Microsoft is moving further and further back towards its PC gaming roots with the advent of the next-gen Xbox — Project Helix — and according to former exec Ed Fries, the upcoming console sounds a lot like what Microsoft had originally planned for the OG Xbox before the system morphed more into a traditional console during development.
On a recent episode of The Expansion Pass podcast, Fries sat down to chat about all-things Xbox, including some talk about Project Helix. When asked about its similarities to the concept of Microsoft's original gaming console, Fries agreed that it appears to be going in a very similar direction to what the team was doing back then.
"It's very similar to what the original Xbox plan was. Not the Xbox we shipped, but the original plan was that it was going to be a PC running Windows, and it was basically just a PC that looked kind of like a console, and pretended it was a console, but it was really a PC underneath. And what we shipped ended up being somewhere in between, you know."
Fries went on to say that a lot of the components were still very PC-based, but that ultimately it had to strip back a lot of additional Windows features from the device to allow devs as much power as possible to build games.
"It still architecturally had a lot in common with a PC, you know, the CPU was a CPU you could have put in a PC, the graphics card was a graphics card that could have been in a PC, [...] for that original Xbox idea to work, the reason it didn't work, is because we were still really constrained on system resources — in particular, RAM — and any bit you had allocated to the operating system was a piece you couldn't use in a game, and game developers desperately need every little bit they could get."
This time around, Microsoft has been increasingly open about its more PC-like approach, and it sounds as though this sort of concept will actually ship with Project Helix. It's funny that RAM was an issue back then though, as it is now for totally different reasons!
Anyway, we'll see how this all shakes out when Project Helix finally ships in the next year or two (hopefully) - and we'll be there to see how much it mirrors what Microsoft wanted to do with the OG Xbox all those years ago.