use of it.

10. Limbo

Released: 2010

Though Limbo didn’t come along until over halfway through the Xbox 360 generation, it is nevertheless the standard-bearer for what Xbox Live Arcade was capable of. Developer Playdead’s side-scrolling physics-based platformer told the harrowing story of a boy who…well, no one’s quite sure, really – there are many intriguing theories as to what the real story of Limbo is! But what’s not up for debate is that Limbo is about as close to perfect as a video game can get in terms of mechanics, art, animation, audio design, and polish. Limbo defined Xbox Live Arcade, cementing Microsoft’s already established small-games platform as one of the very best things about the Xbox 360.

9. Rock Band

Released: 2007

If you were a gamer in the late 2000’s, odds are you were either an active participant in the plastic-instrument rhythm-game craze that Guitar Hero started, or you knew someone who was. Developer Harmonix Music Systems built Guitar Hero but then sold it to Activision. That’s when the developer advanced the exploding genre forward with Rock Band, a four-player co-op game whose multiplayer experience is truly unlike anything else you’ve ever played. A singer, guitarist, bass player, and drummer worked together to hit the right notes as they came down the note highway, truly and emphatically delivering a convincing replica of the feeling real-life musicians have when they play together. Rock Band was truly remarkable, not just because of its core gameplay and multiplayer chemistry, but also for its commitment to music. Harmonix added to the game’s music library with new songs via DLC every single week for eight years. Rock Band may not have been exclusive to the Xbox 360, but it was nevertheless a defining game for the console, standing out amongst the even heavier hitters coming up higher on this list that arrived at the same time.

8. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion

Released: 2006

When you play the first-person RPG The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion for a bit of time, when you first emerged from the dungeon and into the open world for the first time, you spun your character around and your jaw dropped. A truly next-gen, high-definition world was all around you, and in it you could go anywhere and, seemingly, do anything. Oblivion dropped so soon after the Xbox 360 launched – just four months into the new Xbox’s lifecycle, and while PlayStation gamers were still stuck on the PS2 that wasn’t capable of anything that looked remotely like it – only made Bethesda’s first console-on-day-one role-playing game that much more incredible. While the Xbox 360 had a very good launch lineup, nothing at the time (or really in hindsight) made you have to buy the console immediately. Oblivion changed that. You had to get a 360. You had to see this. And the gameplay lived up to the graphics. Oblivion packed dozens of hours of open-world medieval-fantasy role-playing, spanning many memorable quests and locations. It was a generation-defining moment.

7. BioShock

Released: 2007

Before BioShock, stories were mostly secondary in first-person shooters. Sure, there was Halo, but that was the (wonderful) exception to the rule. But Bioshock had the depth of a great book, the plot twist of a memorable movie, and the gameplay to match the very best of any action game on the market. It was set in a failed undersea utopia – the city of Rapture – where visionary Andrew Ryan’s dream turned into a nightmare. As players discovered Rapture, they found it overrun with creepy monsters as well as curious Little Sisters and the Big Daddies. It’s not exaggeration to say that BioShock elevated video game storytelling, and the fact that it was initially released as an Xbox 360 exclusive only helped further define the second Xbox as a must-have entertainment delivery box for your living room.

6. Fable 2

Released: 2008

While it wouldn’t be fair to say that Fable 2 was the Xbox 360’s Zelda, it was a large-scale action-adventure RPG and a unique consequence system that would change your character’s physical appearance based on how good – or evil – you chose to be. Fable 2, for the most part, delivered on the remaining promises made by renowned designer Peter Molyneux’s first attempt on the original Xbox. You could wander the world of Albion with your trusty dog at your side, battling Hobbes, leveling up by actually doing jobs, and building relationships including romantic ones with townsfolk. There had never been and still hasn’t been anything quite like Fable, and the series was at its best with Fable 2, its first Xbox 360 entry. 

5. Grand Theft Auto 4

Released: 2008

The GTA 4 build up was a big deal. The biggest franchise on Earth was going next-gen, with a brand-new game engine and the power of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 to allow for more open-world possibilities than ever before. And while the previous 3D games had all debuted as PlayStation exclusives, GTA 4 would ship day-and-date on Xbox 360. But Microsoft wanted more than that. So they paid for timed exclusivity on both of GTA 4’s brilliant expansion packs: The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. Then-Xbox boss Peter Moore even announced a monumental moment, he rolled up his sleeve to reveal a “tattoo” of the Grand Theft Auto 4 logo. Suddenly, the Xbox 360 was the best place to play the first next-gen GTA game, and both expansions were so good that I can’t imagine anyone regretted their choice.

4. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Released: 2007

Call of Duty 2, which was a day-one launch title for the Xbox 360 and truly started Call of Duty’s ascent to becoming the biggest FPS franchise in the world, but Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was the one that really sent the series into the stratosphere. It almost seems silly to say now, but before Modern Warfare, Call of Duty had only ever been a first-person shooter set in World War II. Infinity Ward not only jumped the timeline forward, but everything else, too. The unique single-player campaign was full of shocking moments, while the multiplayer built on top of the previous games that the franchise was already known for and paired with some truly memorable maps to make it a must-play. COD 4 and the juggernaut known as Halo 3 – combined with the effortlessness of connecting with your friends on Xbox Live – cemented the Xbox 360 as the place to play multiplayer shooters.

3. Mass Effect

Released: 2007

Mass Effect promised players a true space story – a trilogy of games where your choices would affect your relationships with other characters and lead to your own unique outcomes and endings. Your character would import into the subsequent games in the promised trilogy, and in the end it would be unlike any role-playing game you’d ever laid your hands on. And the first Mass Effect – an absolutely visually stunning Unreal Engine-powered epic from the RPG kings at BioWare – delivered on its end of the bargain. The Mass Effect universe felt lived-in, with myriad alien species all interacting with each other at the Citadel, a galactic hub at the virtual center of the universe. You played as a male or female Commander Shepard, a human who becomes the first of their species to be welcomed into the ranks of the Spectres, a group of space sheriffs given incredible power and leeway to protect the galaxy. No one had ever seen anything like Mass Effect before, and the fact that it came from the same development team that gave us the original-Xbox-exclusive Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, meant that Xbox truly had some of the world’s most talented RPG developers on its side.

2. Gears of War

Released: 2006

You know a game is a big deal when its developers can ask Microsoft to double the amount of RAM in the Xbox 360 before the console makes it to market – and Microsoft says yes. Gears of War was perhaps the best-looking action game anyone had ever seen when it was released just 11 months into the Xbox 360’s lifespan. Gears of War dropped us onto the planet Sera, into the middle of a war between humans and the Locust, an underground-dwelling alien race hellbent on obliterating humanity. Gears of War is a war story, and while its Active Reload system, delightfully vicious chainsaw finishing moves with the Lancer rifle, and engrossing team-based multiplayer were all top-shelf, it’s arguably its empathetic characters that secured its place in gamers’ hearts. Marcus, Dom, Baird, and Cole – Delta Squad – really felt like brothers, and we became emotionally invested in their wartime journey. It’s no wonder Microsoft later bought the franchise for $2 billion.

1. Halo 3

Released: 2007

When the day finally came in September of 2007 for the hugely anticipated Halo 3 to drop – nearly two years into the new Xbox’s life – it couldn’t have been a bigger deal. The original Xbox’s Halo 2 had infamously ended on a cliffhanger, and Halo 3 was built to resolve it –giving plenty more hardware power to the devs. Story-wise, it gave players a satisfying conclusion that closed the book on Bungie’s trilogy, but not before Chief told us, “Wake me, when you need me.” Meanwhile, multiplayer picked up where Halo 2 left off, augmenting the best online multiplayer infrastructure with Forge, a new level-editing tool that let players build their own maps. In hindsight, this is where Halo peaked in terms of success, popularity, cultural relevance and impact.

But the Xbox 360 eliminated any remaining doubt after all these legendary game releases as to its dominance in the games industry.