If you were holding out hope for Microsoft to extend its backwards compatibility update all the way back to the original Xbox, it might time to give up on such a pipe dream. Before the company rolled out its huge ‘New Xbox Experience’ update for the Xbox One earlier this month, Xbox boss Phil Spencer had said, when asked about such a possibility, that: “I don’t think it’s silly. I ask the BC team this question a lot. Need to finish 360 BC for now.”
However, in recent comments on The Inner Circle Podcast, Xbox Director of Program Management Mike Ybarra said that such a project would be “very Challenging.”
We’re not looking at original Xbox 1 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 very challenging. Getting 360 to work was incredibly challenging, and really a multi-year engineering investment going all the way back to the original certainly would challenge the team. We’re fortunate enough to have a great engineering team, who loves to take on challenges, and I’m sure they would love that one as an opportunity to go look at.
Ybarra’s comments may not have put the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, for such a project ever being green-lit, but if there’s currently no plans to do such a thing, then we could be waiting a rather long time for it to come to fruition, considering Ybarra’s own comments on how time consuming it was to do for the Xbox 360.
Ultimately, Microsoft have to weigh up the whether such a huge task would be worth undertaking. There’s sure to be plenty of gamers out there that still own a vast library of 360 games, but the original Xbox is a distant memory to some.
Would you like backwards compatibility for the original Xbox come to the Xbox One, or do you think it’s simply not worth the hassle? Let us know in the comments below.