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Grand Theft Auto and the biggest moments in video game history

Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA V) made headlines as the biggest video game release of all time, selling more than $1 billion worth of copies in three days. But GTA V didn't get to this landmark moment by itself. Find out more moments that changed the course of video game history in this list, from most recent to the beginning of (video game) time.

4. Xbox Live connects players around the world

Imagine you wanted to play your console video games with your friends, but you weren’t much for getting up and heading over to a friend’s house to play. Or perhaps you wanted to play with someone across the globe, but couldn’t find a way to connect.

In 2002, Xbox found a way to do this with Xbox Live. This new Xbox console included a broadband feature that connected games online so that multiple people could play the same game at a time, from their own living rooms. You could add your friends to a “Friends” list to see when they were online and play along with them, or find people around the world to play whenever you wanted. Instead of playing against the game console, you played against people.

While similar services had previously been available on PCs, this was a big step for console gamers, and it has been heralded as a huge success for Microsoft (the maker of Xbox) and a big change to the game console market. As of 2013, Microsoft reported more than 46 million members on Xbox Live.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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