Every day seems to bring another announcement of a classic console game getting a fresh recomp allowing it to be played on modern PCs. Many – though not all, and certainly not the best – of those recomps are powered by AI coding, and the wave of community interest in these projects is helping to inspire a new initiative at Microsoft called Xbox Labs.

What is Xbox Labs? According to Xbox boss Asha Sharma, it's "a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience." If that sounds vague, well, it's because it is – but according to a memo sent to employees and published on the Xbox Wire, it's inspired by a wave of community development efforts including recomps.

"In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support," Sharma writes. "Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we’ve seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another."

Sharma adds that it's "easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators.

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