Original Xbox backwards compatibility? "Nothing's impossible"

We're an impatient lot. No sooner did Microsoft get 104 backwards compatible Xbox 360 games out of the door, then everyone started asking whether we could get all our original Xbox games running, too. The Inner Circle Podcast put the question to Mike Ybarra, Director of Xbox Platform, who was heavily involved in the 360 backwards compatibility project - and it seems it's one he's been asked before:

"Oh boy, you sound like Phil [Spencer, Head of Xbox] talking to me. He tweets quite a bit about original Xbox. I'll say nothing's impossible. Right now we are very focused on trying to get as many Xbox 360 games as possible on Xbox One as we can [...] We're not looking at original Xbox games on Xbox One just yet.

"It's certainly very challenging - getting 360 to work was incredibly challenging, and really a multi-year engineering investment. Going all the way way back to the original would certainly challenge the teams, but we're fortunate enough to have a great back-compat engineering team who loves to take on challenges - and I'm sure that they'd love that one as an opportunity to go look at."

Ybarra mentions the Xbox UserVoice polling system throughout the discussion - as ever, if enough people asked, original Xbox compatibility could well become a discussion amongst the team. You can listen to the full podcast here (the back-compat chat begins at around the 19:25 mark):

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