Answer: Xbox

At first glance, the Xbox seems notable largely because it was the first console offering from Microsoft and it introduced variety and competition into the console gaming market. The Xbox was also the first game console with an internal hard drive (which opened the door for downloadable content and local storage of media). While noteworthy, what the Xbox really did, with the inclusion of an Ethernet NIC, was make online gaming easily accessible.

The Xbox was a member of the sixth generation of home gaming consoles, right along with Sony’s PlayStation 2, Nintendo’s GameCube, and Sega’s Dreamcast. What distinguished the Xbox from the other sixth generation consoles was that, right out of the box, it was ready to connect to an Ethernet network. The other consoles had accessories, in the form of clunky add-ons (or hardware updates in later models), that made online and/or LAN play possible, but they lacked the elegance of the Xbox’s built-in network interface. Setting up a massive Halo LAN party, thanks to the Xbox’s built-in NIC, was as simple as taking your Xbox to a friend’s house and jacking into their network.

Furthermore, you could easily play against your friends online with Xbox Live thanks to the built-in connectivity. Although we take the idea of console makers providing a gaming network for granted now, in the early days, it was highly unorganized. Microsoft led the pack with Xbox Live while other console makers dropped the ball. In the early days, for example, Sony relied on game companies to provide their own servers for online play. As a result, the online-experience when using a PlayStation 2 wasn’t uniform, the quality of game play varied wildly, and as game companies folded or redirected their efforts elsewhere, they took the game servers with them.

The other console makers eventually caught up, and the seventh generation consoles all included either Ethernet or Wi-Fi connectivity as well as a unified game server, but in the early days of online play, the Xbox reigned supreme.