Gaming Industry should Embrace Emulation says Phil Spenser

Replaying your childhood video games isn’t as simple as re-reading a favorite book or re-watching a film you’ve already seen 100 times. And Phil Spencer, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Gaming, believes that embracing Emulation with open arms is the solution to this problem. Because the exact copy you read as a child may be enjoyed again and again as you grow older, books are probably one of the most resilient mediums. Likewise, the concerns with relying on technology for media consumption start to appear in movies, TV shows, and music.

You are trying to listen to an audio cassette or see a VHS film 20 years later unless you have a working cassette player and VCR on hand. Thankfully, those sectors often embrace every new technology that emerges and re-releases content in various formats regularly. Of course, having to buy your favorite movies over and over isn’t ideal.

Still, when the industry migrated from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray to streaming delivery, you could always locate a copy of Star Wars, for example. Unfortunately, as technology advances, the video game business has been far less adaptive.Trying to access those titles on current consoles and gaming machines is hit or miss unless you have a collection of classic hardware for playing original versions of games.

For example, Emulation (software that can play older games by pretending to be older hardware) is used by Microsoft’s latest-generation consoles to play old Xbox 360 and original Xbox games, as does Nintendo through the Switch’s online service, which now allows the handheld console to play NES, SNES, N64, and even classic Sega games.