The eject button held all the power on the original Xbox

The disc tray was the most important button on the original Xbox.

This doesn't make sense. The power button is the most important button because it turns on the whole console. The attitude is steeped in our understanding of modern devices, where our games and apps are more self-contained than they were during the original Xbox's heyday.

The console's design reflects the priority of the button. The green glow of the console draws even more attention to the disc eject button, which is bigger, higher up, and surrounded by an LEDs ring.

The original Xbox was useless without discs for games, DVDs, and CDs. Without the disc tray button, your Xbox was a hulking hunk of green and black plastic. Microsoft wanted to direct you to that button because it meant that you had bought a game and were ready to play it or that you wanted to swap out discs to play something else.

A broken disc tray on an Xbox is not a good thing; an open tray is one that is ready to launch you into your next video game adventure. Microsoft prioritized the disc eject button in its design.

There is a legacy in the console universe. The GameCube has an extra button on its lid that is similar to the one on the disc tray buttons, but it lacks the power and reset buttons. The eject button on the original Xbox is the biggest and flashiest button on the entire console.

The story of how discs became less and less important in video games is told by the successors to the Xbox. Take the original console. The tray eject button is still visible on the side of the drive, but it is no longer in the spotlight. The power button is festooned with lights that could indicate connected controllers or critical hardware failures.

The shift in focus away from the disc drive was related to an increase inFunctionality for the console itself. You could download games to the hard drive of the Xbox, and use it to buy and rent movies and TV shows, even without a game. Over the course of the history, it is a trend that continues. The next two versions of the device, the Slim and the E, would put more emphasis on the power button and shrink down the disc eject button.

The Xbox One generation would go further. The scale between the console's lit-up, Xbox logo-shaped power icon and the tiny disc eject button reflects that. The Digital version of the console simply lacked a disc drive and the corresponding button.

The modern generation of consoles are from Microsoft. All games purchased and played on the Xbox Series S have to be done through Microsoft's store. The Xbox Series X shows a fundamental shift in how we interact with consoles. The power button is the same as it has always been, but the eject button is smaller. The discs are mostly vestigial. Modern games run on the console's internal drive. Buying a game on a disc just means avoiding an initial download so the base game files can be copied off the Blu-ray instead, and usually, that just precedes a lengthy download of patches and updates from the internet.

The history of the disc eject button is a story of how the video game industry has changed over the last four generations of consoles.