The eject button held all the power on the original Xbox
The most important button on the original Xbox wasn’t the power button: it was the button to eject the disc tray.
Conceptually, this doesn’t make sense.Of course the power button should be the most important button — it turns on (and off) the whole console. But that attitude is steeped in our understanding of modern devices, where our games and apps are far more self-contained than they were during the original Xbox’s heyday.
The console’s design reflects the eject button’s priority. The disc eject button is bigger, higher up, and surrounded by an LED ring in the console’s iconic green glow, drawing even more attention to it.
The reasoning here is simple: the original Xbox (like its contemporaries and predecessors) was useless without discs for games, DVDs, and CDs. Without the disc tray button, your Xbox was never more than a hulking hunk of green and black plastic. So Microsoft wanted to direct you toward that button because it meant that you had bought a game and were ready to play or that you wanted to swap out discs to play something else.
A powered on Xbox with a broken disc tray was a useless thing; an Xbox with an open tray was one primed and ready to launch you into your next video game adventure. Is it any wonder that Microsoft prioritized the disc eject button in its design?
It’s a legacy that exists elsewhere in the console universe. The original Playstation and PlayStation 2 both feature power buttons the same size as their disc tray buttons; the Nintendo GameCube does, too, emphasizing its lid eject button with an extra physical dimple that the other power and reset buttons lacked. But the original Xbox wins out in its glorification of the eject button by making it the single biggest and flashiest button
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