Xbox announced today that some original Xbox games, including Conker: Live and Reloaded, will be fully playable on PC via its digital store. These OG Xbox games will include new visual settings and features. And eventually, Xbox plans to add achievements to these older titles, too.
On July 22, Xbox confirmed that four original Xbox games will be made available to buy and play on the Xbox PC app. These games are BLiNX: The Time Sweeper, Conker: Live and Reloaded, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, and Bill Gates’ favorite video game, Fuzion Frenzy. It’s an interesting selection made up of Xbox exclusives and launch titles for the 2001 console. Xbox says that to start playing these games on PC, you just have to boot up the Xbox app on PC, buy one of them, and start playing. If you already own the game on console, you don’t need to buy it again.
However, according to Xbox’s minimum specs, it appears your PC must be running Windows 11. I’m still on Windows 10 and can’t currently see these games on the Xbox app. Boo.
“Your library is more than just a collection of games,” said Jason Ronald, VP of next generation (stop giggling) at Xbox. “It is your personal history of epic stories and treasured memories from the past. And as players, we don’t want to leave our gaming legacy behind even as technology continues to evolve and advance. We expect our library of games to move forward with us and to be able to play them in entirely new ways.”
Xbox says these PC versions will feature new visual options, including 4x resolution upscaling, VSync support, fullscreen and windowed modes, anisotropic filtering, enhanced anti-aliasing, “and more.”
And in the near future, Xbox says it will begin to add achievements to “select” original Xbox games on both PC and console. These first four games will get achievements in “the coming months.”
“This marks the beginning of a broader effort to preserve XBOX games from the past and bring them to PC over time,” said Ronald. I hope more original Xbox and Xbox 360 games get backward compatibility support across console and PC. And I hope Sony and Nintendo are paying attention and maybe follow in Xbox’s footsteps, because it is wild to me that Xbox is still doing a better job at making old games easily accessible and playable than either of those other gaming giants.