It’s been an exciting few days with regards to keeping retro gaming alive, what with CEX announcing their seven-day Retro Repair Squad plans and modded consoles dropping into our newsfeeds. Still, the news that there’s now a Microsoft team preserving retro titles could well top them all.
Xbox have been in the news for a whole host of other reasons lately, what with critics and gamers alike questioning their plans with regard to porting their titles to other consoles and the future of both the brand and their handheld plans.
Still, we’re only concerned about retro news here at Retro Dodo, and now that Xbox’s President Sarah Bond has been pinned to set up a team to preserve our favorite titles of old and that team has been confirmed by Microsoft themselves, we’re sitting up and paying attention.
While scouting through Windows Central, we discovered that one of her aims is to future-proof the Xbox libraries of today for the gamers of tomorrow, keeping retro classics and modern-day titles alike alive as we move forward onto new consoles.
There has been a lot of talk of late about the ‘death of physical games’ and a move towards digital-only consoles, and while that doesn’t really bother those of us still gaming on an N64 with all the physical cartridges we could dream of in our collections, it is a problem for the future generations who won’t know that thrill of going to a game store and peeling the plastic off a brand new game.
Sarah has further solidified Microsoft’s plan to create ‘the biggest technical leap ever in a generation,” with talk of AI gaming becoming a bigger factor in how the consoles will work. This is one writer who doesn’t enjoy the whole AI revolution, so I’ll be watching this with interest to see how much is actually integrated into the new console.
Preserving Xbox Classics
The Xbox was such a behemoth when it first came out on the scene. I should know; I was (and still am) a GameCube fan and was sure that it wouldn’t be able to knock the GameCube from the top spot as the ultimate console of all time.
I think we all know how wrong I was, and the Xbox went on to become a force to be reckoned with in the gaming world. While things haven’t looked too great for the company of late with the PS5 shifting ahead in sales and the Nintendo Switch hurtling past them both in a bid to top the leaderboard, we can’t forget about the epic series of games that have made Xbox a prominent name in gaming today. Think of a world without Halo or Fable, for crying out loud!
Sarah Bond recently explained that Xbox has ‘formed a new team dedicated to game preservation, important to all of us at Xbox and the industry itself. We are building on our strong history of delivering backward compatibility to our players, and we remain committed to bringing forward the amazing library of Xbox games for future generations of players to enjoy.’
One can only hope that this means Xbox original classics will remain available for people to play for many more years to come rather than appearing in another news article about gamers waking up to find their libraries wiped from existence. Let’s hope that other consoles and companies follow suit and make sure the games that got them to where they are today stay prevalent for future gamers.
You can quote me on that last line; I think that could be some of my best work.
