Dusting off and turning on the machine, I pressed eject and found NBA Live 2005 in the tray, no worse for the wear. Then I examined the contents of the hard drive. As I suspected, my friend had not erased it. All of his gamesaves were intact, all missions ready to be resumed. The Xbox, the only console of its generation with an on-board hard drive, had a vast capacity for its day, and here was preserved his entire video gaming career. Had he given me a PS2 or a GameCube, which used 8 megabyte memory cards, I probably would not have seen all 100 saves he made in Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, which spoke to its hold over him on a weekend seven years ago, like a page-turner keeping him up into the small hours. Indeed, my friend was playing his Xbox mostly past midnight, probably when his wife was asleep. Nearly all of the gamesaves were stamped between 11:30 p.m. and 2 a.m.
