The Xbox 360 is the successor to Microsoft's Xbox video game console, developed in cooperation with IBM, ATI, Samsung and SiS.
The promotional campaign for Xbox 360 began on March 14, 2005, with the opening of an alternate reality game called OurColony.
Xbox Live Gold has the same features as Silver, plus online game playing capabilities.
John Carmack stated at QuakeCon 2005 that the Xbox 360 has "the best development environment I've seen on a console".
E3 2006 was the first large-scale show after the console's launch and there, the first trailer for Halo 3, the third game in the flagship Xbox series of shooters, was premiered. Fable 2, a sequel to the Xbox's best-selling RPG, was also shown, along with Alan Wake, Mass Effect and Too Human. Bill Gates spoke of plans to integrate several Microsoft services into one entity with Live Anywhere.
The Xbox 360 takes a new approach to hardware compared to its predecessor. The CPU, named Xenon-CPU (or XCPU) at Microsoft and "Waternoose" at IBM, is a custom triple-core PowerPC-based design by IBM.
The console features 512 MB of 700 megahertz GDDR3 RAM on a 128-bit bus.