Phil Spencer Wants to Bring Old School Xbox Emulation and Game Pass to PC

One of the big announcements from Microsoft at E3 this year was their plans to support OG Xbox backward compatibility on Xbox One. As we know already, many 360 games are compatible with Xbox One, but this week they announced their expansion on that with the classic Xbox library. But big boss Phil Spencer of Xbox explained what else he wanted in terms of availability.

Talking with PC Gamer, Spencer was asked if we might see that same emulation on PC in the future.

"Yes." He said.

Fortunately for their interviewer, he expanded on this point after letting the words hit their mark.

"I want people to be able to play games! [Emulation] is hard. [Xbox] 360 specifically is a PowerPC chip, emulated to x86, which is difficult. It's a little bit easier when you have a fixed spec, when you think about Xbox, Xbox One S, and Xbox One X. And you think of the variable specs of the PC space, so you're taking a fixed-spec PowerPC emulator and then moving it over to run on PC, so there's a lot of work there.

The original Xbox, OG Xbox, is a little bit easier, because that was an x86 chip it was running on. Obviously when we think about UWP and the ability for games to run across console and PC, we're getting closer. I want developers to be able to build portable applications, which is why we've been focusing on UWP for games and even apps that want to run on multiple devices.

So I think we've got work to go do there, but I think it's in our future."

In lamen's terms, he wants to do it and he thinks it's possible, but it would take a good amount of work. He also noted that he'd like to see the Game Pass on PC as well.

"I've said I want to bring Game Pass to the PC. The team doesn't love it when I pre-announce things, but I definitely want to bring Game Pass to PC," Spencer said.

Good old Phil, getting excited and telling people his plans early. As we learn more about the inevitable release of these two features, keep it tuned to GameZone for their official announcement in the future.