This week E3 has been full of surprises, one of the most notable being Microsoft’s announcement regarding the Xbox One and how we’ll finally be able to play older Xbox 360 games on it.
The software giant has revealed that the Xbox One is going to be backwards compatible for ‘some’ Xbox 360 games. Microsoft will be offering more than 100 titles at the launch of the new update later on in 2015, and those lucky few who are members of the Xbox One preview program can test a selection of these games as of yesterday.
Microsoft has built an Xbox 360 emulator that will run on the Xbox One named, quite simply “Xbox One Backward Compatibility” and it seems Microsoft’s creative juices were on full power for the creation of this software and ran out of steam in naming it!
On the plus side, Microsoft has promised that there will be hundreds of the older 360 games available to be played on the Xbox One.
The system will work as follows:
As soon as you launch an Xbox 360 game on your Xbox One the software will start-up a virtual version of the Xbox 360 console to play the game, within your Xbox One. If you have a disc that is on the supported list then it will simply download the game and ask you to keep the disc in the tray for validation purposes. If you have digital copies of Xbox 360 games then they will automatically show up.
Seeing as there are well over a 1000 titles for the Xbox 360 currently available, it is entirely possible that based on Microsoft’s “Hundreds” hint; most popular titles will be on the list.
Of course, publishers will have to agree to having Microsoft list their titles and emulating them.
“We have to do packaging and validation work on each title to make it available through Xbox One backward compatibility,” explained a Microsoft spokesperson.
This is not the first time Microsoft has emulated Xbox games of course. Microsoft built an emulator for the Xbox 360 ten years ago now, would you believe it! Which allowed it to run some of the original Xbox games. At launch it was a small list that started with titles like Halo, but the company expanded it over two years to support more than 450 games, so watch this space!