: >"The Xbox was a powerful machine, offering highly detailed
: graphical capabilities that would be on par with low end PC machines at
: the time"

: The Xbox's NV2A could trade blows with a GeForce 3 Ti500, which was
: considered by many to be the best-performing consumer graphics card
: available in late 2001. It's not like people were building their PCs up
: with crazy multi-GPU setups either; 3dfx SLI was a thing of the past, and
: Nvidia SLI and AMD Crossfire wouldn't exist for a few more years. At the
: moment of its launch, the Xbox's graphical capabilities were competitive
: with good PCs.

: >"It also advanced Bungie’s abilities in pushing for new gameplay
: ideas; Marathon was the first major FPS title to contain a backstory, told
: through computer terminals throughout the game."

: Not really. Story integration wasn't a new thing for Bungie, and of course
: you have things like System Shock existing.

: >"This paved the way for what we have today, simultaneous releases
: for PC and consoles, often the same game either merely ported or barely
: altered to now encompass both console and PC users. Halo was one of the
: first titles to showcase that crossover appeal, especially after the PC
: release of Halo in 2003."

: Kicking off port projects post-launch was already a common practice for
: successful games at the time, and Halo wasn't even particularly expedient
: about it. Variants of Doom existed on several consoles within a year of
: its PC launch, for instance.

Based on the phrasing on the first point, I think they [i]meant[/i] to say high-end rigs? Doesn't really make sense that they use the verbiage around it but say it was low-specced given the other graphic comments.

As for forgetting Bungie's history... I feel like that's where people's PC bias shows. Pathways was and is Mac-only, as far as I know, and that's the first game which I think feels "modern" in that it has a surface level story of interest with a much richer background than is initially apparent (the game itself has aged badly as all the Wolfenstein-era games have, and I would love to see Bungie return to it with an updated FPS/survival horror remake.)