Xbox Takes Backward Compatibility on the Road with Xbox Cloud Gaming

While Microsoft has bred numerous innovations with the Xbox brand, from including an internal hard drive in the original Xbox to the Achievement system you likely either love or loathe, there is some well-trodden ground that they’ve never dipped their toe into: handheld gaming.

Handheld gaming has been around for nearly as long as the medium itself, though the concept really took off with Nintendo’s Game Boy in 1989. And a lucky thing for them, too, as their handheld business — and exclusives like Pokémon — has arguably helped buoy the company when navigating the rough waters they sailed with the likes of the GameCube and Wii U. Their latest console, the Switch, has effectively doubled down on the prospect that’s done so well by them over the years.

But it’s not as though they’ve gone unchallenged in the field. Early on, Atari attempted to bite back with their Lynx portable, while SEGA tried to take handheld gaming to the next level with the Game Gear — both featuring color graphics that the Game Boy lacked, but at the cost of battery life. When those challengers left the field, SNK had a go with the NEOGEO Pocket and NEOGEO Pocket Color, while Bandai happened upon the WonderSwan, a newer creation of the Game Boy’s original creator, Gunpei Yokoi. Sony would eventually get into the on-the-go game as well, first with the PlayStation Portable in 2004/2005, and again with the PlayStation Vita in 2011/2012, only to drop it — and the whole prospect of handhelds — only a few years later.

Throughout all this, one major home hardware manufacturer stayed out of the handheld arena: Microsoft. Not that they didn’t consider it; back in 2015, former Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Division president Robbie Bach had a new book coming out, and was telling sites such as Polygon and IGN about the considerations of getting into the handheld space, even going so far as to call the hypothetical device the “Xboy.” In the end, though, they would decide it wasn’t worth it.

But this was before the explosion of mobile gaming…

“The irony is, the thing we missed about that was it should have been a phone. What we should have done was the Xphone, not the Xboy. I don’t think it would have been an obvious thought at the time. This was still pretty early. This is three years before iPhone. But if we’d been prescient enough to start looking at phone technology, looking at touch screens — if we managed to think that all through, we might have said, ‘Oh gosh, we should do an Xphone.’ That could have been … who knows? Hindsight is 20/20.”

In an ironic twist, things have managed to come back around to that. Microsoft has been testing their Xbox Cloud Gaming service with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members, which allow users to stream Xbox games to their mobile devices. Well, provided you’re not saddled with an iPhone (*raises hand*) or iPad, though word is they’re working on that for this year.

This past week, they announced that the library of games available to stream has gotten bigger with backward compatibility reaching Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Now, a whopping 16 games from the original Xbox and Xbox 360 are available to play on Android phones and tablets:

• Banjo-Kazooie
• Banjo-Tooie
• Double Dragon Neon
• Fable II
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Gears of War 2
• Gears of War 3
• Gears of War: Judgment
• Jetpac Refuelled
• Kameo
• Perfect Dark
• Perfect Dark Zero
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• Viva Piñata
• Viva Piñata: TIP

Interestingly, while Xbox Cloud Gaming typically uses normal controls (seen with the mobile device clip attached above), Microsoft has gone a step further by adding touch controls to three of these games: Jetpac Refuelled, Viva Piñata, and Viva Piñata: TIP.

The Studio Head of Rare, Craig Duncan, spoke with Xbox Wire about this approach to certain titles:

Xbox Wire: How did you decide which titles would get the touch control treatment?

Craig Duncan: We took the lead from the Cloud Gaming team, as they did the implementation and shared with us to play and test. It’s always tricky, as touch is different than a controller and certain games with fewer inputs do lend themselves better to a touch experience than others. Jetpac Refuelled is a good example of fewer inputs, but if touch is the way you as a player want to play any game, we want to make sure it works as well as it can. Of course, we also welcome feedback from our players.

As far as the importance of backward compatibility to the preservation of gaming, Duncan offered this:

It’s essential. There are just a bunch of inherent complexities when generations and platforms change and being able to relive games you played previously and fondly remember is important. Those games contain memories and moments you can share with others and being able to do that quickly by just selecting the game in Xbox Game Pass is easy and just works with no fuss. The alternative is firing up an older console, finding all the cables, and preserving the discs so they still work (which some collectors do as a passionate hobby). Making the history of games available to everyone and making your game library a click away is awesome!

It’s a view I certainly appreciate, let me tell you that much, and has made me that much more of a fan of Xbox over the years. Of course, I think they still have a way to go with including some titles, and hopefully the backward compatibility team gets back around to adding more titles across the board. After all, having older games run better is a terrific thing, but still only ranks in second behind having them run in the first place.

With all that said, it’s interesting to see Microsoft not only enter the handheld market, but in their own way and on their own terms — terms that no doubt make better business sense for them than investing resources into an “Xboy” and butting heads with Nintendo.

It’s actually kind of funny: For a time, it appeared that mobile gaming might overtake dedicated handheld gaming consoles that provided a more traditional gaming experience on the go. Now, Microsoft is using those same devices to provide the kind of experience that they had been chipping away at.

Incidentally, I wonder if Microsoft has the rights to put something like Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge on here. It was made for the Game Boy Advance, so it’s designed with handheld gaming in mind, but was published by THQ, which has allegedly been a problem for companies like SEGA when it comes to re-releasing such games from that library.

Anyway, for the full interview with Craig Duncan, click here, and if you would like to see Xbox’s official announcement of backward compatible titles on Xbox Cloud Gaming, then click right here.

Thanks for reading!

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David Oxford is a freelance writer of many varied interests. If you’re interested in hiring him, please drop him a line at david.oxford (at) nyteworks.net.

David Oxford

David Oxford, or “LBD ‘Nytetrayn’,” as he is sometimes also known, is a freelance writer of many varied interests who resides in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. If you’re interested in hiring him, please drop him a line at david.oxford (at) nyteworks.net.

For a full list of places to find him online, click here.