Xbox head Phil Spencer believes legal emulation is vital to games preservation

Phil Spencer hopes that the whole games industry can get better at preserving older titles, Axios  reported Wednesday.

Gaming has always struggled with making older games playable on modern consoles. There are many reasons for this, of course, but it often comes down to the difficulties with emulating old hardware. Regardless of the logistics, Phil Spencer wants everyone to get better at games preservation.

“My hope (and I think I have to present it that way as of now) is as an industry we’d work on legal emulation that allowed modern hardware to run any (within reason) older executable allowing someone to play any game,” Spencer said  via Axios. “I think in the end, if we said, ‘Hey, anybody should be able to buy any game, or own any game and continue to play,’ that seems like a great North Star for us as an industry.”

One of gaming's best eras #Xbox20 pic.twitter.com/Czh5qvH8oq

— Xbox (@Xbox) November 17, 2021

“I think we can learn from the history of how we got here through the creative,” Spencer said via Axios. “I love it in music. I love it in movies and TV, and there’s positive reasons for gaming to want to follow.”

Spencer can back up these ambitions with Xbox’s backward compatibility program, which recently added  76 original Xbox and Xbox 360 games to its library. Any excuse to make 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand  available to a broad audience  is good in my book.

The Xbox head isn’t too keen on NFT gaming as it stands, though.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.