Xbox has expanded its backward compatibility program to PC, with four original Xbox games available to start.
As part of this, BLiNX: The Time Sweeper, Conker: Live and Reloaded, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, and Fuzion Frenzy have launched on PC. Notably, Xbox says this marks the first time this quartet of games has (officially) been available on PC.
All four games can be purchased for $9.99 each and are also included with all Game Pass plans. This is more flexibility than what’s offered on PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2, where the bulk of retro games are locked behind subscription services without the option to purchase them à la carte.
It’s also worth noting that these games can be played on supported handhelds as well, including the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X. Further, these titles are part of the Play Anywhere program, which means a single purchase will let you play them across Xbox consoles, PC and handheld and with Xbox Cloud Gaming.
Additionally, Xbox is adding some customizable graphics settings, including up to 4x resolution upscaling, VSync support, Fullscreen and Windowed display modes, anisotropic filtering, and enhanced anti-aliasing.
Finally, Xbox confirmed that it will be bringing more games and features to Xbox Backward Compatibility on PC in the future. In the meantime, though, the company revealed that “one of the top fan-requested features,” Achievements, are coming to original Xbox games on both console and PC later this year.
Xbox first launched backwards compatibility on Xbox One in 2015 and has been expanding the program in the years since. In total, there are now hundreds of Xbox and Xbox 360 games available on Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One.
This is certainly an important initiative, given that the gaming industry has infamously been poor with game preservation. To that point, a 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation found that nearly 90 per cent of games released before 2010 weren’t available on modern platforms. And more recently, we’ve learned that Sony is set to kill physical PlayStation games in 2028, which is another blow to preservation.
With all of that said, Xbox has undoubtedly been hurting the preservation of the art form in other ways. In particular, the company just axed 1,600 employees with plans to cut an additional 1,600 over the next year. Besides ruining employee’s lives in favour of investing many billions into AI slop, these layoffs have resulted in the immeasurable loss of institutional knowledge from those who had been at the affected developers for many years.
For instance, id Software, the historic, beloved developer of the Doom series, lost two-thirds of its team, including a veteran who had been there since the ’90s with co-founders John Romero and John Carmack. And more relevant to this story, Xbox even laid off the lead architect for backward compatibility after nearly 40 years of being with the company.
And so, while it’s great that Xbox has this ever-growing backward compatibility program, it would be even greater if it stopped laying off thousands of talented developers.
Image credit: Xbox
Source: Xbox
