Ever since the wave of AI-assisted gaming development has filled our feeds, the head chiefs at XBOX have seen this growth and are keen to take full advantage of it, going as far as opening up a new sector of their business called XBOX LABS, run by Scott Van Vliet, with a goal to build random things in the open using the popular decompiling, hacking and fan-made development methods that so many people are consuming these days.
Quite simply, XBOX LABS is a "small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We’ll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating".
This was announced recently on October 13th, and already Scott and his team are hard at work building things, and the first project they've been messing around with seems to be a selection of customised dashboards for modern consoles, featuring the iconic XBOX 360 Blades dashboard that many 2000 gamers obsessed over back in the day, and I was one of them. There was nothing more statisfying that seeing your Gamerscore get bigger and bigger every time you turned on the XBOX 360.
Credit: XBOX
Scott teased this on social media, more specifically X and even Asha, CEO of XBOX, shared it with a sense of approval. The video shows what looks like a possible new feature for modern XBOX consoles and PC users that offers a selection of retro dashboards to choose from, such as Blades from 2005, the "New Xbox Experience" from 2008, more renowned for featuring your XBOX Avatar, and also the slightly more minimal, box "Metro" dashboard from 2011.
It's clear this is still in early testing, and likely something they've messed with in the past, but XBOX LABS are looking at it for a reason, and the reaction on social media is obvious, that gamers want it, like, yesterday. This is a good sign for all of us retro gamers who have wanted minor things from XBOX, and perhaps with the new Labs part of their business, we'll see some new inventions and features that come to fruition next year that would have taken up too much of XBOX's money and time, originally.
