How time passes! It seems like yesterday when two computer and video game enthusiasts, myself and the good Matteo "Cubiq", met on the microsoft.public.it.xbox newsgroup chatting passionately about the new Microsoft console, recently landed in Italy, then deciding to create a site dedicated to their passion, MondoXbox.

And instead 20 years have passed since that November 2002: it was a very different world from the current one, without social networks, without smartphones (at the time I had with me the legendary Nokia 7110, also improperly called "the phone of the Matrix") and where to watch videos of the games you had to visit dedicated sites with Flash players like GameTrailers ... connection permitting!

In these 20 years MondoXbox has had a long evolution: started as a small and unknown amateur blog, it has collected month after month more visitors while other enthusiasts offered to collaborate in the drafting of news and articles, until the traffic load became unbearable for the small hosting service we were using. So the " Gamesurf period" began, with the famous Tiscali portal (managed then as today by our friend Luca Gambino) who hosted us for a few years supporting all the technical expenses in exchange for the placement of some advertising banner.

MX continued to grow by acquiring audiences and collaborators also thanks to the birth of our forum, until we felt able to support ourselves with advertising revenue by renting a server of our own. From this moment, while remaining an amateur site and also thanks to the appreciation of the public, of Microsoft itself and of the publishers who decide to support us with the sending of games (even in the development phase, to be tried strictly on "debugging" consoles), we begin to "feel great": we begin to visit the great videogame fairs such as the Games Convention in Leipzig then became gamescom in Cologne and the E3 in Los Angeles , while we also manage to create a core of "special correspondents" to be sent to all non-trade fair presentations organized by publishers and developers.

A long period during which, both within the editorial staff (obviously virtual, with members who have contributed from all over Italy, from Sicily to Switzerland) and among you users, many friendships have been born that have sometimes continued in the real world, while we have also seen our families expand with the birth of small, new "boxers". In the meantime, the same Xbox landscape has evolved, going from the first, powerful but expensive console to the glorious Xbox 360, then passing through the "multimedia" parenthesis of Xbox One, up to the real rebirth of the brand with Xbox Series X|S, Game Pass and Cloud Gaming.

The last phase of our evolution took place in January 2021 with the launch of our Twitch channel, conducted by a handful of intrepid streamers who keep you company daily chatting about all the news and showing you the games of the moment. Since that November 2002, over 70 editors have taken turns creating over 70,000 news stories and 3,500 articles including reviews, previews and various specials, while publishing 30,000 videos and 150,000 images, while we have broadcast over 500 Twitch streams. Not bad!

All this while remaining purely and proudly "boxing", resisting any temptation of "multi-platforming" and thus proposing ourselves as an oasis of information for Xbox fans, safe from console wars and animated discussions between fanboys. The only experiment in this sense that we allowed ourselves was, in 2013, the launch of MondoPlay, designed as a parallel reality dedicated to PlayStation fans: the site came out, however, when that segment of users had already clearly found a home at the large Italian portals, thus failing to break through and reach the numbers of MX. For this reason and for the lack in the editorial staff of real passion for the Sony platform (that we are boxers have I already said?), just today, on the occasion of this anniversary, we decided to close it.

Today the web part of MondoXbox no longer has the popularity of the past, primarily because many now prefer to get information through social media and YouTube but also because, between personal commitments and other complications, we can no longer publish as once dozens of daily news, preferring to focus only on the most important ones; however, we all remain super-fans of video games and especially of the Microsoft platform, and we will continue to keep you company for a long time to come.

We can only thank you for the great affection and esteem you have shown us in all these years, hoping that you will continue to follow us and that you want to join us in our Happy Birthday wish to MondoXbox!