Retro gaming revivals continue to leave Xbox in the past

More and more classic games are getting ported to modern systems or remastered for new audiences with each passing year, but why does it feel like every other platform is getting more retro love than poor old Xbox?

There's a simple answer to the question of why it seems like Xbox drew the remastered short straw — apparently, it did. Sure, a lot of the big ones have come our way, from Diablo II to the PS2-era GTA trilogy and including many of the notable retro collections we've seen, and even some of the lesser known revivals have landed on Microsoft consoles. But it's getting to the point now that whenever we get excited about the latest retro deep cut set for a comeback, we pretty much always expect to see Switch and PC mentioned and PlayStation seems typically likely to get in on the action, while it's often surprising to see Xbox supported.

We've missed out on some pretty big things recently — Square Enix in particular has been ducking Xbox big-time, with the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series snub depriving Xbox players of having the full mainline JRPG series bar the MMOs playable (until FFXVI ruins that next month anyway by launching as a PS5 timed exclusive), while reworked new versions of gems like Actraiser and Live a Live also popped up everywhere else but here, disappointingly. It doesn't stop there, either... Quantic Dream's Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy remaster wound up a PlayStation exclusive even though the original Xbox got the game back in the day, quirky Kirby-esque Game Boy platformer Trip World fell short of Xbox (although fellow handheld title Avenging Spirit did make the cut), the Psikyo shmup collections are set to hit PlayStation in a few weeks after launching on Switch a while back, and even Bill & Ted's Excellent Retro Collection ("We got totally lied to by our game titles, man...") couldn't find time for Xbox, and the list just goes on.

Xbox needs to be a bigger part of the retro renaissance

Part of the problem stems from a self-fulfilling prophecy we've seen so many times before — Xbox versions of games like these arriving after other platforms, leading to many fans picking them up elsewhere and the later Xbox releases underperforming, in turn causing publishers to rethink bringing future titles to the system at all. The latest such example is Gimmick! Special Edition, which was just confirmed to be missing its July release date on Xbox to arrive "at a later date," by which point anyone wanting to get their hands on this lost NES classic at last will likely already have done so... hopefully Sunsoft will recognise that this isn't a fair indication that demand isn't there among Xbox players and not skip the system with future re-releases, but we'll have to wait and see on that front.

While some classic games not making it onto other systems makes sense — nobody should be surprised to see Nintendo sitting on its back catalogue of NES/SNES titles and finding new ways to sell it to fans each generation, for example — the broader retro revival shows a wild lack of consistency even beyond some comebacks just skipping Xbox. The NIS Classics collections are a perfect example, bringing back some of Nippon Ichi's amazing PS2 and PS1 RPGs and tactics games, but only to Switch and PC... realistically, we were never going to see these cult classics come to Xbox when there aren't even versions for modern PlayStation hardware despite all six featured games being exclusively on Sony systems on original release. But there seems little rhyme or reason to some of what does and doesn't make it onto Xbox when it gets plucked from the archives, with massively popular franchises like Final Fantasy skipping over us with the Pixel Remasters of FFI-VI (even though all of the later mainline games bar XIV have been on Xbox, with most even doing stints in Game Pass) while the exact same publisher did see fit to grace us with the remaster of the comparatively obscure (at least to us Europeans, who never saw the original release) PS1 Chrono Trigger sequel, strangely.

Another part of the problem may also lie with Microsoft being the youngest of the three main platform holders, with both Sony and Nintendo having plenty of games that far predate Xbox, and these are often heavily promoted on their modern systems to this day. Players paying for Switch Online have access to a library of classic games from a bunch of older systems to ensure that the favourites of yesteryear are never out of the limelight, while Sony has been actively pushing some of its PS1 titles on each subsequent generation, now even including some in the PS Plus catalogue and updated to feature trophy support. Even though Xbox is the best of the three when it comes to true backwards compatibility, with Series X being the only modern console where you can put in a disc from three generations prior and have it play (assuming it's a supported title, of course) and some original Xbox games even making it into Game Pass, simply not having an archive that extends back beyond the early 2000s means publishers may see the systems with longer runs as better targets for reissued older games.

So how do we fix this? There's only so much we can do from the consumer side of things, so logically, the best place to start is going to be actually consuming where and when we can. While it might be understandable to want to vote with your wallet and not support companies who don't support the places we want to play, might it not be better to send Square a message by grabbing, say, Chrono Cross on Xbox to show that support for retro titles is alive and well on the platform so perhaps there could be an audience for those classic FF games here after all? Let's show some love to the Persona games after last year saw 3, 4, and 5 coming to Game Pass in the space of a few months — they say 'better late than never,' but if publishers are gauging interest by player counts, low late numbers could end up leading to never in the future if what we've seen before plays out again. Or perhaps we just aim to keep driving up player counts for proven wins like Rare Replay, once again showing that there's a love for old-school gaming on Xbox that extends far further back than the first Microsoft console? Outside of consuming, there are also plenty of opportunities to engage with publishers via social channels, forums, surveys, and so on asking to see some more love for Xbox, and while these can often feel like shouting into the void, they have been known to bear fruit on occasion so it's got to be at least worth trying.

What retro revivals have you been gutted to see skip Xbox, and which have you been glad that we actually got? Let us know down below!

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Written by Luke Albigés

Luke runs the TA news team, contributing where he can primarily with reviews and other long-form features — crafts he has honed across two decades of print and online gaming media experience, having worked with the likes of gamesTM, Eurogamer, Play, Retro Gamer, Edge, and many more. He loves all things Monster Hunter, enjoys a good D&D session, and has played way too much Destiny.