I'm not spoilering this, because it doesn't need it.
As I mentioned before, some of my favorites times playing video games were playing Goldeneye with my friends, all huddled around a 19 inch TV. We'd play up in one of the church's upstairs classrooms for hours. I wasn't any good, but it was still a lot of fun.
When Halo first came out, the first thing everyone started noticing was the unparalleled polish that went into the multiplayer segment. There were all sorts of engaging game variants, and on a slightly larger TV (which greatly helped the experience, if I'm allowed to be honest), it supplied all the entertainment we'd need during several Mountain Dew-fueled nights between my friends and I.
One interesting feature of the Xbox was its rarely-used ability to link to up to three other xboxes. This allowed up to sixteen players to play in a single game. Next, we just had to find sixteen players.
We only managed it twice. Both times were honest to God events. Cramming twenty people into a couple rooms, borrowing couches, TVs, and setting up equipment took some time, but once the games started, it was all worth it. Constant carnage, in-jokes that will never die (one girl my brother fancied was dragged along and coerced into playing and given the name 'Grumpy'. It turned out the only people she was any good at killing were teammates, so she ended with a -5 score). My dad - not exactly a video game fan - even got in on things, hopping into a tank a blowing up people left and right, weirdly parlaying it into the top score for one round.
With 90% of the cast of the games having disappeared to every corner of the earth, the odds of ever recreating those games is nearly nil. Besides, Xbox live and its ilk have largely destroyed the idea of getting tons of people to come over for that sort of thing anymore, which is sad, because I have never had even half as much fun playing on Xbox live as I did those couple of days.
