Digital Foundry has plenty in store for its coverage of the Xbox 360 launch's 20th anniversary, as the DF Retro team would have it no other way. We kick off our look at the console's emerald anniversary - an appropriate gemstone for Microsoft's preferred colourway - by unboxing a very green, very original Xbox 360 box.

This Xbox 360 "Core" console variant, as acquired via eBay for a "hefty ransom" was advertised as a wholly unopened, untouched and unused console - a selling point that made us wonder whether it would even boot. But boot it did, which we confirmed after getting the box and its contents to DF Retro lead John Linneman for an unboxing time capsule of sorts.

As we pick through plastic bags and cardboard buttresses, you'll notice Core differences from its higher-priced "Pro" launch sibling like a lack of installed hard drive, a lesser video cable, a USB Type-A wired gamepad and a lack of silver highlight on its optical disc tray (which we quite prefer on an aesthetic level). As a German variant, we also document this set's German-specific power adaptor and its composite-to-SCART video signal adaptor.

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You are about to enter a new world of amazing games and digital entertainment. Welcome to Xbox 360. (Or change the language in this very first Xbox 360 menu to get such a statement in something you are more fluent in.)

After cataloguing the box's contents and commenting on the system's early history, we plug this Xbox 360 into a compatible CRT and, as displayed in a 50Hz container, dive right into the long-absent "blades" interface. These blades marked the Xbox 360's earliest years and even adorned the 360's original instruction manuals (which we pick through in this unboxing, of course). Future OS updates eventually relegated the blades to a sub-menu, while the primary menus came to bury users in Mii-like avatars, streaming-service nudges and adverts.

As viewed from an external camera, our initial testing focuses on the breezy power-on process (no lengthy EULAs here!), the original menu interface and the remarkably fast loading times for Ridge Racer 6's DVD. Our future DF Retro coverage of the Xbox 360 will benefit from direct capture of a 720p signal in what may very well be the cleanest original-firmware Xbox 360 capture ever uploaded to the internet.

We look forward to showing you so much more Xbox 360 launch celebration in due course. Until then, please enjoy our previous coverage of another 20-year-old event: our commentary-filled version of the Xbox 360's formal worldwide reveal at E3 2005.