If you were on Xbox 360 in its heyday, my condolences. It was the wild west of gaming, when grown adults bullying kids on Minecraft was prime YouTube fodder, and Call of Duty lobbies were full of people screaming obscenities at each other. Online console gaming was a new phenomenon and, as it turns out, if you hand anonymous people hiding behind a Gamertag a crusty old mic, they’ll make you lose faith in humanity faster than you can swap to your sidearm.
Oddly, a lot of people are nostalgic for it, and even after being ridiculed online as a ‘squeaker’ by people who apparently slept with my mom, and after being kicked out of my secondary school clan for no-scoping instead of quickscoping, I kinda get it. There was a twisted kick to beating someone so badly that they sent you a voice message. And while I hope we can leave the Xbox 360 era firmly in the rearview mirror (though with harassment still a problem in gaming, I somehow doubt that), one fan has revived the old voice message system with a dedicated website.
“Xbox 360 let anyone record a voice message and send it to you,” Mike Wing posted on X. “Microsoft then killed this feature. So I brought it back.”
Ah, The Bad Old Days
Dubbed ‘Xbox Chatting,’ this website should be familiar to any of you poor souls who were trapped in the liminal hellscape of a Call of Duty lobby back in the day. You can set a custom Gamertag, update your profile pic, select from four backgrounds (black, Modern Warfare 2, Minecraft, and Halo 3), and adjust the mic settings to make it sound like you’re working from an underfunded call center set up on an airstrip — just like the good old days.
Once you’re ready, just hit record, and you have 15 seconds to cuss out your friends. You can then download the message, change its name, delete it, or share the link, and any messages you open and/or receive will be added to the ‘messages’ tab so you can listen to them whenever you like. It’s both weirdly nostalgic hearing people use this to insult random strangers online, and a little unnerving. Then again, there’s a reason my gut instinct with multiplayer games these days is to mute everyone. Thanks, Xbox.
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