No, Phil Spencer’s shirt isn’t teasing a big game reboot — yet
Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox and the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, has once again pandered to conspiracy-minded video game fans with a cheeky fashion choice. To close the Xbox Games Showcase stream, Spencer wore a black T-shirt with a print of the box art for Hexen, a long-dormant series that — thanks to the acquisition of Bethesda and with it, id Software — Xbox now owns. Was he teasing the announcement of the company’s next big first-person shooter reboot?
“That wasn’t me trying to pre-announce it,” Spencer told Polygon in an interview following the stream. “But it was me recognizing the importance of some of the games in our portfolio.”
You’re forgiven for expecting something more official. The exec has a long history of using T-shirts as playful marketing, whether it’s supporting an indie, announcing a new release, or yes, even hinting at a reboot of a long-dormant franchise — looking at you Battletoads.
Spencer offered an origin story for his T-shirt tradition: “The first time I wore a T-shirt on stage, in this way, was a game called Jumpman that I used to play with my dad on the Commodore 64. Epic’s Jumpman. I wore a Jumpman shirt thinking nobody would know what it was except my dad because he was watching. And it was right around Father’s Day, which is when E3 always is.”
For Spencer, the Hexen shirt is just a continuation of that tradition. “To be truthful,” he said, “I didn’t really communicate it much internally. And then I’m on camera recording that and people are like, ‘What is that?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it.’
“So for me, wearing the [Hexen] shirt wasn’t as much about a tease forward as it was just about nostalgia. I recognize that as our portfolio grows, we’ve got important [games] that we
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