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Xbox fans have long been eager to know what the next phase of the backward compatibility and game preservation program will look like, and Microsoft has finally dropped a pretty significant hint. In a post, Xbox Vice President Jason Ronald announced that the Xbox backward compatibility program is expanding to PC. Thanks to new emulation technology, Xbox games will run on Windows for the first time.
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This is still just the beginning, but it gives us reason to be optimistic about the direction the company’s efforts to preserve its gaming heritage will take in the coming years.
“Your library isn’t just a collection of games. It’s your personal history of epic adventures and cherished memories from the past,” says Jason Ronald. “And as gamers, we don’t want to lose our gaming legacy, even as technology continues to evolve and improve. We expect our game library to evolve alongside us and for us to be able to play these games in entirely new ways.”
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The first wave will include Blinx: The Time Sweeper, Fuzion Frenzy, Crimson Skies, and Conker: Live and Reloaded. All of these are classic games for the original Xbox, and Microsoft fully owns the rights to them. At the same time, there is every reason to believe that other games previously available only on consoles may eventually appear on Windows PCs and Xbox portable gaming devices, such as Xbox Ally.
In addition – and this came as a surprise, according to Ronald – these games will also gain support for Xbox achievements later this year. Given that the source code for these projects has likely been gathering dust for quite some time, it’s interesting to consider exactly how Microsoft was able to make this possible.
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The games will also receive a number of PC-focused improvements. These include Xbox Play Anywhere support with cloud saves, resolution scaling up to 4K, V-Sync support, full-screen and windowed display modes, anisotropic filtering, anti-aliasing, and other features that have long been standard on PCs.
It’s great to see that Xbox is actively promoting backward compatibility and game preservation. It seems that the era of disc-based releases is gradually coming to an end, but platforms like GOG offer DRM-free digital versions, and companies like Xbox continue to invest in porting console games to Windows PCs, complementing them with dual licenses for different platforms
So far, there are only four games, but we can assume (or at least hope) that their number will increase significantly in the future.
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