While Xbox Project Helix aims to make sure Microsoft's gaming division has a future, the brand also has 25 years of history to look back on. For the green machine's silver anniversary, Xbox has big plans on re-releasing some notable, as-yet-unnamed classics this year as part of a larger commitment to game preservation.
"The game preservation team has been working very hard in the background for a number of years," Xbox's next-gen VP Jason Ronald explains in a Game Developers Conference talk attended by GamesRadar+. "As part of our 25th anniversary later this year, they will release some iconic games from the past that are now going to be able to be played in entirely new ways. This shows our commitment to game preservation and enabling these games to be played by the next generation of players in ways that are very familiar to them."
Ronald does not detail what these games are or what the "entirely new ways" to play them will be. However, he does give a bit of insight into Xbox's broader philosophy on modernizing old games, which includes features like auto HDR and FPS boost.
"Not only do we want to preserve those games, but we also want to take advantage of the latest technology to enable them to be played in entirely new ways. I think about features like auto HDR as an example. Being able to put HDR on top of a game that was created before HDR even existed – it feels entirely new. It feels very fresh. I think about features like FPS boost, where we take games that were originally designed to run at a certain frame rate, and now we're able to run it at a significantly higher frame rate. It almost feels like a remaster for a lot of players."
FPS boost in particular is certainly a welcome upgrade for most players, though some of Xbox's recent steps in game preservation have been misguided, to put it generously. Last year, the now-former Xbox boss Phil Spencer talked up generative AI as a way to free games that were once shackled to older hardware – a thought that resulted in the most nightmarish way imaginable to play Quake 2.
Still, Xbox has seemingly been making investments in real game preservation, too. Job listings that also cropped up last year looking for experts to help "enable system level emulation across the catalog of Xbox content" as part of an effort to "to secure the future of Game Preservation." Far-reaching efforts to expand software emulation of old hardware are a much more robust way of keeping old games accessible today, and Ronald is certainly talking the talk in his GDC panel.
"We can't talk about games without talking about game preservation," Ronald explains. "Game preservation is deeply personal for me. I have so many personal stories of games that maybe my son has played, and it's like the game came out before he was even born. Yes, it might be an old game for me. It's a brand new game for him. I fundamentally believe that great games are timeless. Not only is this something that's deeply personal to us…being one of the largest publishers in the industry, one of the largest platforms in the industry, we feel a deep responsibility to preserve the games from the past."
