Ever since the release of the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S back in late 2020, we've been hearing about emulators that are supported on the two systems. We wouldn't suggest trying these for yourself, but nevertheless it's fascinating to see that these two consoles are becoming emulation powerhouses.
The latest Xbox Series X|S emulator that's been getting a massive amount of attention lately is something called "Xenia", which has just launched on Xbox over the past few days. Simply put, this is an Xbox 360 emulator that in theory could support all 2000+ Xbox 360 games and make them playable on Xbox Series X|S in the future.
For now, it's very much in an early access state, only working properly with a few games - although one of them is notably the cancelled GoldenEye 007 remaster for the Xbox 360, as you can see in the MVG video above.
Even though it's far from perfect, we've been seeing some very interesting tweets of the emulator so far:
Of course, Microsoft could always put a stop to this, but also we'd really like to see a future where all Xbox 360 games are (legally) playable on Xbox Series X|S, so it'd be good to see more progress made with Xenia moving forward.
Xbox boss Phil Spencer has previously talked in the past how he would like the industry to work on emulation to allow for legal access to any game within reason - here's what he had to say to Axios a couple of years ago:
“My hope (and I think I have to present it that way as of now) is as an industry we'd work on legal emulation that allowed modern hardware to run any (within reason) older executable allowing someone to play any game.”