XBOX announced that Windows 11 would be able to play original XBOX games and announced 4 games that could be played today. The games being added are BLiNX: The Time Sweeper, Fuzion Frenzy, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, and Conker: Live and Reloaded. Not only that, but Achievements will be coming to select original XBOX games later this year. More games will be added later this year. These first games are part of an early-release rollout. XBOX CEO Asha Sharma posted on X:
New tech shouldn’t mean leaving behind old games. Today XBOX is launching new tech so you can play the OG XBOX games you own, but now on PC and handhelds
I had a blast playing Crimson Skies on my XBOX. It was probably my second most played game, right after Halo 2. Conker has been one of those series I’ve wanted to check out, but just haven’t yet. Achievements would definitely increase my interest in playing them now.
How It Works
You have to have a digital version of the game or XBOX Game Pass to be able to launch these games from the XBOX App. Nothing was announced for how this works yet, but “launching new tech” means that these aren’t just PC ports of the games. With Project Helix going to support Steam, while being backward compatible, I wonder if that could mean all XBOX consoles will come to PC? If that is the case, if you have a PC, do you need a Helix at all? I already had a hard time justifying a XBOX Series X since you can stream Series X games to the XBOX One and for the first couple years, there was supposed to be no exclusives for the console. This turned out to be false as The Medium came out in December and it was a Series X exclusive that released a few months after the console.
Disc to Digital
XBOX has reportedly been preparing a feature to basically turn discs into game keys. It would entail that the key is attached to your account, if that same key is used on someone else’s account, then it gets attached to theirs and you don’t have that key anymore. This new feature would pair nicely with the PC Backward Compatibility feature.
