Microsoft officially announces the restart of the Xbox backward compatibility program, which may bring official Xbox 360 / original console game emulators to Windows 11 PCs.

IT之家 March 12 news: At the GDC 2026 event held today, Microsoft officially announced the relaunch of its Xbox Backwards Compatibility Program, aiming to let players play more classic original Xbox / Xbox 360 games on Microsoft’s current and future Xbox platforms.

However, Microsoft did not specify the exact form of this Xbox backwards compatibility plan; the original wording was: “Xbox Backwards Compatibility Program is returning in some form later this year（Xbox Backwards Compatibility Program will return in some form later this year）.”

For comparison, in reality, Xbox One and Xbox Series X｜S cannot directly run original Xbox / Xbox 360 games. Microsoft’s previous “Xbox Backwards Compatibility Program” was essentially a custom virtual machine environment built for modern consoles, along with a series of adjustments made to games so that the old games’ graphics APIs and instruction sets could work on modern consoles. Some games would also introduce higher frame rates / resolutions at the same time.

Therefore, if players ever tried inserting the adapted classic Xbox 360 / original Xbox game discs into today’s Xbox consoles, they actually could not run the games directly. They had to download from the cloud the compatibility-adapted versions that had already been tuned by developers; the game discs only served to verify the legitimacy of the copy.

And earlier reports indicated that Microsoft’s new Xbox backwards compatibility plan would allow players to play classic games directly on the device. Coupled with the fact that all rumors point to Microsoft’s new Xbox being essentially an esports mini console running Windows 11 with an Xbox interface, this so-called “relaunch of the Xbox backwards compatibility plan” likely refers to Microsoft’s future launch of official original Xbox / Xbox 360 game emulators on Windows 11.