Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
The next phase of the unending console wars is starting to heat up, with Sony announcing that the successor to the PlayStation 4 will, predictably, be called the PlayStation 5.
But the news got us wondering: what will Microsoft call its next-generation Xbox console, which is currently using codename “Project Scarlett”? Unlike Sony, which tends to stick to strictly utilitarian names for its consoles — PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, with a few self-explanatory “Slim” or “Pro” variants thrown in — Microsoft has tended toward what we’ll call… creative branding.
There’s no obvious pattern. There was the original Xbox, which is a good place to start. But that was…