Last week, rumors began to circulate that Microsoft was making plans to work alongside the devs of Xenia, an unofficial Xbox 360 emulator, to bring more classic Xbox games to more modern platforms. It seems, however, that this one should never have escaped the rumor mill, as the devs behind the emulator have directly denied the report.
“The Xenia (and Xenia Canary, by extension) team is by no means associated with, nor working alongside Microsoft in any capacity,” contributor JeBobs says on the Xenia Discord. “Microsoft uses their own emulation to provide backwards compatibility on Xbox One/Series consoles and as such has no reason to collaborate with Xenia, even if they decided to bring these titles to PC.”
We know Xbox has been making some big investments in emulation as part of its efforts to “secure the future of game preservation,” with job listings for software engineers specifically set to “emulate legacy games on modern platforms” across the “Xbox and Windows gaming ecosystem.” It just seems that those efforts won’t include help from the Xenia devs.
And honestly, Xbox might not stand to gain much from working with Xenia anyway. Those developers have done great work in getting so much of the Xbox 360 library up and running on modern platforms, but the official emulator available on Xbox One and Series consoles is more stable, offers more robust enhancements, and is compatible with a much wider selection of games.
It’s very unusual for an official emulator to outstrip the efforts of fan developers – just look at the issues that continue to plague Nintendo’s emulation on Switch – but that’s exactly where we find ourselves when it comes to Xbox. Here’s hoping that Microsoft’s emulation work continues at this level of quality, and that we might indeed someday be able to access the whole of the Xbox library on PC.
Any time is a good one to revisit the best Xbox 360 games of all time.
