Back in December, Xbox’s at-the-time vice president of next generation and now vice president of Xbox Jason Ronald had spoken about the company’s plans to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Xbox with an expansion to backwards compatibility features. As caught by The Verge’s Tom Warren, Ronald took to GDC to reveal that “some iconic games from the past” will be playable this year.
While he didn’t reveal too many details, Ronald did note that these games are going to be played “in entirely new ways.” While this could essentially mean anything, including cloud streaming, according to ResetEra user NateDrake, this could be a hint at classic Xbox games becoming playable on PC.
“As part of our 25th anniversary later this year, [the game preservation team] will release some iconic games from the past that are now going to be able to be played in entirely new ways,” said Ronald at GDC, accompanied by a slide showing off quite a few games. While this Game Preservation slide includes several multi-platform titles, one seemingly noteworthy inclusion is party game Fuzion Frenzy, which was originally released on Xbox in 2001 and has never been ported to other platforms.
NateDrake has indicated that bringing old Xbox games to PC has been Microsoft’s goal for “over a year”. The company has seemingly been working on achieving this for quite some time. “I think I made a comment about it before; but MS back-compat team has wanted to bring & make your OG Xbox and Xbox 360 digital library playable on PC.”
It is worth noting that, along with Xbox, Microsoft has also been focusing on Windows as a gaming platform for some time. We recently saw the results of some of these efforts with the Xbox Full Screen Experience on the ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X handheld systems. These improvements will also likely play a large role for the next-generation Xbox – codenamed Project Helix.
A report from back in October has indicated that Microsoft is trying to make Project Helix a hybrid machine that sits somewhere between PC and console. This means that, along with running new Xbox games, the machine will also seemingly be capable of running third-party stores, like Steam or Epic Games Store. This also means that Microsoft can’t subsidize the cost of the machine, since it isn’t guaranteed money from game sales off its own digital store. The bill of materials of the system is also noted to be quite high, coming in at over $999.
At GDC, Ronald had also announced that the early versions of the Project Helix development kit would be sent out to developers next year. The machine will allow studios to figure out its custom AMD chip, and how it works alongside software technologies like DirectX and FSR.
“Project Helix is powered by a custom AMD [system on chip] and co-designed for the next generation of DirectX and FSR to unlock what comes next,” he said. “It delivers an order of magnitude leap in ray tracing performance and capability, integrates intelligence directly into the graphics and compute pipeline, and drives meaningful gains in efficiency, scale, and visual ambition. The result is more realistic, immersive, and dynamic worlds for players.”
