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The slim, glossy 360 with built-in Wi-Fi
Announced at E3 in June 2010 and in stores days later, the redesigned Xbox 360 S was slimmer, quieter, had built-in Wi-Fi and a 250 GB drive, and included a port for Kinect. Xbox Live, at $50 a year,...
You are the controller
Kinect launched on 4 November 2010 in North America as a $149 camera bar that tracked your whole body and voice for the Xbox 360. Microsoft sold eight million units in 60 days, hackers wrote...
A writer, a flashlight, and the dark
Remedy's Alan Wake, released in May 2010 for the Xbox 360, was a Twin Peaks-flavoured thriller about a novelist fighting shadows with a flashlight. It launched the same week as Red Dead Redemption...
$200 million on day one
Bungie's last Halo game launched on 14 September 2010 and made $200 million in its first 24 hours, the biggest entertainment launch of the year until Black Ops. Its multiplayer, Forge editor and...
$360 million in 24 hours, the biggest launch in entertainment history
Call of Duty: Black Ops, released on 9 November 2010, sold about 5.6 million copies in its first 24 hours in the US and UK, worth $360 million, then the biggest entertainment launch ever. Its...
Black-and-white, silent, and the summer's indie darling
Playdead's Limbo launched on Xbox Live Arcade in July 2010 as part of Microsoft's Summer of Arcade. Its monochrome silhouettes, giant spider and puzzle-platforming won dozens of awards and helped...
Tower defence with peashooters, on every platform in 2010
PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies, released for PC in 2009, arrived on the iPhone in February 2010 (selling 300,000 copies in nine days), then the iPad, Xbox 360 and DS. Its lawn, its zombies and its...
From Newgrounds Flash game to indie hit
Super Meat Boy, released in October 2010 on Xbox Live Arcade and in November on Steam, grew out of a 2008 Newgrounds Flash game. Its brutal platforming and a million sales made Team Meat a symbol of...
Rockstar's western, the game of the year for many
Red Dead Redemption, released on 18 May 2010, put Rockstar's open-world design in the dying American West. It won many game-of-the-year awards, its Undead Nightmare expansion in October became a cult...
Red envelopes, and a streaming-only plan
In 2010 Netflix was still mostly a DVD-by-mail company, but streaming was taking over: Watch Instantly worked on the Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, Roku and, from August, the iPhone. Netflix launched in Canada...
The little box that made Netflix streaming a habit
Roku's 2010 line, the HD, XD and XDS at $59.99 to $99.99, were the cheapest way to get Netflix Watch Instantly, Hulu Plus, Pandora and Amazon on a TV. With the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3, they turned...
Obsidian's beloved, buggy Mojave
Fallout: New Vegas, released in October 2010, was Obsidian's cult follow-up to Fallout 3: deeper factions and choices, and famously unstable at launch. It sold millions and is still cited as one of...
The suicide mission
BioWare's Mass Effect 2, released on 26 January 2010, opened the year with one of its most acclaimed games: a squad-recruiting space opera whose final mission could kill your favourite characters...
Two billion views a day, 360p by default
YouTube celebrated its fifth birthday in May 2010 by announcing more than two billion views a day. Users uploaded 24 hours of video every minute in March and 35 hours a minute by November. The player...
The world's biggest webmail, redesigned
Hotmail, by then branded Windows Live Hotmail, had hundreds of millions of accounts in 2010, many of them the first email address people ever created. A mid-2010 update added Sweep, Office Web Apps...
A touchscreen slider running BlackBerry 6
Launched in August 2010 on AT&T, the Torch combined a slide-out keyboard with a touchscreen and the new BlackBerry 6 operating system with a WebKit browser. It was RIM's answer to the iPhone at a...
The keyboard phone of the business world and the school corridor
The Bold 9700 was the definitive 2010 BlackBerry: a compact QWERTY keyboard, an optical trackpad, the red blinking notification light, and BlackBerry Messenger. Alongside the cheaper Curve 8520, it...
A 12-megapixel camera and the last hope for Symbian
The Nokia N8, released in October 2010, had the best camera on any phone, a 12-megapixel sensor with a Carl Zeiss lens and HDMI output. It ran Symbian^3, which reviewers found dated next to iOS and...
The cheap touchscreen Nokia that sold in the tens of millions
Nokia was still the world's biggest phone maker in 2010, and phones like the 5230, a low-cost touchscreen Symbian handset, were why. It sold enormously across Europe, India and Asia to people who...
Microsoft's controller-free camera for the Xbox 360 sold eight million units in 60 days and was hacked into open-source drivers within a week.
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Black Ops sold about 5.6 million copies in the US and UK in 24 hours, the biggest entertainment launch in history at the time.
