While there has been a lot of talk about the Xbox One team’s work on backwards compatibility, Phil Spencer and the rest of the higher ups had been talking about the fact that they didn’t know if they would be able to bring the original Xbox games to the current generation console. This comes hot on the heels of there being a ton of game from the Xbox 360 generation now playable on the Xbox One.
Now that the move to get Xbox 360 on the Xbox One is largely over, or at least the biggest push to do so is over, the team might just be taking a second look at getting older games on there as well. Xbox and Windows Platform Director of Program Management Mike Ybarra talked about future plans on a podcast hosted by The Inner Circle. “We’re not looking at original Xbox games on Xbox One yet, and right now the focus is making more 360 games work, but I would say that nothing is impossible.”
“Certainly, it would be very challenging. Getting 360 to work was incredibly challenging, and really a multi-year engineering investment going all the way back to the original [Xbox] certainly would challenge the team. We’re fortunate enough to have a great back engineering team, who loves to take on challenges, and I’m sure they would love that one as an opportunity to go look at.”
There certainly isn’t any guarantee that the team will eventually bring Xbox One games to the Xbox One but at least the team is thinking about it.