Inside Xbox’s backward compatibility journey with Series X development chief, Jason Ronald

techradar.com:

When Microsoft ruled out backward compatibility during the Xbox One’s launch in 2013, it just seemed like par for the course. 

At the time, consumers were generally expected to start their gaming collection from scratch whenever a new console came out and hold on to the necessary hardware if they ever wanted to replay older games. 

There was also a common consensus in the industry that people probably didn’t want to play last-gen titles, something which Microsoft has since categorically disproved. 

In an interview with TRG, we spoke with Xbox’s director of program management Jason Ronald about the team’s backward compatibility journey, the challenges they faced along the way, and the importance of game preservation in the future.

In 2015, Microsoft rocked E3 with a seismic announcement: backward compatibility was coming to Xbox One. Fans could look forward to playing Xbox 360 and original Xbox games again, and even use the original disk, play over Xbox Live, and access their old save files if they’d been uploaded to the cloud. 

The raucous cheers that erupted throughout the Microsoft Theater on that day ultimately solidified one thing: people still wanted to play these older games that were cherished by the gaming community.

Jason Ronald, director of program management at Xbox, still remembers those cheers today, and how they helped invigorate the team behind Microsoft’s ambitious project.

“When we announced it – it's probably the biggest reaction I've ever seen at one of our press conferences,” Ronald says with a smile. 

“It just really gave confidence to the team. Like, we're on the right path. We're listening to the fans, we're listening to the community, and they love what we're doing. And that's really been what's powered