Phil Spencer On Xbox One Backwards Compatibility

In the latest issue of Edge, head of Microsoft’s Xbox division Phil Spencer has broken his silence since this year’s E3 and spoken about what he thinks about the Xbox One backwards compatibility, which he revealed at E3 several weeks ago, which The Nerd Stash previously covered.

Speaking to Edge, Spencer said that he desperately wanted to leak the news about Xbox One backwards compatibility for several months before E3, saying:

“This, for me, as a gamer and as somebody who cares so much about the brand, has been the hardest thing about not leaking it,” he says. “I’ve wanted to tell people, ‘Hold onto your 360 games!’ There were a hundred times where people had to stop me from tweeting that out over the past six months, because as I would see a game that works I wanted to tell people: ‘Keep it – don’t sell that! Even if you sell your 360, keep your games!'”

Spencer also took the time to explain how the Xbox team managed to get Xbox 360 games to work on the Xbox One, saying that the Xbox One effectively runs some Xbox 360 software, which is how some features that were available on Xbox 360 were available on Xbox One. According to Spencer, how they were able to get 360 games to work on the Xbox One was to basically trick the console into thinking it was running native hardware. Spencer said:

“The team took the approach of effectively running the whole 360 OS on the Xbox One, which is why you can play with Live and everything else. That was the most difficult thing: could we get the 360 OS to boot so it thinks it’s running on native hardware? The nice thing is that the developers don’t have to do anything. They approve the game, we run it through a test pass, obviously, to make sure everything’s fine, then we have to wrap it up as an Xbox One game so the Xbox One knows you’re actually running a game.”