A somewhat minor announcement from Microsoft yesterday that has me quite excited is that later in 2017 games from the original Xbox library will be playable on the Xbox One as an extension of backwards compatibility!
The original Xbox had a relatively short life – from late 2001, till 2005 and the release of the Xbox 360. The system died out quite quickly, but had, and still has, quite a following of people who love it for it’s unique feel. It’s the console that started a gaming empire not only for Microsoft, but for franchises like Halo. It also was the first console to successfully implement online gaming as something standard, with Xbox Live rolling out in 2002 a year after the consoles release. Gaming would never be quite the same following that.
The original Xbox, from 2001.
Back when Backwards Compatibility was announced for the Xbox One, a top executive for Xbox (I forget who, maybe Phil Spencer?) said that there was no technical reason that original Xbox games couldn’t be made to play on the Xbox One. Hell, if you really look at it it would be easier to get them to run than 360 games, as the 360 used a different processor architecture than the original Xbox and the Xbox One use, albeit the Xbox One being a vastly advanced machine.
It looks like they took some time to work on this, and decided that it would be something they could implement, and they did: at E3 this year they have shown 2 Xbox One consoles playing Crimson Skies, an absolute classic original Xbox game (and one of my favorites hands down) linked via system link.
Wow Crimson Skies in system link between an original Xbox and XB1 S! pic.twitter.com/Iv6WdBEW1w
— Peter 🏳️🌈 (@Holo_drone) June 12, 2017
Now, this brings up one critical thing: You will not, at all, in any way, shape, or form, be able to play these games online via Xbox Live. The original Xbox Live service was shut down in 2010, as it’s architecture was too limited for the growth of the Xbox Live service on the 360. This means these games will not be able to access your gamertag to be played online at all, just like how they have been on the 360 when playable on that console, or even on the original Xbox machine if you still have one – Live for it is dead, limiting some of the play-ability of these games, but at the same time perhaps making for a more “pure” game experience.
The one thing I really hate, beyond that, will be that DLC is also lost for these games, so you won’t be able to download all the expanded maps, or other content that was released for these games over the years.
Of course, if you have an original Xbox and have some skills you can solve this issue, but that’s something we’re not going into here.
All in all, I really like this: The idea of being able to play any xbox game (at least, in theory) on one console is awesome. Of course, I still advocate keeping your old consoles if you care about old games, but who am I to tell you what to do, right? Just making a suggestion 😉
I can’t wait to try this out.