Best: Achievements
Before the Xbox 360, consoles didn’t track what games you played beyond whatever saves you created while playing stuff. But with the Xbox 360, Microsoft invented a whole new concept: Video game achievements. The idea was that every game on Xbox 360 would offer a series of challenges that could be completed for points and that the console would track all of this. I was one of the many people who spent a lot of time grinding for those achievements.
There was something so cool about a game rewarding you for doing something really hard, weird, or surprising while you played it. And being able to look back at your video game accomplishments and history years later was also rad. 360’s achievements were such a popular and smart concept that basically everybody else—including Sony and Valve—copied the system and it’s still around today.
