Xbox's big pitch for the future sure involves a lot of going backwards

If there was one consistent message from today's Xbox Games Showcase, it's that stuff is back. Crazy Taxi is back, Spyro is back, Persona 4 is back, the first Halo game is back, Gears of War is getting a back-to-basics prequel after its so-so open world reinvention, and even transparent electronics are due for a reprise.

The new ideas on offer also sported a decidedly nostalgic tone, whether we're talking about the familiar zombie-blasting of State of Decay 3 or the Bioshockish, extremely steampunk-coded Clockwork Revolution. Outside of those games, Microsoft's coterie of acquired developers has been constructing a tall tower of sequels, reboots, and revivals: Fable, Minecraft Dungeons 2, Modern Warfare 4's DMZ mode, and so on.

There was even an emphasis on less fuzzy memories—namely, the console wars. Both Gears of War E-Day and Clockwork Revolution proudly punctuated their trailers with the stinger that they're "Xbox console exclusives."

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Since they're both still coming to PC, presumably at the same time they release on Xbox, the only purpose of all that seems to be dunking on PlayStation. Similar to Sony's retreat from PC gaming, it's hard to know how many people outside of the hardcore fanbases will really care. As PC Gamer's Morgan Park points out in his article about that, it's a harder sell when games take half a decade to release. And in an era when Halo is on PS5 anyway, is the posturing even convincing?

The games themselves don't mark a new strategy, as they're the fruit of years of work, but Xbox's new CEO herself, Asha Sharma, seems keen to go back in time. She countered the notion that exclusivity is antiquated earlier this week, saying "in order to be a platform, you must have exclusive content and services." Xbox is all caps again, and the new logo is greener than Gak—this may not be an entirely new direction, but it feels like Microsoft is hoping to rope people in with a retro cool more than ever.

It's easy to see why, looking at the company's last few years. Microsoft Copilot's sudden unwelcome ubiquity turned out to be the mistake plenty of users identified it as. Microsoft has been named a pressure target, and Xbox a priority target, of the BDS movement protesting its involvement in Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians. That has led to turmoil within the Xbox umbrella and at least one high-profile dismissal at Microsoft. Shareholders are uneasy, employees have led protests, and even Windows 95 startup composer Brian Eno suggested the company was complicit in war crimes.

At the end of 2025, PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon declared it Microsoft's year of shame. Maybe that's why going backwards in time is so attractive for the tech and gaming giant: the first two Xbox consoles brimmed with potential, free from genocidal associations and hallucinating chatbots.

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But it's hard to imagine this 'good old days' act will be convincing for long if AI continues to encroach on everything the company puts out and it keeps courting blood-soaked controversy. If Microsoft really wants to go back to the golden years, it will have to start by jettisoning the baggage it's accrued in the intervening decades—in other words, actually moving forward.