The Xbox One is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, November 22, 2023. Below, we examine how its rough launch unexpectedly steered Microsoft toward embracing its legacy.
It's hardly an original observation, but the Xbox One predicted the future. Digital-only consoles are standard, and every console is a place where people not only play games, but watch TV and movies. However, the Xbox One did not release in the future we now live in, but when the industry was still haltingly moving toward its digital-focused future. Fairly quickly, Microsoft walked back its policy that games bought on disc would be connected directly to your Xbox account and removed the online check-in requirement. However, Xbox One's failed bet on the future that was to come had an odd side effect: Xbox began to look to the past.
In a deliciously ironic turn, backwards compatibility was set to be a launch feature on the Xbox One, but when Microsoft walked back the console's online focused policies, it had to be shelved. By 2014, the company began to develop an internal emulator to enable backwards compatibility in secret. After over a year of hard work, starting on November 9, 2015, you could play 104 Xbox 360 games on your Xbox One. Over the next few years, Microsoft added hundreds of games to the Xbox One's backwards compatibility list, from obvious hits like Halo: Reach to cult classics like Binary Domain.
This program meant that if you wanted to play a broad slice of gaming history on a single device, the Xbox One was a good bet. With it, you could explore the changing landscape of AAA franchises like Gears of War or Call of Duty. You could also check out indies from Xbox-backed classics like Super Meat Boy to more contemporary experiments like Anodyne 2: Return to Dust. It became my console of choice at the time because I wanted to carry my Xbox 360 collection forward. Obviously, unless you hack or mess with it, an Xbox One can't do everything. If you want a more kaleidoscopic look at retro games, or just want to play games released before 2001, you'll have to invest in other physical consoles or emulate them. Nevertheless, the backward compatibility program represented an investment in the past that no other major console manufacturer was doing at the time. Fortunately, the next generation continued this trend.
In the time since the Xbox One's release, every other company has effectively let go of backwards compatibility. While the Wii was an awkward portal into every game generation prior to it, the Switch is restrictive, offering only ports of Wii U titles and subscription-locked handfuls of approved classics. The PS5 can play PS4 games, but not anything further back without buying a subscription or making a new purchase. In contrast, the Xbox Series X|S can play at least some games from every other Xbox model in existence. Some of the games even feature improved performance as compared to Xbox One's emulation.
Now, it's worth not over-praising Xbox's approach to backwards compatibility. First and foremost, this was a savvy business more than anything else. Backward compatibility gave Game Pass a boost for including games from across Microsoft’s backlog like the original Gears of War trilogy and Blinx. Notably, the program doesn't include the thousands of games hosted as part of Xbox Live Indie, which all vanished when the service shuttered on October 7, 2017. Furthermore, of the 2,155 games commercially released for the Xbox 360, only 655 made their way to backwards compatibility--though some of the remaining gaps got Xbox One ports. The history that Xbox has emphasized is corporate in nature, and favors established hits for the Xbox 360 or the original Xbox.
Even by those standards, the approved games have obvious gaps. If you would like to play, for example, any of the three Armored Core games that came out on the 360, you'll have to buy an original model of the 360. Despite the franchise having a new critically acclaimed title, you'll have to shell out money and shelf space to check out any of the prior entries, if you don't want to emulate. There are no announced plans to bring more games into backwards compatibility, meaning that minor classics like The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena and Condemned 2: Bloodshot are harder for millions to play. In fairness, this is because many publishers and developers don't exist anymore or because specific games are tied up in legal issues with licensed music.
It's also worth noting that the Xbox's backwards compatibility program relies on digital check-ins. The Xbox servers read your Xbox 360 game disc, not to play off of it, but to prove that you have it and trigger a download from Microsoft's servers. If Microsoft decides in a future console generation to discontinue the program, you won't be able to play backward compatible games if you don't have them already downloaded.
True preservation will never come through a big business, because archiving and preserving cultural works is never really profitable. The Xbox One's backwards compatibility program was a stopgap rather than an effective effort at preservation. However, that is not to say that it's worthless: The Xbox One, and the Series X|S by extension, lets casual players and die-hards explore a variety of older video games on the same device that they play new ones on. For me, and I imagine for others, this has enabled a sense of exploration, of curiosity, about older games I haven't gotten the chance to try. In a medium like this, when novelty nearly always rules the day, that ability to look back is more than a little refreshing.