Featured Image Credit: My Retro Life/YouTube
There's a school of thought that thinks all bits of new tech look pretty much the same.
This is particularly true when it comes to software and user interfaces - we're all becoming used to samey app logos and design languages.
That's what makes it so trippy going back to watch someone booting up the original Xbox for the very first time in 2001, and seeing the incredibly out-there design of its start-up menus.
It was all swirling green graphics and chunky buttons with dramatic music and, as the YouTuber My Retro Life said in their video, it "felt like turning on a nuclear reactor - just going through the setup process, the system's UI felt dangerous".
That's a really fun way to design a console, but it's also not really familiar to modern gamers, whose consoles are way more standardized and similar.
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After all, the menus don't even slightly change if you upgrade from an Xbox One to an Xbox Series X, despite the huge jump in power and fidelity. Xbox said this was a good thing, but there's no denying it's a little boring.
While the PS5 might have been given a new interface, it's still familiar to PS4 users, and hardly as dramatic and kooky as that original Xbox setup either.
You can tell that this older way of doing things has struck a chord in the comments, too.
One viewer said: "Back when everything wasn't 'minimalist' and had some real punch and personality. Love it!" And since this comment has over 1.4 thousand likes, you can tell others agree.
There are also plenty of people lamenting the death of these sorts of design ideas, and wondering what led developers to abandon them - although we know that accessibility and ease of use are probably the big reasons there.
Some viewers aren't too sympathetic, though - there are comments blaming the changes on "incompetence" and on "distractions like social media and smartphones", which is a surprisingly old-school attitude.
Still, it's clear that there are plenty of people who want a return to the era of a bit more personality in their gaming consoles, and that's no surprise.
It's not just gaming, either - take a look at the Samsung Galaxy S24 next to an iPhone 15, if you want to see just how similar phones are getting to each other, too.
