Hundreds Of Delisted Xbox 360 Games Now Have The Potential To Return On PC

If you were browsing Pure Xbox yesterday, you may have spotted a story from our friends at Time Extension about a new Xbox 360 recompilation tool that offers up some crazy possibilities for reviving old Xbox games.

Basically, this tool (known as XenonRecomp) is said to "convert Xbox 360 executables into C++ code, which can then be recompiled for any platform". In theory, this could result in a PC port for any Xbox 360 game that's out there — including the delisted ones — but obviously these would be unofficial and the potential target of their original publishers.

It's also worth noting that although hundreds of Xbox 360 games have the potential to get a port, that doesn't mean they'll all get one - in fact, the process of building a PC version is said to be very difficult and time consuming.

Nevertheless, it's already started happening - just recently, a new Sonic Unleashed port appeared on PC:

This suddenly creates a strange situation for SEGA, which has never released a PC version of Sonic Unleashed before, and something similar could happen with other titles if people are willing to put in the (very) hard work to port them.

And of course, we know that so many Xbox 360 games ended up getting delisted when the old Xbox Store went offline last year, including some that were never available on any other platform. If those games are to live on in the future, it's possible that this might be the only way... although fingers crossed another option shows up at some point as well.

For what it's worth, Xbox boss Phil Spencer mentioned that he'd "love to find solutions" for the Xbox 360 games that were ultimately delisted, but we're sure he didn't have this in mind! Here's hoping Xbox is working on something in the background too, as we'd love to get our hands on these games again in an official capacity on modern consoles.

What do you make of all this? Let us know down in the comments section below.