Sooner or later everybody asks themselves the same question: How did we get here? After 100 issues of Official Xbox Magazine, we asked the same thing. The games may change (or at least get progressively larger numbers tacked onto the end of them), but the spirit remains the same as it was the day the magazine was born.

The actual birth of the magazine involved a lot of boring contracts and stuff, but Future US president Jonathan Simpson- Bint remembers one of the most important moments. “Before the Xbox officially debuted at E3,” he recalls, “We were in a bar with a bunch of the [Microsoft] hardware dev team drinking, and I asked one of them how heavy the box was going to be. He very calmly said, ‘Well, you tell me.’ And he pulled a finished piece of hardware from his backpack under the table and placed it in my hands! The whole table and much of the bar were reduced to utter silence. I think I said, ‘Oh, sh*t...’”

Former editorial director Matt Firme remembers a slightly more…extreme version of our first encounter with Microsoft: “I could see spider-legged mechs out in the street tearing into the ground, ripping up phone and cable lines, crushing cars, and hammering down utility poles. A lady across the street ran out her door shouting and was immediately gunned down into a pink mist. Soldiers grabbed me and threw me onto my couch, and a cigar-chomping guy in a government-issue black suit came in, glancing around my house as though he disliked my furniture. Finally he ordered his thugs to stand me up, and he stabbed a pen at me. ‘Microsoft Legal,’ he snarled. ‘Sign this NDA.’”

The day-to-day happenings in the early months of OXM weren’t quite so dramatic once we started cranking out issues. “I don’t really remember if I ever turned in any publishable copy during my tenure,” muses original features editor Dan Egger. “Thankfully, I didn’t need to. Everyone was so talented I just had to look busy. That process consisted mostly of retyping spam emails until the day my ‘R’ key broke, which forced me to switch to writing my autobiography of Barbara Walters. I also played a lot of Halo.

“To be fair, Halo is probably why I was fired, or it perhaps was the out-of-date Barbara Walters jokes, or maybe I quit...It was a long time ago. But man, it was great while it lasted.”

Our old stomping grounds — a two-story office complex in Brisbane, California, that uncannily resembled the Halo 2 map Foundation — was a grungy, frat-house mess, complete with stained worn-out carpeting, beat-up furniture, and dust bunnies the size of chihuahuas. But, being the red-headed stepchildren we were, we weren’t even afforded those luxuries. Instead, we were excommunicated to a separate cave on the bottom floor of the building, where we were free to do our “work.”

Such as? Well, those Pyramid of Destructions videos on the demo disc didn’t make themselves. “Every month, we painstakingly stacked Master Chiefs into a pyramid and fired rockets at its base,” remembers former disc producer Dave Rees. “The result was a hilarious ragdoll shower of Chiefs. It was very tedious, but the results were spectacular.”

Free from the watchful “why are we paying you?” eyes of our bosses, we had just enough time to put out a magazine each month and get back to what we really wanted to do: play Halo. Every day at 5pm — and often earlier on Fridays — Marty O’Donnell’s haunting call to battle would wash throughout the office. And the routine rarely changed: We played Capture the Flag on Blood Gulch with all vehicles turned on. We had a standing gentlemen’s agreement (routinely violated) that nobody would block the teleporters with the Warthogs or Ghosts. But nobody ever said anything about cheating.

Former executive editor Frank O’Connor explains the crew’s early frustrations: “When we were playing LAN games, we’d all rush for power weapons,” he begins. “Snipers, rocket launchers, and so on. But for weeks, Dave Rees was absolutely destroying us, no matter what we’d do. And he refused to say how. We’d see him, a speck in the distance, and then ‘pop-poppop,’ we’re dead. He could shoot us out of tanks, off of ridges, long distance, it didn’t matter. ‘How are you doing it Dave? We know you’re cheating, just explain how.’

“He wouldn’t ’fess up. Eventually we discovered that the pistol was a three-shot death machine that could destroy anyone from anywhere on the map, but by that time, Dave had finished his transgender surgery and from then on wished to be called Davina. He stopped playing Halo and now exclusively plays Peggle and Wii Fit. If I recall correctly.”

The early days of the Official Xbox Magazine were full of blown deadlines, a carefree attitude, and a whole hell of a lot of Halo. We were a microcosm of the bigger Xbox picture — as obsessed with Halo as the fans we served. We all lived in the Ring World; for us, there was Halo, and then there was Everything Else.

Fortunately, these days the Everything Else is even better than it used to be, and we’re all still here, meeting every month in these pages to talk about it.

So how did we get here? We turned left at Blood Gulch and kept on going.