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welcome

Players turned games into friendships, rivalries and family traditions. They played with roommates who became lifelong friends, with brothers and sisters who moved across the country, with parents who got older and kids who eventually picked up the controller themselves. Some of the people we played with 25 years ago are no longer here. Some are sitting next to us, now playing with a new generation. We should be proud of that history. But we shouldn’t be trapped by it. Games are alive. The best ones find new players and new creators. They move between generations. They get changed, remade and occasionally broken apart and rebuilt into something nobody expected. Twenty-five years in, XBOX should have that same restlessness.

That is long enough for something wonderful to have happened: kids who grew up playing XBOX are now introducing it to their own kids. A lot has changed since 2001. The machines have changed. The games have changed. How we make them, buy them, watch them and play them has changed. But people still come to games for many of the same reasons. To go somewhere else for a while. To get good at something. To compete. To create. To laugh with friends. To spend time together. There are plenty of milestones from the last 25 years, and you’ll find many of them in these pages. But I don’t think the story of XBOX is really a story about any given hardware, launch or number. It is a story about people.

We have been given the chance to care for some of the most loved games and characters in the world. Our job is to protect what makes them special without protecting them from change. To keep making new things. To take creative risks. To meet players wherever they choose to play. And to make sure someone discovering XBOX for the first time today can feel the same possibility that someone felt turning on that first console in 2001. We won’t get every decision right. No company that is still making things does. But we can keep listening, learning and building. Twenty-five years ago, a relatively small group of people imagined that Microsoft could make a game console. It was an improbable idea. They made it real. I like that as our inheritance. To everyone who built XBOX, created something for it, played with us, argued with us, competed with us, or simply made a little time in their life for one of our games: thank you. The first 25 years gave us a lot to live up to. Now we get to make the next 25.

Asha Sharma, CEO, XBOX

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welcome Welcome to XBOX’s 25th anniversary magazine, a special publication designed to celebrate the past, present and future of XBOX during our celebrations – from nostalgic looks back at the earliest days, to exciting glimpses at what comes next. This magazine covers not just XBOX itself, but Activision, Bethesda, Blizzard, King, Mojang, the many teams and studios within all of those companies, plus a selection of our incredible third-party partners around the globe. The magazine was created by the team behind XBOX Wire and editorial teams from across the XBOX family, who wanted to tell stories you’d never heard before – whether that’s glimpses at games still to come, peeks inside our studios, or tales from those who were with XBOX from the very beginning. And what better way to look all the way back to 2001 than to do it in print? For some of us on the team [Editor’s Note: me] learning about the original XBOX for the first time came through magazines. It just feels right. Thank you for reading, and thank you for joining us on this quarter-century journey. 002

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004 Time travelers

The XBOX Series X25 Limited Edition Anniversary Collection is here

006 Updates installing

Why 2026 has been reinvigorating for XBOX across console, PC, cloud and beyond

007 Happy campers

World of Warcraft: Forever’s beta was hugely popular – and so was a new feature: camping

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008 Pull up a thumbstick

IKEA and XBOX team up to create the YXSTABY Collection

010 3.5 ounces of fun

How XBOX designed the XBOX Nano Controller

012 The soul of Project Helix

An inside look at the creation of the next generation of XBOX

020 KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS and XBOX

Bringing Hideo Kojima’s next visions to life

022 FanFest on Tour

XBOX FanFest has taken our anniversary celebrations all over the world this year

upcoming games 025 Forthcoming releases

we can’t wait for, including…

026 Spyro: A Realm Beyond 028 Persona 4 Revival 029 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Songs of the Past 030 Stranger Than Heaven 032 Grounded 2 – Version 1.0 034 Final Fantasy VII Revelation 035 Exodus 036 Clockwork Revolution

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038 Greetings from Bowerstone

Albion’s iconic capital city is reborn in Playground Games’ Fable

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044 Re-Emergence

098 Simple tools, impossible creations

The Coalition’s journey to redefine a legend with Gears of War: E-Day

048 Driving force

How the original Forza Horizon continues to power the engine of the entire series

052 Ring leader

25 years of Halo, 25 ways it changed the game

056 Block by block

Our studios have seen things they never would have imagined

100 Artistic visions

Two members of the XBOX community introduce their anniversary creations

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101 Picture perfect

084 Beyond the game

So: you made Minecraft, the best-selling game of all time. What’s next?

XBOX worlds are coming to life on every screen (and even off them)

062 How Modern Warfare changed Call of Duty

The creation, legacy, and future of Infinity Ward’s series

088 Behind closed doors

Celebrating some of the fun, nerdy, unusual facets that make XBOX studios what they are

068 A legacy of innovation

090 Looking forward, looking back

072 The road to 25,000 levels

092 Unlocking Achievements

076 Backstage at BlizzCon 2026

094 Designing 25 years of gaming history

How every Elder Scrolls game formed a step on a continuing journey

Candy Crush Saga is about to hit its own big number The stories that led to every game announcement at Blizzard’s biggest-ever show

Publisher Jeff Rubenstein Editor-in-Chief Joe Skrebels Communications Betsy Sund VP, Communications, XBOX Kari Perez

How backward compatibility became a cornerstone of XBOX’s future

Exploring the lesser-known history of XBOX’s Achievements Designer Carl Ledbetter on 25 essential pieces of XBOX hardware

GM, XBOX Brand Craig McNary Sr. Brand Manager, XBOX Fabian De La Fe Design and Production The Slow Journalism Company: Rob Orchard, Christian Tate, Marcus Webb

A glimpse back at XBOX events from across the generations

102 Indie Re-Revolution

Celebrating 25 years of indies on XBOX

106 Small team, big mission Meet Activision’s Emerging Franchises team

108 Player two found

Romances forged by the love of gaming

110 Does this man have the strangest job at an XBOX studio?

Meet Sean Copeland, Blizzard Entertainment’s chief… historian

112 Launch control

How well do you remember the games of 2001?

Writers and Editors Chris Charla, Anthony Devenish, Kelsey Farrell, Will Fulton, David Hodgson, Valerie Lee, Anne Lewis, Mike Nelson, Dan Noel, Danielle Partis, Amelia Savery, Betsy Sund Printed by Modern Litho Inc.

Special Thanks Brian Barbosa, Dom Carey, Sasi Charlanawat, Ben Cooper, Lauren Hill, Larry Hryb, Chris Leggett, Nick Jones-Liang, Kate Maconachie, Stephanie Poon, Brenda Saucedo, Activision, Bethesda, Blizzard, King, and XBOX Comms

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news

The XBOX Series X25 Limited Edition Anniversary Collection is here We might be celebrating our birthday, but we sort of built our own presents. Enter the XBOX 25th anniversary collection. “Fans have been asking for a green transparent special edition since I can remember – I’ve seen it and I’ve heard it,” says XBOX’s Senior Director for Special and Limited Editions, Monique Chatterjee. “We’ve been thinking about the OG Green resin for a long time, and had models of this console built for years – even before the 20th anniversary – but really wanted to hold this one for the right moment.” Well, the right moment has finally arrived. The collection comprises the X25 Limited Edition 1TB XBOX Series X (with only 25,000 being sold, each individually numbered), and the XBOX Wireless Controller X25 Special Edition – both dressed in a resplendent translucent green casing, painstakingly color-matched to one of the most beloved colorways for the original XBOX console.

Attention to detail The ABXY buttons on the X25 controller are even molded and tinted in the style of the original XBOX controllers, rather than in the contemporary version. The bumpers are colored to pay homage to the gone-but-not-forgotten black and white buttons from the original XBOX controllers. The battery case for the controller sports the original XBOX logo, giving you a direct connection to the past.

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Announced at XBOX Games Showcase 2026 to a huge reaction [Editor’s note: This is one of the most-read stories we’ve ever published out of a Showcase on XBOX Wire!], it’s a combination of modern technology with deeply nostalgic design – as a gaming fan of a certain vintage, there’s an allure to translucent plastic that I can’t quite explain, and I’m delighted to see it return. The nods to the past don’t end there, with little callback details sprinkled all over this design (see below for some examples). Your hardware is basically a time machine, taking you back to XBOX’s early years. As Chatterjee puts it, the collection has been designed to be “read” multiple times: “On the first read, you get the green case. On the second, you get those smaller details. And then you make your way to the back to check out what number you got. We really wanted to push all the levels of surprise.” And, as a bit of a tease, there are more surprises that we won’t spoil in this article – suffice it to say that there are some extra details you might want to go and find... Perhaps one of the nicest parts of the design process is that, by creating these callbacks to the past, the team has invented new ways to inform future creations. For instance, for the first time since XBOX 360, an XBOX Wireless Controller features a non-opaque back case, which opens the door for future accessories to take the same approach. “Having the importance of the 25th anniversary, figuring that out was awesome,” says Chatterjee. “For every Limited Edition or Special Edition release, we try to do something new and fresh, and then we have it in our tool belt.” It means that the XBOX 25th anniversary collection isn’t just a chance to own a piece of history – it might become historic for XBOX in its own right. Available as a console bundle at participating retailers while supplies last. X25 Controller also sold separately. Available in select markets only.

For the first time, the controller and console power button light has been ‘inverted’, with the X lighting up in green to call back to the original console’s start-up animation.

The XBOX Series X25 Limited Edition (Images are illustrative. Final products may var y)

The inspiration(s) Released in North America in 2004, the Halo: Combat Evolved Special Edition XBOX is one of the most iconic limited-run consoles ever created, and serves as one of the inspirations for the XBOX 25th anniversary collection. But here’s a fun fact: there were actually multiple translucent green XBOX editions created before this one. In Europe, a limited green XBOX was released to celebrate the console’s birthday in 2003. Even rarer, a Launch Team Edition was provided to members of XBOX staff when the console first launched in 2001 – it came with two translucent green Duke controllers, and featured a message to staff on the central logo panel.

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2026 has been reinvigorating for XBOX across console, PC, cloud and beyond – here’s why XBOX has been getting a behind-the-scenes glow-up this year. Teams across XBOX have been listening to players and delivering new updates every month, making your time on our platforms smoother, more personal, and just better – all while setting the stage for what comes next. These improvements are all part of our commitment to giving players more ways to play the games they love, wherever they choose to play them. We’re looking back at some of the biggest updates and hearing directly from the people who helped bring them to life.

Console updates The return of XBOX has been one of our key commitments to players, and console updates have been an important part of that journey. We’ve been listening closely to player feedback, and turning feedback into meaningful improvements, delivering a steady stream of updates faster than ever. From major updates to achievements that make it easier to celebrate and revisit gaming milestones, to new ways for players to personalize their profiles through badges and gamertags, and improvements to captures that make sharing memorable moments simpler than ever, the team has been making XBOX more personal, more connected, and more enjoyable with every update. And we’re not done yet!

Marking another step in our work for game preservation, we introduced a new feature that grants you a digital license for supported XBOX One or XBOX Series X game discs that you own. If those games are XBOX Play Anywhere enabled, this allows you to play them in even more places, including XBOX on PC, handhelds, and also via the cloud where supported. Best of all, your physical disc continues to work exactly as it always has.

“Working on console updates over the past year has been extremely energizing for the team and me. Every feature release is inspired by player feedback and we pay close attention to what resonates, what doesn’t, and where we can improve.” — Alex Charters, XBOX Senior Product Manager

“Many players have invested years building their physical game collections. We wanted to help bring those collections into the digital world so players can enjoy their favorite games, while also preserving what players love about disc-based ownership.” — Paul Eng, Principal Program Manager, XBOX Game Preservation

Backward compatibility on PC

XBOX mode

As players, we don’t want to leave our gaming legacy behind even as technology continues to evolve and advance. We expect our library of games to move forward with us and to be able to play them in entirely new ways. This year, we extended our Backward Compatibility program to XBOX on PC, beginning a process of bringing XBOX classics to PC for the first time ever (including brand new features like achievements for some original XBOX games!). If you own them on console already, or have an XBOX Game Pass subscription, it’s as simple as opening the XBOX PC app and downloading them.

Gaming on Windows became easier than ever this year with the introduction of XBOX mode. Designed to bring the best of XBOX together with the openness and versatility of Windows, XBOX mode delivers a controller-first, full-screen gaming experience across everything from high-powered desktops, to laptops, to handhelds. With an aggregated gaming library that brings together games from XBOX on PC and other leading storefronts into one place, players spend less time searching and more time playing. And with additions like Gamepad Mouse Mode, Gaming Task Switcher, Game Bar Compact Mode, and the Gamepad Keyboard, it’s a more seamless experience than ever.

“Being able to pick up a classic game and replay it on modern hardware is a magical and nostalgic experience. We promised players in 2026 that they’d be able to play backward compatible games in new ways. The team worked incredibly hard to bring iconic XBOX games to PCs and handhelds so you can play them wherever you want, whether you are a longtime fan or a new player discovering a classic game. What better way to celebrate our gaming legacy?” — Chris MacPherson, Principal Product Manager, XBOX Backward Compatibility on PC

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Your discs. Now also digital

“Building XBOX mode has been incredibly rewarding because it’s all about helping players spend less time navigating and more time playing. It’s been exciting to work with so many teams across XBOX and Windows to create an experience that makes getting into your games faster and easier. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built so far, and even more excited about what’s ahead. This is just the beginning, and we’ll continue listening to players’ feedback and making XBOX mode even better for everyone who games on Windows.” — Brianna Potvin, Principal Software Engineering Lead

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World of Warcraft: Forever’s beta was hugely popular – and so was a new feature: camping World of Warcraft: Forever was announced at BlizzCon 2026, made available as a beta just a few days later, and launched on November 4. Designed to feel familiar but new, Forever’s beta was a runaway success, with over a million Zephras Isle characters traversing the Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor, and Zephras Isle.

Eastern Kingdoms

One of the new features in Forever is camping, where players can set up a campfire and sit to earn varying buffs, depending on how other passersby contribute to the campsite. “With Forever being a new game based on the ‘Vanilla’ World of Warcraft, we utilized four core pillars to evaluate and make decisions about anything we considered changing or adding. One of those core pillars, ‘Nurture and Protect Social Experiences,’ directly played into our desire to design and build our new Camping feature,” says Forever associate production director, Clay Stone. It’s been a very popular addition – during the first three weeks of the Forever beta, players camped at over 1.4 million different campsites. You can see just how much that translates to in the heat maps on this page. “Each of these dots represents a time when a player sat at a campfire and earned a buff, with darker red areas representing more total camping activity at those coordinates,” says World of Warcraft senior data analyst Jennifer Mallett. These maps not only show concentrated activity across starting zones and lower-level areas but also show evidence of brave adventurers venturing out into every corner of Azeroth, exploring zones far beyond what’s expected for characters at or below the beta’s level 30 maximum.

“Each of those dots in farflung areas represents a player who sought exploration for the joy of it and wanted to challenge themselves,” she says. “I also love how these camping maps highlight Azeroth’s major roadways and how you can see all the little strings of players camping together while traveling via ships!” Kalimdor

“Some of the most memorable and rewarding experiences any player can have in any version of World of Warcraft come from serendipitous interactions with other players,” Stone continues. “Even in its pre-launch beta state, we were excited by how well the Camping feature was performing, and we are incredibly pleased by the frequency at which we are seeing players interact and form parties as a result of its inclusion!” You can read much more about WoW: Forever, BlizzCon 2026, and Blizzard’s entire slate of games in our feature on page 76.

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IKEA and XBOX team up to create the YXSTABY Collection, available now

The YXSTABY design team, clockwise from top right: David Wahl and Darja Nordberg, designers, IKEA of Sweden; Elliot Hsu, designer, and Carl Ledbetter, head of design, XBOX Devices; Lukas Bazle and Max Hausmann, designers, IKEA of Sweden; Ryan Whitaker, designer, XBOX Devices

Every gaming session, from a Quick Play match of Overwatch to a marathon Minecraft run, starts the same way: by picking up a controller and taking a seat. A brand-new collaboration between IKEA and XBOX aims to bring these two parallel pastimes together in a collection at home in the living room, the game room, or wherever you choose to play. YXSTABY is a line of nine pieces created by designers from IKEA and XBOX, styled with more of a knowing wink to players than screaming ‘a gamer lives here!’ “We set off to solve problems for the gamer at home, but in a playful and creative way that only IKEA could realize,” says James Monosmith, Director of Consumer Products at XBOX. “What do I do with my controller when I’m not using it? How can I better organize my desk for console play? What do I do when friends come over to play? How do I show off my love of gaming in my home?” Gamer DNA runs deep in this collaboration; it’s not just a meeting of “the games people meet the furniture people” – we’re all players. “When the first XBOX console was introduced in Sweden 25 years ago, my friend and I went to

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“As soon as we met, we knew we were a good fit. Both IKEA and XBOX want to make play accessible to as many people as possible,” says Philip Dilé, product developer, IKEA of Sweden the launch event,” shared David Wahl, Designer at IKEA. “This was a dream project for me. Not only because of my history as a gamer, but because I believe that XBOX stands for iconic design.” Here’s a look at some of the items this team created together, along with notes from the designers themselves.

YXSTABY Gaming Thumbstick Stool (Available in both black and green) “Those shapes are nostalgic to me. The challenge was making it work as a stool, with the right seating curve and stability, while still feeling like a thumbstick. It even moves the way a thumbstick does, so it tilts with you while you play.” — David Wahl, IKEA “We’ve spent so much time on the design of the thumbstick – to see it translated into a piece of furniture was amazing. We’ve been able to maintain the look and feel of the thumbstick’s diamond pattern, and I love the rubber rings on the bottom. They add grip and are a nice design addition.” — Elliot Hsu, XBOX YXSTABY Gaming D-pad controller platter “When we played around with scaling up the faceted D-pad, we quickly felt that we were onto something. I like how it takes on a brand-new function and becomes a piece that’s both decorative and practical.” — Ryan Whitaker, XBOX

YXSTABY Gaming controller display box (Available in black or white) “The display box is made to show off your passion. You can hang it on the wall or put it on your desk, horizontally or vertically, and there’s a little hook that holds the controller in place. You can get many and do an entire installation or go for just the one. Either way, it will look great.” — Lukas Bazle, IKEA

YXSTABY Gaming D-Pad Cushion “I took home a couple of prototypes and tried them out. Now, we have this fun, huggable cushion that stands out just enough and that’s really comfy.” — Darja Nordberg, IKEA The YXSTABY collection is available now in IKEA stores worldwide.

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The XBOX Nano Controller, pictured actual size

133 mm

How XBOX designed the XBOX Nano Controller, our brand-new (very cute) accessory 36 mm

66 mm

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It’s not every day that the designer of a new piece of technology explains its appeal by telling you how... adorable people find it. “When we’ve shown models internally, the first thing people do when they pick it up is to hold it close to their chest and squeeze it,” Lead Designer, Ryan Whitaker tells me. “It’s kind of a universal response – this thing is just cute.” Announced earlier this year and available now, the XBOX Nano Controller is something very rare in modern gaming – an entirely new first-party controller design. In recent years we’ve gotten used to gaming controllers feeling broadly similar – Whitaker calls the XBOX Wireless Controller the “crown jewel of ergonomics” – but that didn’t stop him from trying to think of something different. “Having designed controllers for a while, I realized that our controller, while it’s designed to fit the most hands, the broadest population, it doesn’t suit everyone. Some people find regular controllers intimidating, especially if they’re not familiar with gaming. It can also be a little bit unwieldy for some people. And a regular controller doesn’t always pack well – so having it become more portable was also a benefit; something you could put in a bag or your pocket was a fun idea.” Finding a solution to all three problems got Whitaker’s mind racing: “It was such an exciting proposition that I basically ended up designing it before the business was even asking for it! I’ve got a bunch of little side projects, and I created the earliest versions of this on my home 3D printer.” That was serendipitous timing, as Whitaker’s team was soon asked for a controller design that could reach new audiences, something out of the ordinary. “I brought this up and it immediately became a project.”

After some revisions (Whitaker tells me his original home version was even smaller, somehow), the Nano quickly became what you can see today – a controller with every input you’d get on a regular XBOX pad, but crammed into an extremely cute package. “It has this nostalgic feel,” Whitaker explains. “If you’ve been playing games for as long as I have, you’ll recognize some early gaming elements to it. Maybe it reminds you of an early Nintendo controller, or maybe something that you held at a store display while your mom was shopping.” It’s not designed to replace your existing controllers – “we’re not trying to have someone win a Call of Duty tournament with this thing” – but complement them, offer an option. “We’re trying to lower the barriers,” Whitaker continues. “It’s more affordable – it doesn’t have all the same bells and whistles as a standard controller and that’s on purpose so that it’s more accessible.” The feeling I get throughout my chat is that, beyond the business case, it’s just exciting for Whitaker and his team to invent something. It feels almost momentous to see a new idea appear from nowhere – and he can’t wait to see the reaction: “I hope this unlocks new ways for people to play,” Whitaker says. “I hope that you end up seeing these in an airplane seat next to you, or it becomes easier to hop into a couch co-op game. Who knows? Maybe in the future you’ll have a little collection of these. “I’m just hoping that people feel like they can carry it around and it becomes a little symbol – ‘Hey, I play games.’”

The XBOX Nano Controller, pictured with an XBOX Wireless Controller (lef t)

Powered by XBOX’s latest accessory processor brain. Analog triggers. All-new components built for the XBOX Nano Controller. Lower profile thumbsticks. Design cues taken from existing controllers.

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project helix

An inside look at the creation of XBOX’s next-generation console, with the Head of Next Gen by Joe Skrebels and Jef f Rubenstein

We may have heard about Project Helix – the codename for our next-generation family of devices, including the next XBOX console – for the first time at GDC 2026, but it’s been in the works for far longer. Taken from one perspective, it’s been in development for over 25 years.

The development team is drawing on successes, innovations, and lessons learned from every previous XBOX, going right back to 2001. Deep inside XBOX’s hardware development and testing lab, those consoles are being re-examined, even literally broken open, to take cues from the past. What worked? What didn’t? Why did people fall in love with these boxes of silicon and circuits, and what could help them fall in love more? It’s all in service of one goal: “When we think about Project Helix,” explains Jason Ronald [pictured opposite], XBOX Vice President of Next Generation, “it’s really designed to be the ultimate gaming machine – one that removes all the barriers of play that have historically existed. My entire library is accessible to me. I’m able to bring four generations of my XBOX library and progression with me and have it available instantly. And we remove the arbitrary constraints between console and PC games.” And on top of that inherent convenience it’s about using technology to allow game creators to realize new horizons for play: “We don’t think the next generation is defined by 8K, or 240 hertz, or some of the traditional metrics – it’s really about gameplay innovation. It’s about deeper immersion. It is about leveraging new technical advancements such as neural rendering, to deliver a new level of visual fidelity in more efficient and innovative ways. It’s about new kinds of games and new game experiences that we haven’t been able to do before. What excites me about the future is the idea of entirely new types of games that have never been possible before, delivered through all the innovation in the silicon and the hardware and the platform that we’re delivering.”

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project helix

And, finally, it’s about making good on a mantra you’ll have seen from us this year, the Return of XBOX – the return of a console: “When I think about what makes a console magical, it’s that it just makes my games instantly accessible and ready to play in an instant. I don’t have to worry about updating my operating system, updating drivers, configuring different settings – things like that. The hardware and the experience is entirely designed around playing games.” Such tinkering and tweaking has always been the trade-off for the flexibility of PC gaming. So what is Project Helix – a console, or a PC? “We’re very clear on the design goal: Helix is designed to be a console that is also capable of playing games from your PC. It is not a PC that can also play console games. The goal is making it easy, intuitive, and instant to access my games. But if you’re a hardcore gamer or a power user who wants to have that deeper level of customizability across settings and performance options, you can absolutely go do it.”

Conversation Starter It’s easy to imagine that building a next-generation console begins with engineers siloed away inside their lab, inventing what comes next and simply telling game creators what they have to work with. But for Ronald and his team, the journey began by heading outside of XBOX HQ in Redmond, Washington, and asking questions of two very specific groups: players and developers.

We got access to some of the labs where Helix is being studied, invented, and built

“Helix is designed to be a console capable of playing games from your PC. It is not a PC that can also play console games”

“The very first next-generation conversations we had were with all of our first-party studios. That was absolutely foundational to the design of what we’ve done with Project Helix – talking about where they saw the future of game design going, where they saw the future of their franchises going, and what was constraining their creative ambition.”

That idea of removing constraints has been key – after speaking to XBOX’s own studios, the team has continuously traveled around the world to sit down with developers, big and small, to ask what they need from a new machine. If one of Helix’s aims

Innovations across generations The XBOX features still making an impact today

Every generation of XBOX has seen new ideas – new ways of thinking about how you play your games, who you play them with, and how you share what you’ve done with others. Some of those inventions haven’t lasted (sorry, Kinect, you didn’t make this list), but others have become embedded in the fabric of gaming. Here are some of the fundamental changes XBOX has made over its entire history.

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FIRST SEEN ON: XBOX

The Console Hard Drive The original XBOX was the first console with a built-in hard drive, meaning no memory cards required. You could even rip your own CDs, and create custom soundtracks for supported games.

Built-in Broadband XBOX was also equipped for broadband from day one, opening the world of online gaming as we know it today. XBOX Live became a platform-wide, highspeed online service as a result.

The Human Factors Lab How you interact with a console physically is just as important as what you do onscreen. This is where controllers, buttons, and anything you touch is created and tested to ensure comfort and utility for players of all shapes and sizes. It’s a testament to how the science of computing and the science of the human body are intertwined. The centerpiece? A gigantic version of the XBOX Wireless Controller, designed to show adults what it would be like to be a five-year-old holding a regular-sized controller.

Advanced Prototyping Center These CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machines and industrial 3D printers allow for rapid prototyping so the team can quickly get a sense of the look, feel, and ergonomics of its designs.

The Roadmap Room Central to Helix’s vision is learning from the past – and this room is key to that effort. The Roadmap Room is regularly swapped out with the entire history of a specific product, perfect for study. “On one day, you have all the generations of controllers sitting sideby-side, and on another you have every special edition and limited edition console. It really gets you to think about the breadth of our ambition,” explains Ronald.

Gamertags XBOX Live also saw the creation of Gamertags, the first unified username used across an entire console platform. One screen name, one friends list, and one profile, carried across all your games.

Automated Matchmaking Halo 2 saw the debut of TrueSkill, an automated matchmaking system developed by Microsoft Research, and subsequently used across XBOX Live. It removed the need to manually find online match-ups, getting you into games more quickly than ever before.

FIRST SEEN ON: XBOX 360

Console Storefronts The XBOX Live Marketplace launched alongside XBOX 360, offering the first on-console digital store for games and extra content, as well as offering demos and themes.

The Downloadable Game Revolution XBOX Live Arcade began life as a disc for original XBOX owners, but on 360 it became its own store, starting a revolution in the world of smaller, downloadable games like Braid and LIMBO.

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project helix is to allow for games we’ve never seen before, who better to tell them what’s needed than the people making them?

How Helix draws from each XBOX generation – both from their spirit and their lessons

But alongside that has been deep, ongoing research into the people who’ll play those games. That goes for data drawn from how players are playing right now, and interviews with players – chosen from countries around the world, with different gaming habits and different incomes – about what they’d like next. It’s led to an idea that sits at the heart of Project Helix: “I think player behaviors are fundamentally changing. Historically, people would define themselves: ‘I’m primarily a console gamer,’ or ‘I’m a PC gamer,’ or later, ‘I’m a mobile gamer, a handheld gamer.’ And now, the reality is that players expect their experiences to work across many different screens.” In order to design the hardware of the future, Ronald and team are looking to what the gamer of tomorrow might expect.

XBOX

“When you think about Generation Alpha, those players grew up in a world with smartphones, touchscreens, multiple devices, and streaming services. So this idea that their content is locked to any one individual device is completely foreign to them; when you look at that generation, they apply those same expectations to games.”

First released: 2001 The original XBOX was born from a renegade spirit – just like Helix, it came from a desire to do something unexpected in service of a future the team knew was coming. Just the simple fact of Microsoft entering the console space was a shock, but there was more to XBOX’s challenge to the status quo:

But it’s not just about breaking barriers between platforms – it’s also the barriers between the worlds of players and creators. Curated, creator-led game development will never disappear, but there’s a growing category of games in which player creation is key. It’s something the Helix team wants to enable more than ever before: “Today, we have mods or user-generated content. But I think the barriers of creation are going to come down; moving forward, we’re really going to move into [a world where] the players are going to have much more agency and they’re going to have much more control over the experiences. They’ll create stories in these worlds and they’ll share them with other players. And I think that’s just going to be a new way that people play.” All of this work with developers and players ties back to the idea of learning from XBOX’s storied past. Each generation brought new innovations and learnings – and one of the most important lessons came from the XBOX One generation: remember who you’re building for. “With XBOX One, I think we got so focused on expanding our aperture that we lost sight of what truly is magical, which is Achievements Achievements effectively gamified your games, offering developers inventive new ways to get you to play, and players a new way to compete across the whole platform by comparing their overall Gamerscore.

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Cross-Game Party Chat Voice chat was already standard practice across XBOX Live, but 360 introduced party chat that sat outside of the game itself, letting you and your friends travel from game to game (or even play different games) while still talking.

“It was really this vision for a connected ecosystem and digital distribution,” says Ronald. “That’s why the team put the hard drive and Ethernet port in there, even though XBOX Live didn’t come out for years afterward. It was designed and built for what they thought the future of play was going to be at the time.”

players, developers, and the games that they love. We have to build the best platform for game developers to deliver their creative vision.” “The other thing, and I think this is something that is unique about XBOX, is we have to be connected to the community. A lot of the features that people have come to love and expect from XBOX have actually been driven directly by community feedback. I think that’s really core to the soul of who XBOX is, because if you’re in touch with your player base, you never go wrong if you focus on what their needs are.”

Netflix on Console Something you may not remember – 360 was the first console to offer a local version of the Netflix app, way back in 2008, letting you stream movies and TV directly from your console.

FIRST SEEN ON: XBOX ONE

Console Subscription Services XBOX Game Pass launched in 2017, offering console players a single subscription in return for a growing library of games. For millions, it’s fundamentally changed how they discover and play new games.

There’s another factor at play here, one the team couldn’t have foreseen when Project Helix began. Consoles have historically been the most affordable entry point into gaming, but the current component crisis is driving up the cost of almost everything you can plug into the wall. Meeting this challenge has become a primary driver of Helix’s innovation:

XBOX 360

First released: 2005 360 was designed to bring the world together – gaming had been isolated at worst, and tricky to make communal at best. A combination of XBOX Live, achievements, cross-platform voice chat and more allowed gaming to blossom as a shared hobby – a first removal of the barriers that Helix is looking to continue. “XBOX Live was actually integrated into the DNA of the product on day one,” says Ronald. “I had my XBOX identity. I had achievements. I had my online community and my friends. We had a digital marketplace with the first downloadable content. So it really became about the social element, the community.”

“It’s definitely a challenging time, but as a system and a platform designer, it’s also one of the most exciting times, because we have to invent entirely new technology to continue to advance the state-of-the-art while also continuing to make things accessible and affordable. “This is a big reason why we’re really focused on advancements like neural rendering, because it’s an entirely new way to generate a frame without requiring more computational horsepower, additional memory, and things like that. I think you’re going to see more innovation over the next three to five years than you’ve seen in the last 10 years.”

Part of the Family Beyond thinking about what’s next, the Helix team also has a parallel goal: Helix isn’t a break point between generations, it’s a transition between them. Nothing should be left behind just because you have a shiny new machine.

“We have to invent entirely

“Game preservation is core to XBOX. Not only do we feel like it’s the right thing for the industry, we feel a deep responsibility as one of its biggest platforms and publishers. For the first 30 years of game development, nobody really thought about game preservation when they were designing their hardware, when they were building their games.

to continue to advance the state-of-the-art”

“A great example of where that’s already starting to happen today came earlier this year. For the first time ever, I can now play original XBOX games on my PC and a handheld. When those games were originally designed, and when we designed the original XBOX, we never envisioned a future where that could actually be true.”

new technology

Backward Compatibility Program In 2015, XBOX turned game preservation into policy by introducing a backward compatibility program that keeps older games running on new hardware – and will continue into our next generation.

FIRST SEEN ON: XBOX SERIES X|S

And that drive goes for the games we haven’t even imagined yet: Launching One Console in Multiple Models Series X|S marked the first major home console to launch as separate models, offering players the same experiences at different price points and performance levels.

Quick Resume XBOX Series X|S introduced Quick Resume, a literally game-saving feature that allows multiple games to be suspended, exactly as you left them, even if you reboot your console.

Smart Delivery With the same games now available across multiple generations, Smart Delivery allows you to press download and know you’re always getting precisely what you need for your hardware – no upgrade fee required.

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“[Compatibility is] really informing how we design the platform and how we work with our partners to make sure that these games can not only be played, but they can also be played better than ever before in the future. Not only are we preserving those games from the past, but it’s actually informing how we’re designing and building the platform and games today – so that they can be preserved 20 years, 30 years in the future.”

XBOX One

First released: 2013 XBOX One didn’t initially center the games and the players. That’s been fundamental to the Helix team’s work talking to developers and fans in the earliest stages of the new project.

A Platform for Success Alongside all of this, Project Helix aims to take a wrecking ball to the dividers currently keeping players and their games apart. “I think it’s really about putting the player at the center, and not the device and the technology. Really enabling them to experience those games wherever they choose to play. It’s about removing barriers to play, removing friction, and those arbitrary boundaries that have existed in the past. “It’s also this notion that not only does my library move with me, but my progress moves with me as well. Because I fully expect that when I’m in the middle of an 80-hour RPG, if I’m 25 hours into that and I want to play it on another device, I should be able to instantly resume from where I was. Those are things that today are becoming more common, but I think in the future it’s going to be a baseline expectation of all players.” Helix will be the crown jewel in a platform able to move with you, and that means the platform itself needs to adjust. Navigating Helix will feel fresh, but the team is cognizant that players won’t want to have to learn a completely new UI just to get back into their games. It’s about maintaining a balance. “Our design goal is that no matter where you play, it feels very intuitive and very distinctly ‘XBOX,’ but we also want to tailor it to the unique capabilities of the screen, whether that’s a large-screen TV in your living room, whether you’re playing on a console or you’re streaming it to a small screen on a handheld device, or even on PC – where you have higher information density, you have a mouse and keyboard, you have more precision. We want it to feel very familiar, but also FPS Boost Making backward compatibility even better, this innovation allows you to put your hardware to good use, doubling or even quadrupling the frame rate of older games without the need for a patch.

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Embracing HDR Support for Dolby Vision means that new games can automatically display visual improvements on modern TVs, while Auto HDR can apply visual boosts to backward compatible games that may never have supported it.

But it’s also a tale of evolution – the XBOX One S refined what the console could be, and the XBOX One X turned it into the most powerful machine of its generation. It also led to the creation of the UI and platform we now know. It kick-started our Game Preservation team, who are a huge part of Helix’s future. It also introduced XBOX Play Anywhere, which is the foundation for Helix’s aim to break down barriers between platforms.

Our design goal is that no matter where you play, it feels very intuitive and very distinctly ‘XBOX’” FIRST SEEN ON: XCLOUD Cloud Gaming in Game Pass Cloud gaming has been spreading in recent years, but building the service into Game Pass subscriptions marked a new moment for the industry – console gaming without the need for, well, a console. Whether you’re on your phone, on your Smart TV or, soon, in some cars(!), your XBOX library is waiting for you. FIRST SEEN ON: …ANYWHERE! Buy Once, Play Anywhere XBOX Play Anywhere brought a simple premise with huge implications – it lets a single purchase travel with you to other platforms, retaining your progression as it does.

project helix

XBOX Series X|S First released: 2020

Series X|S introduced the concept of a family of devices; each fully compatible, but built with different audiences in mind. It’s a cornerstone of Helix’s push for accessibility, the drive for innovation to make sure one console can serve multiple kinds of people. “It was really about rededicating ourselves to our core XBOX players and developers,” explains Ronald. “Really designing a best-in-class gaming experience, both at a high end – a high performance at a higher price – but also making sure that we had a lower entry point to make gaming more accessible to more players. It’s really about the diversity of the devices reaching different players, but still having that same catalog of games.”

ROG XBOX Ally

First released: 2025 Created with ASUS, the XBOX Ally is important to Helix – and important because of Helix. In many ways, it’s another step toward XBOX’s goals to make games accessible wherever you may be playing (being able to play something like Forza Horizon 6 on a handheld still feels like a minor miracle). And its introduction of XBOX mode, which allows players to navigate a PC in ways more familiar to a console, hasn’t just affected the entire XBOX platform, but provided a practical lesson in how Helix’s own UI should work.

take advantage of the unique capabilities of the device you’re actually playing on.” Want to get a feel for where we’re going? The creation of ROG XBOX Ally and XBOX mode – the integration of multiple game libraries and inputs – was a way of putting our vision for the future of play in the hands of players and listening to the community’s feedback. Helix’s interface will be its own, but will take lessons from what’s been tested already: “The ROG XBOX Ally was really an opportunity for us to learn alongside our player base with a lot of these concepts and the ideas that we had: being able to play libraries from across multiple different storefronts, understanding how PC games and console games can show up together in a unified library. The feedback that we’ve gotten from players has fundamentally informed and altered our plans of how it actually shows up in a future console. Players shared where we met the mark and areas we needed to improve or approach differently. So absolutely, we view the Ally as a precursor to what we’re doing with Helix – but it’s informed by a lot of the design concepts we have for Helix.”

The message is clear – Helix is taking the lessons from our past, but more importantly building the future for where developers and gamers are going. After 25 years and four generations’ worth of innovations, the future of console gaming won’t be summed up with a list of features or tech specs. And in 25 more years, alongside its technical and gameplay innovations, Project Helix will be remembered as the first console to remove the barriers.

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news

Partnering to bring Hideo Kojima’s next visions to life In his 40-year career, Hideo Kojima hasn’t just changed what video games can do, he’s changed what they are. Repeatedly. Kojima-san has regularly reshaped the medium as a whole, making creative decisions and introducing generational leaps that didn’t just help his own games stand out, but influenced decades of other games to come. Every new Hideo Kojima game has offered something to set the entire industry talking, dissecting, and emulating. It’s why we’re so excited that KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS has partnered with XBOX for this visionary’s next two games – the all-new horror experience OD and a long-awaited return to the action-espionage genre he created in PHYSINT. On top of that, XBOX and KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS will be collaborating across film and television to bring new stories to broader audiences. At Tokyo Game Show 2026, Kojima-san also announced that Bill Skarsgård will portray the lead role in PHYSINT, and released two new posters for the game, featuring photography he took himself. “I’m delighted to confirm the lead role for PHYSINT will be Bill Skarsgård,” said Kojima-san. “We are both longtime fans of each other’s work, and we’ve decided to embark on this new adventure together. The costume fittings, scans, and camera tests we conducted with Bill and Charlee [Fraser] earlier this year gave me tremendous confidence in the direction of the project.” When you say, “A Hideo Kojima Game,” you’re not describing a set of expectations – rather, you’re saying that you couldn’t guess at what to expect. We can’t wait to show you what’s next.

OD

Kojima-san’s long-awaited return to horror, OD was announced in 2023. OD explores the concept of testing your fear threshold, and what it means to OD on fear, and Kojima-san has described it as, “a very unique, immersive, and totally new style of game – or rather, a new form of media.” Kojima-san himself will direct a portion of the game subtitled KNOCK, featuring Sophia Lillis and Hunter Schafer.

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PHYSINT

Kojima-san returns to – and redefines – the action-espionage genre he created. Kojima-san has explained that PHYSINT will go far beyond the expected, “blurring the boundaries between film and games, offering near lifelike graphics and a new take on interactive entertainment.” The game will feature Bill Skarsgård in the lead role, alongside Charlee Fraser, Don Lee, and Minami Hamabe. Further casting news will come in the future.

Building KJP

A timeline of KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS’ history

2015 KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS is founded.

2019 DEATH STRANDING becomes

KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS’ first release, marking an all-new genre and franchise for Kojimasan, with a Hollywood-level cast including Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, and Léa Seydoux.

2020 Kojima-san is awarded the

BAFTA Fellowship, the highest accolade bestowed by BAFTA upon an individual in recognition of exceptional contribution to film, games or television.

2022 KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS and

XBOX announce a partnership to “create a video game for XBOX like no one has ever experienced or seen before.” A live-action DEATH STRANDING movie from A24 is announced, to be directed by Michael Sarnoski.

2023 Kojima announces OD for XBOX

at The Game Awards, featuring Sophia Lillis and Hunter Schafer.

2025 DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH is released.

Hideo Kojima makes a surprise appearance at XBOX FanFest Tokyo on September 17, 2026

KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS reveals a new trailer for OD – KNOCK, an animated movie, ‘DEATH STRANDING MOSQUITO’, a Disney+ animated series, ‘DEATH STRANDING ISOLATIONS’, and more during its BEYOND THE STRAND livestream.

2026 KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS and XBOX expand their partnership to publish PHYSINT.

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news

XBOX FanFest has taken our anniversary celebrations all over the world this year

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upcoming games

This magazine isn’t just looking back, it’s looking forward There are thousands of games in development for XBOX right now – far too many for us to cover them all – but in this section we’ll focus on a few incredible examples. And take a look below for just a selection of the other games we’re looking forward to playing.

INSIDE: Spyro: A Realm Beyond P026 Persona 4 Revival P028 The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past P029 Stranger Than Heaven P030 Grounded 2 – Version 1.0 P032 Final Fantasy VII Revelation P034 Exodus P035 Clockwork Revolution P036 Fable P038 Also upcoming: Grand Theft Auto VI | World of Warcraft: The Last Titan | Rainbow Six Tactics Metro 2039 | Resident Evil Veronica | Wo Long 2: Wings of Ember | At Fate’s End Magicians: The Devil’s Deal | There are No Ghosts at the Grand | Witchbrook Vivarium | Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons | JOIN US | Bad Magpie ONTOS | State of Decay 3 | Hollow Knight: Silksong – Sea of Sorrow | Grave Seasons Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance | Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis | Alien Deathstorm Artificial Detective | Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement | Crazy Taxi: World Tour | ILL Kingdom Hearts IV | Militsioner | The Wolf Among Us 2 | The Expanse: Osiris Reborn Alien: Isolation 2 | Total War: WARHAMMER 40,000 | WWE 2K27 | MLB: The Show 27 | F1 27 The Eternal Life of Goldman | Armatus | Erosion | Out of Words Rayman Legends Retold | DRAGON BALL XENOVERSE 3 | Turok: Origins 025

upcoming games

Reinventing the legend without losing the fire by Danielle Partis Spyro the Dragon has spent the better part of two decades in a kind of pop culture stasis. Fans found solace in the launch of 2018’s Spyro Reignited Trilogy, Toys for Bob’s faithful remake of the original three games, but the little purple dragon fell a touch short of having his own new story. Needless to say, Toys for Bob are fervent Spyro fans, but the opportunity had never quite manifested itself. Until now. When the studio revealed Spyro: A Realm Beyond, the reaction in the Spyro community was seismic, giving some much-needed vindication to the team who had been tucked away building their big secret. “When you’re working on games, you have to be so secretive for so long!” Toys for Bob Creative Director Lou Studdert exclaims. “Not to be dorky, but that reaction really was the wind beneath our wings, and it’s helping us soar to the finish line.” That combination of relief and delight – of finally being able to talk about the thing they’ve been so focused on making – crackles through our conversation. They’re not just making the next Spyro game – they’re making their Spyro game, the one they’ve wanted to play for years.

“We went after this idea because firstly, we’re big fans, and secondly, we’ve also heard very vocal fans say that they want this too,” Studio Head Paul Yan adds. “That said, when you’re working in isolation, you second-guess yourself. So when the trailer finally hit, it really showed us that Spyro does still resonate, lots of people love him as I do – and I’m not crazy!”

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Welcome to Painted Plains Players will begin this new adventure in Painted Plains, one of many unique biomes to be found across the world. It’s a sprawling, whimsical expanse that deliberately echoes Spyro’s classic starting hubs – the concept art we’ve been lucky enough to share shows a pastoral dreamscape with rolling hills, lush pastures and stone spires winding into a soft sky. “The design motivation was absolutely to evoke that classic feeling of the starting areas,” Yan says. “But we also want that feeling to be juxtaposed with some danger. There are threats to

Getting Your Wings With full flight marking a huge shift for the series, Painted Plains will be where players learn how to control a far more mobile dragon. “We’re calling it our ‘Wright Brothers area’,” says Studdert. “It’s where folks are going to learn to fly for the first time in a Spyro game, so we wanted to create these big open runways with safety cushions.”

be found here, but Painted Plains is a place to get your wings, so to speak.” As Spyro explores the Plains, verticality will be the big, noticeable shift compared to those previous, ground-bound worlds. There’s still plenty to do on the floor, but in A Realm Beyond, Spyro can now take flight at a moment’s notice. “The scale is just so much grander now,” Studdert says. “We wanted to retain that original feeling of looking in a direction in the game and thinking ‘how do I get over there?’, but, instead of a direct glide, you’re looking at the environment to figure out how to get there.” One sentiment that echoes through the Spyro community is how the games always felt ‘zen-like’, and capturing that feeling served as a core design goal for the team. “We spent a lot of time emphasizing true flight because that’s a core novelty of this new game, but we absolutely think of it as an extension to Spyro’s movement kit, not a replacement. It’s all about the fluidity of the movement and chaining abilities together to achieve a flow state as you’re playing the game.”

Flight and Flame To support Spyro’s new flight moves, the team has also built out his trademark flame breath to synergize with true aerial combat. His classic, short-range flame burst remains, but he’ll also pack a bunch of new skills for different situations – including a ranged fireball attack that can be used in flight. “We found pretty early on that flying means you’re such a distance away from things, and we need new ways to engage with the play space,” Studdert explains. “Before, Spyro could only really interact with what’s directly in front of him. We’ve built new ways to engage with the world on this grander scale.”

In Plains sight Never-before-seen concept art for the Painted Plains area (top), alongside an in-game screenshot of the same location (bottom).

This experimentation took many forms, but ultimately, the team didn’t want to lose Spyro’s essence by adding capabilities that felt unnatural: “We tested out a mechanic where Spyro would have to fire a rock from a slingshot by flaming it,” he adds. “Immediately we’re like ‘That’s not what a dragon would do.’ Spyro needs to be able to do these things on his own.”

Yan emphasizes the creative tension felt between nostalgia and novelty, noting that it’s been almost 20 years since the last original, mainline Spyro game. If you bank too much on nostalgia, it feels like a rehash of something that came before. If you do something too novel, you risk losing those core, longterm fans and the original essence of Spyro.

Spyro has a long legacy and a fanbase that spans generations. Some players have been here since the beginning, others may have discovered Spyro through the Reignited Trilogy. It means that A Realm Beyond faces the ultimate challenge: balancing nostalgia with innovation.

“There’s no perfect middle ground,” Yan says with a laugh. “But our guiding principle is that we want this to be the Spyro you know and love, with all of that core DNA and personality. That presents a recognizable foundation for us to tell new stories, build new locations, and expand on a beloved character.

“The jury’s still out on whether we’ve accomplished that, For Studdert, it starts with the preservation of Spyro but for us, it’s about finding the fun, building the fantasy, and as a character, the cocky but endearing personality making sure it’s just a great experience for play.” perfectly captured by Tom Kenny in the original games: “We’ve had all sorts of interpretations of Spyro in different games and Spyro: A Realm Beyond spin-offs, but we wanted to explore takes flight in Spring 2027 for XBOX Series X|S, what an evolution of that original Spyro XBOX on PC, and Game Pass. Play it on both would feel like, and bringing Tom back felt console and PC at no additional cost with extremely important to that.” XBOX Play Anywhere. Also available on Steam, Nintendo Switch 2 The other side of that is continuity – what would and PlayStation 5. this version of Spyro look, sound and act like if he were a direct evolution of that classic portrayal?

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upcoming games

This JRPG classic gets the Royal treatment by Will Fulton It’s easy to look back on high school with rose-colored glasses, but teens have to deal with so many things at once: homework, friends, dating, the murders, and battling the monstrous manifestations of their shadow selves in the dream realm – a tale as old as time. I played an hour of Persona 4 Revival, getting a little taste of all the game’s main elements (story, combat, dungeons, and life sim). My first experience of the Persona series was Persona 5 Royal, whose blockbuster success is why we’re getting these lush remakes. Most obviously, Revival sees the 2008 original brought up to the gorgeous visual fidelity of 5. All the character models have a modern, cel-shaded look that does a great imitation of a ‘living anime’. The menu UI has the same aggressive graphic design that was a big factor drawing me to 5 in the first place – it’s thrilling to see that kind of beautification to the genre’s neglected core infrastructure, like murals on a highway overpass. But Revival’s overhaul is more than skin deep. Combat incorporates elements from subsequent games, like 5’s Baton Pass ability to let another character take over after hitting an elemental weakness. It also adds a wholly new

Persona 4 Revival arrives on February 18, 2027 for XBOX Series X|S, XBOX on PC and Game Pass. Play it on both console and PC at no additional cost with XBOX Play Anywhere.

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mechanic called Prime Time in which actions in combat (particularly targeting enemy weaknesses) charge up a meter that allows you to take up to four uninterrupted turns of free actions when triggered. It’s a combat tweak that turns what could be ‘solved’ battles into a quick and easy flow, and bosses become interesting puzzles. It helps that the enemies and the party’s personas are all so charmingly weird. The creature designs pull from global mythology, art history, and pop culture for striking creations that have iterated and evolved over the decades. Persona 4 Revival’s complete aesthetic overhaul means a whole new menagerie of odd, goofy, menacing, sometimes weirdly horny friends to meet – isn’t that what high school is all about? Music likewise plays a big role in making the serialized battles into a joy instead of a chore, here with more of a guitar-forward pop-rock vibe when compared to 5’s acid jazz. As an aesthetic package, Persona 4 Revival is slick and enticing for new players, and anyone coming from Persona 5 Royal and Persona 3 Reload will feel right at home. Whether you’re new to the series, filling in the back catalog, or revisiting an old friend, Persona 4 Revival seems like an excellent new spin on a classic RPG to look forward to.

upcoming games

Why returning to The Witcher 3 meant creating an all-new location by Joe Skrebels It’s been a long time since we last saw Geralt of Rivia – and when we left him, he’d effectively retired to live out his days on a vineyard.

Of course, when a monster-slaying hero is involved, Letten inevitably hides a darkness that needs to be rooted out – but in Songs of the Past, it’s all in service of building the characters we know.

“We always said that Geralt deserved his rest after [the last Witcher 3 expansion] Blood and Wine, and we stick by that,” explains CD PROJEKT RED Narrative Director, Philipp Weber. “However, that doesn’t mean that Geralt can never go on an adventure again, especially with his best friend...”

“We could have chosen any reason to set off on a new journey – but all of us wanted it to be about Dandelion. He is a very much loved character and his bond with Geralt was always touching. We shove the characters into new, challenging situations, we make it tough for them, in order to shift the dynamics of their relationship and show its depth.”

In this new expansion, finding the reason to tempt Geralt back into the world was as much about creating a new part of the world for him to explore. Welcome to Letten, ancestral home of Dandelion (erstwhile bard, friend, and game narrator).

Where that journey will take us remains a mystery – will this bridge the gap to The Witcher 4, or is this another way to say goodbye to a beloved hero? Either way, Letten feels like a fitting location for it.

“The story of Geralt and Dandelion traveling to Letten was created many years ago, and since then we have very badly wanted to tell it,” explains Principal Writer, Alexandra Motyka. “We wanted it to be paced differently from other adventures – a slow burn, sentimental, and somehow soothing. Letten is a perfect place for this kind of story.” Inspired by Polish romantic poetry, the English countryside and Tudor architecture, and some of the bucolic locations in the original Witcher game, Letten offers a new reason to play simply by feeling different. It acts as an origin story for Dandelion himself (even introducing The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past arrives his family), and is a truly new creation. Author of in 2027 as an expansion for The the Witcher books, Andrzej Sapkowski has never Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, available for explained it, or even placed it on a map: XBOX Series X|S and XBOX on PC. Play it on both console and PC “Uncovering a new region on the map of The Witcher world at no additional cost with is just as thrilling for us as for the players. This time we could XBOX Play Anywhere. use our creative freedom, while still remaining within the boundaries of the imaginary world we inherited.”

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upcoming games

In Stranger Than Heaven, you’ll use extreme violence to sur vive and musical talent to thrive as a showman across five cities and eras of 20th Centur y Japan

Exploring why there’s no biz like showbiz by Jef f Rubenstein We’ve peeled back the layers on the mystery that is Stranger Than Heaven all throughout this year – learning of its major characters, its eras and locales across 20th-century Japan, and grappling with its original combat system. Across it all, one thing tied it all together: music. While the jazz-forward soundtrack we’ve heard thus far is incredible, music is much more than a mood setter in Stranger Than Heaven – it’s fully integrated into the action, whether you’re collecting musical inspiration guiding protagonist Makoto Daito down the street, creating original compositions, or running the clubs where those songs are performed. But how does it work? We chatted with Stranger Than Heaven Director, Ryosuke Horii to learn more.

Collecting sounds and composing songs:

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XBOX 25 Magazine: Players can collect sounds, like the swish of a broom, and use them to create songs – can you explain that system?

X25: Asking as someone who is a music fan, but possesses no musical talent: Is it possible to finish the game having made music you’d call bad?

Ryosuke Horii, RGG: These collected sounds are called “Inspiration.” By sharing them with composers, they spark ideas for new songs and arrangements. The range of arrangements available is unlike anything seen in previous music games. The more Inspiration you gather, the more dramatically you can alter songs – for example, changing the overall mood of a track, including major changes to instrumental parts. In some cases, you can even incorporate collected animal sounds directly into the music itself.

Horii: The arrangement system offers an extremely wide range of possibilities, but we have not designed it so that musical quality has a major impact on completing the game. Music has no single correct answer, and if we tied musical quality too closely to gameplay success, it would undermine the freedom of the arrangement system. Even if a player lacks musical sense, they can still improve their singers’ abilities, understand the mood the audience wants, and successfully handle stage production. The game is balanced around those broader factors.

X25: Composers players meet turn collected sounds into songs. Who are these composers – and does your relationship with them affect what you can create? Horii: The composers change with each era, and each one has different personalities and musical specialties. As the sounds demanded by society evolve over time, both Daito and the player will need to think carefully about what kinds of music to create and perform. The composers are partners who support you through that process. In every era, it is important to provide them with as much Inspiration as possible and expand the range of what they can create. X25: Can music cross eras? For example, can a player carry a 1915 Kokura sound all the way into 1965 Shinjuku – and do sounds from different eras work together? Horii: As the eras change, so do popular trends, performance venues, composers, and performers. While some abilities and systems do carry over between eras, our primary focus is on how the music, instrumentation, tones, and arrangement possibilities evolve alongside each era’s historical background and musical development. We place great importance on depicting how popular music changed throughout Japan’s turbulent history, so we hope players pay close attention to that aspect. We are also developing the game so players can do things like take a song created during the early Kokura years and perform it in a rock style later in Shinjuku, so we hope players look forward to that as well.

Showbiz Management X25: You’ll also be managing a showbiz empire alongside creating music. If the setlist is wrong or the band is miscast, does the audience turn on you? Can it affect story consequences? Horii: A successful performance depends on many factors. If Daito lacks the skills needed to run shows, he will struggle to attract audiences in the first place. Even if he does attract a crowd, audiences will not be satisfied if the songs do not match current trends or the mood they expect, or if the singers and performers give weak performances. Players need to consider all of those elements when organizing shows. In addition, each era’s show business storyline has its own dedicated narrative progression and, in some cases, players will not be able to advance until they beat specific objectives. If those challenges prove difficult, players can earn money through easier performances or train their performers before trying again. X25: Thinking about the musicians and singers you recruit – how deep does the roster go? Are we talking a handful of story performers, or a genuine stable to manage across decades? Horii: Across all eras, there are nearly 100 singers and performers in total across every role. Since Daito’s circumstances and environment change dramatically from era to era, this is not a game where you continuously raise the same young companions from Kokura until they become elderly in Shinjuku. A core theme of the show business gameplay – and of the story itself – is how players navigate changing positions,

Fight music When we played Stranger Than Heaven, music even seems to be part of combat – even the stagger meter looks like a vinyl record. So, are musical themes and mechanics woven into the game beyond sound collection and the music management? Horii explains, “Since Daito is an entertainment promoter, and because music historically reflects its era, we positioned ‘music’ as one of the game’s core concepts, which depicts a man living through five different eras. In that sense, music also serves as a way to emphasize the differences between each period. To express that concept, we incorporated musical elements into areas such as the UI design as well. “That said, just because music is important does not mean we forced rhythm-game mechanics into every part of the experience. We did not design the game to lean excessively into music-game conventions.”

talent pools, and musical environments as an entertainment promoter across each era. X25: When I speak with fans of other RGG Studio titles, it’s not uncommon for me to hear that they’ve spent hours and hours on management-focused activities. Will players who enjoy the showbiz elements be able to go similarly deep into this part of the game? Horii: Each era includes dedicated show business side-story style content, along with many systems focused on growth and musical arrangement, so we believe players will be able to enjoy it for a long time. Players with deep musical knowledge can become extremely detailed with song arrangements, while players without musical experience can still fully enjoy and complete the game through the management and growth systems.

Stranger Than Heaven launches January 15, 2027 for XBOX Series X|S, XBOX on PC, and Game Pass. Play it on both console and PC at no additional cost with XBOX Play Anywhere.

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The path to launch, and the gentle art of letting players guide design by Danielle Partis After 16 months of early access development, Grounded 2 has a finish line in sight. The survival-action game launched into XBOX Game Preview and, after a steady stream of content updates, will launch into 1.0 next year having been shaped by its players. When Grounded 2 Game Director Chris Parker speaks to me about the path ahead, he doesn’t sound like someone approaching a long-awaited final destination – he sounds like a creative walking a tightrope between, as he describes it, “joy and terror at all times.”

suggestions on how to improve it, Parker says he was “pretty skeptical” – and then his team quietly made it work. “I’m like, oh – that’s actually really easy to do, and this works for all items now.” He laughs. “I use it every time I’m playing now.” The community doesn’t just influence gameplay – it also has an impact on the game’s sense of humor. Parker explains this with the ‘roach milk incident’, where a throwaway gag became

Did you know?

“I live on both sides of the fence,” Parker adds. “I love where things have gone so far. With game development, you never know what each day is going to bring, but it’s pretty gratifying when your plans work out!” But unlike most games, Grounded 2’s growth won’t be (ahem) cocooned away in secret – it’s been transforming before our eyes, and will continue to do so up until that 1.0 milestone and beyond. And that’s thanks to you. Grounded 2 isn’t just shaped by its developers, but by its players too. Over the last six years, both Grounded titles have benefited from the voices of the community, with the team gathering feedback on new ideas and even seeking consultation on what to do next. Small suggestions can lead to transformative results, and Parker recognizes this with the kind of candor that only comes from treating community feedback as a design fundamental rather than a data point. He points to ‘hot-depositing’ – a system that makes managing your inventory simpler. When players offered

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The Into the Abyss update drew strong inspiration from an unexpected source – the Siofra River Well in Elden Ring, an elevator that takes over a minute to ride, taking players into a deep underground kingdom. Parker wanted Grounded 2’s Abyss to invoke those same feelings of wonder as you explore deeper and the biome below opens up.

a valuable addition not just to Grounded 2’s crafting system, but also its wider lore. “We put roach milk into the game basically as a joke,” Parker says. “Like, this is a weird thing just to gross you guys out. For about a month afterward, everyone wanted us to add roach milkshakes as a consumable, which led to Rilkshakes, which you can use to regain health.” Grounded 2’s community also had the opportunity to name the most recent fall update, Rot and Ruin, in a move that gave players even more ownership over a world they’ve helped build from the very beginning. “Everybody was super jazzed about doing it,” he explains, “and that decision came from thinking of fun ways we can engage with the community.” Parker adds that the team is constantly on the lookout for feedback like this, from those subtle quality-of-life updates to absurd suggestions that can ultimately become canon, to creative decisions that usually wouldn’t reach players. “You can be a little looser with what you’re doing,” Parker says, giving an example of two developers debating if an item should be green or orange. In a traditional, closed-door development setting, that kind of minor decision can become bigger than it should. At Obsidian, checking in with the community is the compass that guides their next direction.

Creature feature Parker’s dream creature to add to Grounded 2? Easy. A baby skunk. “They’re adorable, but I don’t want one to get too close to me. It would also be ridiculously huge. Ask me again next month.”

“Whenever we’re starting a new biome, we focus on a core element to portray; for example, ‘fantasy pumpkin jungle,’ ‘Southern US bayou,’ or ‘deep ocean trench,’” Parker explains. “With this update, for the Ice Box biome, we are really trying to create a survival experience that feels like you are trying to summit a dangerous mountain in the depths of winter. “You’ll need new and better equipment than you’ve had before, you’ll want to make camps (or castles!) along the way for warmth and rest, and you’ll need to bring your A-game to fight against the new enemies – some of which are insects that were in Grounded 1 but still haven’t made it to Grounded 2.”

“We can just say, look, it’s going to be orange this time, let’s see what the community thinks,” he adds. “That helps guide what we’re doing. That’s really the most influential aspect of the feedback we get.”

The Ice Box adventure will be even better if you’ve gotten the Toe Biter Buggy, introduced during the Into the Abyss update. The Toe Biter is impervious to chill, making for a perfect adventuring companion. Parker also tells us that the winter update will introduce two additional biomes, as well as a brand-new Buggy that he’s keeping under wraps for now. There’ll also be salt for your weapons – the community keeps asking for it, and Obsidian, of course, is happy to oblige.

“With game development, you never know what each day is going to bring, but it’s pretty gratifying when your plans work out!”

There’s much more to come before we get to 1.0. Grounded 2’s (as-yet-untitled) next major update lands this winter, and promises an appropriately frosty setting, with an expansive ice biome to explore. The idea takes inspiration from Grounded 2’s Ice Cream Cart – a cold-hazard cave filled with freezing mechanics that can hurt if you run in unprepared. That was only a small area, but something that the team has wanted to build out for a long time. Parker tells me that they’re building an experience that feels like climbing Mount Everest – Grounded 2 style. Taking place inside Brookhollow Park’s Ice Box (one of those big two-door freezers outside convenience stores that contain bags of ice), this massive adventure will make you feel like you’re in a frozen tundra, challenging you with new creatures and obstacles as you battle against the cold.

And this is what makes the journey to 1.0 most exciting – there may be ideas that make up the “finished” game that haven’t yet been dreamt up. And they could even be your ideas.

Grounded 2 (XBOX Game Preview) is available now for XBOX Series X|S, XBOX on PC, and Game Pass. Also available on Steam through Early Access and PlayStation 5.

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“Where we dropping, boys?” by Jef f Rubenstein There was an era when, in every Final Fantasy game, the player would find themselves in possession of an airship, typically piloted by a character named Cid. But since Final Fantasy IX, mainline titles in the series tended to swap open worlds for higher fidelity in more intimate spaces. With the reimagined FF7 trilogy, Square Enix no longer needs to make the trade-off. The guardrails are coming down in Final Fantasy VII Revelation – not only does the most modern incarnation of Cid become a playable character, but you also get the keys to his ride: The Highwind. Once you’re given the helm, flying is intuitive and fun, and really gives you a feel for the scope of the world. The map is huge; southern regions of the planet are now accessible, including Yuffie’s home nation of Wutai, frequently mentioned but unvisited until now. Getting there is as simple as flying above your destination and parachuting down, battle royale-style. When you’re ready to move on, the team can zip back up to the Highwind directly from the map. Back on board, you’ll realize that the Highwind is not only a conveyance around Gaia, but a destination in itself: the airship doubles as an inn, resupply depot, Queensblood arena, even a portable Chocobo stable. It’s also customizable, with

Final Fantasy VII Revelation launches April 8, 2027 for XBOX Series X|S and XBOX on PC. Play it on both console and PC at no additional cost with XBOX Play Anywhere.

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collectibles unlocking new themes for the whole ship. The space is large enough that you’re quickly handed a grappling gun to speed up your journey. Your persistent (if uninvited) companion Chadley has also come aboard – and he’s been busy. FITs is a job system that lets you customize each character with new archetypes such as Summoner, Knight, and Black Mage. FIT-tingly, each role gives characters a new look; a welcome visual refresh for players who have now spent over 100 hours with most of these characters across Remake and Rebirth. Of course, new characters feel fresher than the rest of the gang. Cid wades into combat with his spear, offering aerial abilities such as Dragoon Jump and the Rising Dragoon launcher. The newly playable Vincent can transform into an imposing Gallian Beast form, as if a gun-toting vampire wasn’t already a formidable enough fighter. Layered on top of these inherent abilities, the FITs system allows you to shape them further – Vincent as a magic user, or Cid as a tank perhaps. But that’s once you arrive at your destination. With the Highwind, the grapple gun and more, getting around the world of Final Fantasy VII Revelation is becoming nearly as fun as what you do when you get there.

upcoming games

Evolution is everything in this starry new sci-fi adventure by Joe Skrebels “One of the lines we’ve used a lot is that we want players to feel like the co-author of the story we’re telling,” Drew Karpyshyn tells me. These are bold words, but when they come from the man who wrote Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the first two Mass Effect games, you really sit up and listen. Exodus follows in the footsteps of those games – a rich, system-heavy action-RPG with a huge emphasis on choice and consequence. But there’s a distinct aim here not just to invoke those beloved games, but go further than they ever could have. That’s never clearer than in hearing the team at Archetype Entertainment talk about how far this game will let you feel the effects of your own personal actions: “We’ve set up the framework,” Karpyshyn continues. “You play as Jun Aslan. We’ve built this character for you, but the choices you make as you go along this path will definitely change where it ends up.”

companions will react to them, too. But even beyond that, you’ll also be guiding humanity’s future as a whole, taking Celestial Technology found on your missions, and applying it when you get back to home base – “that has huge ramifications on how humanity’s going to evolve,” teases co-founder Chad Robertson. But most exciting of all, to me, is the idea that my actions can in effect be invisible choices – that my game could be different to yours without realizing. As Robertson puts it: “You probably made a bunch of choices in the demo that you don’t fully understand or realize yet will reflect different outcomes later.” Just as its story centers on evolution, Exodus is aiming to be an evolution of the genre in itself.

In an hour-long demo, I’m faced with multiple moments of traditional choice: from the small (do I save a dying soldier from the enemy side?), to the large (do I allow an entire species to be free, yet in danger, or controlled, but safe?). For some larger choices in Exodus, those choices will become tied into game mechanics themselves: “One interesting system is called Break Points,” says Karpyshyn. “Jun has some certain genetic advantages and one of them is this ability for predictive foresight, where you can see potential outcomes of your choices – and as you build that skill up, it gives you more detail.” Beyond that, your choices can affect Jun’s personal philosophy through this game’s take on the genre-standard morality system, Traveler Oaths – but also how every one of his

Exodus arrives for XBOX Series X|S and XBOX on PC on April 7, 2027. Play it on both console and PC at no additional cost with XBOX Play Anywhere.

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CLOCKWORK REVOLUTION MARVEL AT THE MANIFOLD MECHANISMS OF INXILE’S MOST MAGNIFICENT MACHINE!

by Will Fulton inXile Entertainment’s Clockwork Revolution made a bold first impression – the studio known for isometric RPGs like Wasteland 3 and Torment: Tides of Numenera has gone first-person. But Clockwork is actually a direct and exciting evolution from this team’s decades of genre-defining work. As inXile’s first new project developed wholly under XBOX ownership, they’ve been able to create something larger and more ambitious than ever before in their own near-25 year history.

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So ambitious, in fact, that it’s even sent the very pages you’re reading back in time.

Clockwork Revolution is set in the Victorian steampunk metropolis of Avalon. Lady Ironwood’s secret use of time travel – achieved through a device called the Chronometer – has cemented her rule, and the brutal repression of much of the city beneath her. You will play Morgan Vanette, a (fully customizable) rebel from the oppressed undercity slums, who discovers a

Chronometer and uses it to subvert Lady Ironwood’s regime. As time travel stories have long taught us, however, going into the past to alter the present can have dangerous and unpredictable consequences. And consequences are everything in Clockwork Revolution.

Clockwork Revolution embodies the best parts of inXile’s mature, narrativedriven RPGs: grit, weirdness, dark humor, and deep reactivity. Just as the pomp and frippery of the real Victorian English elite was built on violence

and exploitation, whimsy and cruelty go hand in hand in Avalon. And your choices sit at the heart of that. “It might hit you first with its action and first-person perspective,” Producer and Studio Founder Brian Fargo tells me, “but we haven’t lost the crunchy systems and reactivity that you’d expect from us.” Director Chad Moore adds, “For us, going first-person was about more than just gameplay. When the city changes around you as a result of your choices, we wanted you to be fully immersed.”

MYRIAD POSSIBILITIES! This missive makes clear that your actions in the past can have a profound effect on the present – but, dear reader, the vagaries of time travel can transmute small decisions into momentous consequences. You may change the course of entire lives along the way. Perhaps you stumble into the path of a monstrous serial killer? Return the favor in the past by breaking into his house, and, when you return to the present, you’ll find him advocating for the rights of home invasion victims. Or perhaps you meet the inventor of a new automated crane – which now threatens the livelihoods of Avalon’s dockworkers. You could influence the inventor in conversation, inadvertently changing the future layout and purpose of an entire section of the city. Even your smallest actions, or most benign conversational choices, can affect the food and fashion of those in Avalon’s present day. The message is clear: go carefully, time traveler – you cannot fathom your own power.

Building a game that can rewrite itself around you has been a huge undertaking. “We set out to be modest in our ambitions – but we just couldn’t help ourselves,” Fargo explains. “We’re currently sitting at more words than all eight seasons of ‘Game of Thrones’ combined.” You won’t be able to access everything in a long, single playthrough, though. It’s spread across the immense number of ways the game can play out based on your decisions. This starts at the very beginning; skills and traits you choose during character creation (including a fan-favorite “Dullard” option) will inform what choices are available to you later. Based on your earliest decisions, playthroughs will immediately diverge, encouraging players to compare stories, or replay in new ways.

But time travel is where things get truly variable. At key points of the game, the Chronometer will allow you to go back and forth between your present and (appropriately enough for this magazine) up to 25 years in the past. Your actions in the past alter the present city, in ways small and sweeping – both to the landscape, and people’s lives. The stakes of your decisions will be made more personal by how they affect the lives of Morgan’s gang, The Hooligans – you might return from the past to find you even have a different crew. All these many permutations will culminate in the final act. According to Fargo, you’ll find yourself in “a different city, with different management, with different allies.” More than just triggering one from a handful of canned ending variations, inXile is ensuring the game’s finale is a culmination of the players’ choices up to that point. As Fargo puts it: “It can’t be a parlor trick.”

Clockwork Revolution aims not just to overthrow Lady Ironwood’s rule of Avalon, but our expectations for how responsive the world, story, and characters of an RPG can be. Time travel presents a daunting narrative design challenge, but the master machinists at inXile have been doing the hard work needed to execute on it. Clockwork Revolution arrives in 2027 for XBOX Series X|S as a console exclusive, XBOX on PC and Game Pass. Play it on both console and PC at no additional cost with XBOX Play Anywhere. Also available on Steam.

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“When we started thinking about our Albion, I don’t think there was a single day when we didn’t think Bowerstone was the capital of it.”

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by Joe Skrebe ls

Fable Game Director, Ralph Fulton is pretty clear on this. If you make a Fable game, even if it’s a full reboot, Bowerstone must be included. The capital of Albion has appeared in every mainline game – it’s changed in form, and even in location on the world map – but it’s always been there. “It just felt like a no-brainer to us.” This new take on Bowerstone is the densest location Playground has ever built – you can enter every single building (and purchase most of them), all hand-designed inside and out. It’s rich with returning landmarks from previous versions of the city, each reimagined specifically for this all-new tale. “The map of Albion – the literal landmass – has changed from game to game,” Fulton continues. “In folklore, details are always what’s remembered – and therefore subject to memories and flowery recollections and retellings. So we always gave ourselves permission to rethink and reimagine aspects of the original trilogy. That means we rebuilt Bowerstone completely for our game. We didn’t follow maps or even general locations from the previous games. We built Bowerstone to serve the needs of our Fable.” And the key need here was to give the player an anchor in the world. After the game’s introductory sequence, you’re set free to take your own path, able to travel in any direction you choose – but you’re given a single point of guidance: head to Bowerstone and its Heroes’ Guild. Throughout the game, the city will act like a center of gravity for the main story. “We’ve made sure that you’ll come back to Bowerstone multiple times because it is so big and so important

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to Albion, and to the history of Fable,” Fulton tells me. “It was something that we wanted the player not just to pass through, but return to multiple times. We want you to come back at different stages of your story, different stages of your game progression. “And, hopefully, the next time you come back after you’ve been doing various things in Albion, you’ll be a bit richer. Maybe you’ll be able to afford more of the things that Bowerstone has to offer and move up in the world? There’s a nice player fantasy about that.” With Bowerstone so central to the entire game, the team at Playground has stuffed its three districts with sights to see, side quests to take on, shops to visit, houses to buy, and secrets to stumble upon. So, let me act as your personal tour guide – read on to discover just a slice of what Albion’s historic capital has to offer a heroic new visitor. Turn over to check out the full Bowerstone city map in all its glory.

Fable arrives February 23, 2027, with Early Access for the Premium Edition beginning February 18. It will be available on XBOX Series X|S, XBOX on PC, and Game Pass. Play it on both console and PC at no additional cost with XBOX Play Anywhere.

THREE-FOR-ONE DEAL Bowerstone is so enormous that, under the hood of the new Fable game, it is in fact multiple locations stuck together. “There was kind of a hard limit to the number of NPCs that we could have in a settlement – and we wanted Bowerstone to be much bigger than that,” explains Fulton. “So we ended up building three settlements.” In-game, that’s represented by Bowerstone’s three main districts – let’s break them down:

COPPERBOTTOM Traditionally the home of workers, Copperbottom is characterized by its narrow, winding streets and povertystricken populace, with a visual palette distinct from the others. In keeping with real-life medieval cities, it’s also physically lower – and thus gets less sunlight – than its richer neighbors. Rumors that a criminal element has taken root in Copperbottom are… well, they’re absolutely correct.

BUTTERFIELD MARKET Home to the majority of Bowerstone’s shops, the Butterfield Market is built around the striking Clock Tower, and caters to anyone looking to buy new clothes, or gifts for NPCs – and also includes hairdressers and tattoo parlors. For the budding entrepreneur among you, every single shop is, itself, for sale – a perfect place to begin your business empire.

The Old Enemy

Bowerstone is not the only major city in Albion – and its northerly neighbor, Bloodstone, has a simmering hatred for the capital. “There’s a history of enmity, even straightforward warfare, between Bowerstone and Bloodstone,” Fulton explains. “You’ll learn from side content and readables about the history. For those in Bowerstone, the monarch in Fairfax Castle rules both cities – I think the people of Bloodstone would probably take issue with that…” Make a point of visiting both on your travels – you’re sure to be able to take a side.

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BOWERMINSTER The richest district, Bowerminster includes the magnificent Fairfax Castle, home to the queen, and houses the city’s nobility. Lined with enormous townhouses and the most exclusive shops, it’s sure to become your aspiration to own property here. Just don’t cause too much trouble – the Royal Guard is also stationed in the area, and is looking for an excuse to rough up ‘undesirables.’

SIDE QUESTS Fable will feature a huge number of side quests – with as many optional stories to play through as there are main quests – and Bowerstone won’t be skimping on what you can get up to. They can be revealed either by talking to the right person, or simply finding yourself in the right place at the right time, and can take some very unexpected turns. “My favorite side quest in the game is up in Bowerminster,” Fulton enthuses. “You’ll be invited to read the will of a recently deceased noble, who stipulated that the job be handled by a Hero of the Guild. You’ll go into this wonderful townhouse and you’ll meet some of the family… and they’re awful. They’re just awful, awful rich people. “You’ll meet the two daughters of this noble, and her brother. You’ll meet her personal assistant. And after doing a little bit of investigation around the house, you’ll be invited to read the will. The twist is that this Noble is leaving the distribution of her assets up to you.” I won’t spoil exactly how that can go, but suffice it to say, your options about what to do here can be… unconventional.

Fable’s Living Population means the consequences of your decision go beyond whatever reward you get: “Whenever it’s possible, we release side quest characters into the Living Population, and you can expect them to retain very specific and personal opinions of you. But your actions in the side quest will also earn you Reputations which will bubble up and become part of the wider consciousness of all the local NPCs.” Choose wisely, or just choose what seems funniest – just know that it matters.

Demon Doors

Demon Doors are a hallmark of the Fable series – talking doors with faces who set very specific tasks in order to open up what’s inside. While the mainline quests in Fable won’t require you to interact with the game’s Life systems (tailored for players who solely want to follow the story without impediment), Demon Doors are all about interacting with those features. Take Bowerstone’s Demon Door as an example. “This one requires you to be an aristocrat – so you need to be dressed in a certain way, and own a property of a certain grandeur,” Fulton explains. “It’s going to push you back into the world to go do those things.” How you acquire those things is up to you, of course… Once you meet its requirements, this door will open to reveal an entire, magical manor house inside, filled with new NPCs. I won’t tell you exactly what you’ll be asked to do inside – but know that this is an entire quest in itself. You’ll want to work on getting those fancy accoutrements, believe me.

Fairy Flowers

A new side activity in Fable, Fairy Flowers are part of a world-spanning quest. Early in the game, you’ll meet a character looking for a solution to an unusual problem. “There are malevolent flowers springing up all over Albion,” explains Fulton. “They have a specific kind of nectar, which is attracting fairies and getting them drunk. You’ll recognize them because they’re surrounded by a swarm who are just a bit, you know, three sheets to the wind. “There’s over 50 of them across the world – you need to shoot the flowers to close them up and sober up the fairies. The challenge is often, ‘I can see or hear the drunk fairies, but how do I get a clear shot at the flower?’ and we’ll create a little environmental puzzle around that.”

Silver Key Chests Another returning feature from the original game, Silver Key Chests contain some of Fable’s highest-value loot. Each one can require multiple silver keys – themselves a rare find, so discovering a new chest can set you off on a self-set quest. As Fulton puts it, “There’s this great main story, and you’ll spend a lot of time in Bowerstone pursuing it, but you can drop that at any point and go and do any number of other things – you’ll probably spend the same amount of time again, or more, doing these kinds of side activities. That’s your choice – it’s all about player agency.”

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Fairfax Castle

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WELCOME TO BOWERSTONE The seat of power inside the seat of power, a version of Fairfax has appeared in multiple previous Fable games – but it’s never been this grand. Dominating the Bowerminster skyline, it’s both imposing and inviting.

BUTTERFIELD MARKET The Old Clock Tower Another returning landmark, the Old Clock Tower is the most recognizable part of Bowerstone’s Butterfield Market, acting as a beacon to those with gold coins burning a hole in their pocket.

COPPERBOTTOM The Heroes’ Guild This is where your journey truly begins, so it needed to feel suitably grand. “We wanted it to be this really spectacular, quite self-aggrandizing structure – it fits the historic role of heroes in Bowerstone and Albion,” says Fulton.

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The Coalition’s journey to redefine a legend with Gears of War: E-Day

by Danielle Partis

Two decades ago, Gears of War exploded onto XBOX 360 with a tone and emotional weight that felt unlike anything else in gaming. It was brutal, but grounded and unexpectedly tender, with a story about loyalty and loss packaged inside an explosive, gruesome shooter.

“Gears is unique in that on its surface is one thing – these big, burly soldiers fighting monsters with a chainsaw gun – but then it has a little bomb hidden in the middle, which is the emotional story,” says Nicole Fawcette, Studio Brand Director at The Coalition. “It’s that one-two punch – getting connected to those characters and what they go through while playing this action-filled cover shooter is what gives Gears such staying power.”

There’s a particular feeling you get when you pick up a Gears of War game – a weight even, like every step forward is earned through sheer grit. It’s something fans and developers alike have held onto for the last two decades, even as the series evolved. With Gears of War: E‑Day, The Coalition took on the monumental task of going back to where it all began, not just to recreate the past, but to redefine it, and lay a foundation for the series’ future. At The Coalition, it’s clear that this wasn’t just another project. The team faced the challenge of going back to the beginning to understand what Gears truly is, why it has endured, and bringing that forward to deliver a whole new experience. Following E-Day’s launch, there’s a palpable sense of pride, and notably, a deep, shared sense of duty to the franchise this team stewards – a responsibility borne of shouldering 20 years of history.

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It’s the spectacle that draws people in, but the humanity is what makes them stay. Matt Searcy, Studio Creative Director on E-Day, highlights this: “Some of that emotional punch comes from reflecting real-world values and moments that people share; it just happens to be inside a surreal world where monsters come out of the ground.” One of the more challenging aspects of E-Day was portraying series protagonists Marcus and Dom before the events of the first game. The Coalition had to strip those elements away in order to build characters that felt less like the hardened monster-slaying veterans we know, and more like unsuspecting soldiers going through the life-changing event that would later define them. “We had a lot of heated discussions about how to push these characters forward,” Fawcette tells us. “We had to work out where we could push Marcus in a way that doesn’t break who he is, but in a way that can live up to what’s happening in the rest of the world.”

E-Day documents the Locust ’s terrif ying assault on Kalona, presenting Bravo Squad with unimaginable horrors lurking beneath the surface

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The Coalition has recast the Locust as living nightmares – mysterious, cunning and highly tactical in their approach

Searcy adds that E-Day’s unique setting allowed the studio to do something particularly special: “We go from never seeing any of the monsters, through the moment the world changes, all the way to a really emotional conclusion between iconic characters. It’s something we’ve not really been able to do before – tell a new story that also sheds new light on their relationship.” The popularity of the original Gears of War, particularly its intense cinematics and brooding tone, contributed to an overall shift in shooters. For E-Day’s visuals, the team revisited the desaturated war movie aesthetic that defined the look of the original trilogy, but rebuilt it with modern fidelity. Aryan Hanbeck, Studio Art Director on E-Day, explains: “We didn’t want to copy what the first Gears game did, technology is a lot more

Fenix Rising Marcus Fenix has become a true gaming icon, but he didn’t emerge fully formed. The Coalition shows us some of the early images that led to the hero we know today. Early concept work of the ‘Samurai plate mail’ soldier. This design wasn’t made for Marcus, but led to the COG infantry silhouette that quickly became the template for him and Delta Squad.

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sophisticated now. What we did was take the vibe and feeling that the direction evoked and brought it forward into 2026.” The results are clear in E-Day’s setting – the city of Kalona is grounded by its heaviness, but denser, sharper and richer than any Gears location that came before it. “I don’t think there’s a game out there right now that looks quite like E-Day,” Hanbeck adds. In recent years, the broader shooter landscape has also evolved in a way that makes Gears’ moody aesthetic feel novel again, as noted by Fawcette: “There’s a lot of colorful games around right now with very bright aesthetics, and over-the-top cartoon personalities. Gears is still heavy, and it has this muted color palette that stands out. We’ve gone through a whole arc and come back to a place where Gears once again feels unique.” That said, modernizing Gears of War runs beyond giving it a new coat of paint. It asked The Coalition to look back at their most recent entries and be completely honest with themselves on how they landed with fans.

An early black-and-white sketch of Marcus from 2005, where his classic look starts to take shape, complete with his trademark bandana.

“The biggest lesson to learn is that you can modernize and evolve a franchise, but you have to balance the recipe for what makes it unique,” Searcy says. “Gears 4 and Gears 5 had a lot of

Marcus as he appeared during the 2005 reveal of Gears of War – not quite his final form, but another step toward the iconic, unrelenting soldier

E-Day Season Two: Legacy To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Gears of War, E-Day’s next multiplayer season, Legacy, will introduce – as Lore and Content Manager Andrew Morava puts it – the “greatest hits” of Gears of War content, including bringing back iconic characters from the series, new skins, and classic game modes featured during the series’ early years. Launching on December 1, 2026, it’s a curated tribute to everything we know and love about Gears, a celebration of its legacy, and a gift to the community that has sustained it. It’s also, as Morava admits, a way for The Coalition to have some well-earned fun with these beloved characters and the series’ history: “It lets us reimagine the characters in ways you remember, while pushing them into some imaginative places.” Character skins for Marcus and Dom will pay homage to looks fans have long imagined – like the suit Dom wears in the iconic photo he carries of himself and Maria. There are also a bunch of new weapon skins serving as a throwback to memorable Gears and XBOX moments – including the Golden skin from Gears of War 2, a skin inspired by the Epic Reaper from Gears of War: Judgment, and even a skin inspired by the XBOX 360 blades interface. “There’s so many fans at the studio that have such strong memories of Gears and XBOX, and we wanted to use the season as a springboard to hit on all those amazing memories,” Morava adds.

new things. They’re great games and we’re very proud of them, but some things didn’t land as well. For example, Gears 5 has a lot of big open spaces and a vehicle you could drive around on, and the reception was that it didn’t feel ‘Gearsy’. In E-Day, we do have those larger spaces still, but they’re small city blocks; there’s action everywhere, and the streets are dripping with lore. We realized we can have that open element, but we need to make sure it works with the other ingredients that make Gears great too.” This clarity and confidence didn’t come easy at first. E-Day represents the longest development cycle in The Coalition’s history, and the team is forthcoming about the uncertainty

All roads led to this – the iconic Marcus Fenix that was revealed to the world in 2006 as part of the famous ‘Mad World’ trailer – the hero that would leave a mark on a generation.

and pressure they felt to deliver on their vision. Without the external validation, the team had to trust their knowledge and understanding of Gears – and, more importantly, one another. “We were in the dark for so long, and we did so much work on understanding who our fans are, what kind of game they wanted, and what story we want to tell,” says Hanbeck. “When the announce trailer came out, and all of that guesswork landed, a humongous weight got lifted off all our shoulders.” Behind the success of E-Day is a collaborative ethos that ensures every idea is born out of a crucible – it has to fight to be earned. The Coalition rejects the notion that a single mind can claim ownership of a world like Gears of War. “We buck against this idea of ‘the auteur’ for our games,” says Fawcette. “It’s impossible for one person to be responsible for every single detail of the game. We’re a team. Input comes from a lot of places and there’s a lot of empowerment to bring people’s passion to the forefront. I think the shared collective investment to do what’s best for the franchise is an important process, and that’s why E-Day feels the way it does.” Hanbeck laughs, as he knows that only the strongest concepts survive: “It really is a trial by fire. If an idea makes it through us, then it’s really gone through the gauntlet to ensure we’re not taking any missteps.” All of The Coalition’s philosophies – from the core pillars of E-Day’s design that keep it feeling authentic, to a company structure that lets every idea be heard – play a vital role in E-Day’s reception. Twenty years on from the original game, Gears remains honest, human, and true to itself, a feat that can only be achieved when its makers also adhere to that same ethos. “This moment feels like a culmination of our love of the franchise, that kind of thing doesn’t always happen in your career,” Searcy says frankly.

Marcus Fenix as he appears in E-Day – slightly younger, less battle-worn, but more in-depth than ever before, E-Day is a testament equipped with to the heart of the his trusty characters, the heart Chainsaw of the fans, and the heart Lancer. of the people that built it – a commemoration of where Gears has been, and where it’s going next, and The Coalition stands by ready to    guide it.

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by Mike Nelson

14 years on, the original Forza Horizon continues to power the engine of the entire series 048

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Driving for the fun of it “The Forza franchise has always been about that joy of driving. What Forza Horizon was able to do – what it had permission to do – was take that beyond what Forza Motorsport was doing, take it beyond the track,” says Forza Horizon 6 Design Director Torben Ellert when asked to reflect on the original game. “While getting that perfect apex and getting the fastest straight are still very much in the DNA of the game, Forza Horizon was about just being in the world in a way that is different from racing in the world. And I guess as the Forza Horizon games have evolved, that has just become more and more core. There are more places to go, more things to do in the world.” And of course, there are the cars. Forza Horizon ensured there would always be a massive library for players to choose from – more than 140 in the first game – and took a purposeful approach to have a less expected selection. “I think that’s a real strength – you could get your Volkswagen Golf GTI and upgrade that thing and it could carry you really deep into the game,” says Forza Horizon 6 Production Director Mike Bennett. “I think fans really responded to that, and that’s something that we’ve always known we needed to keep hold of. “I think people love having that experience, being able to go and take your car that maybe you own in real life and build that into a proper racing machine. There’s just a ton of fun in that gameplay loop on its own.”

Playground Games may not have known it back in 2012, but they had just developed what would become one of the tentpole franchises for XBOX. Forza Horizon offered a refreshingly new take on the racing genre, one that rewarded experimentation, breaking free from the confines of circuit track racing. What’s remarkable is, if you revisit that XBOX 360 game today, you’ll discover just how much the team nailed in their first attempt. And it all began as a spin-off from another series. Forza Horizon emerged as a massive celebration of car culture mixed with bombastic showcase events that pushed your skill and changed what was possible in a racing game. There was also the Horizon Festival itself, which delivered a variety of racing challenges, encouraging you to experiment with a wide range of cars. Rounding that out were the radio stations that would deliver an eclectic range of music. All these features helped place you in a riveting world dominated by racing and car culture.

Go your own way Forza Horizon, in many ways, paved the road for future Horizon games to drive down. For instance, players were rewarded through expressive driving – completing skills, racking up combos – a wider spectacle beyond just trying to finish first. A full five games later, and with a huge community to support, the Forza Horizon 6 team is continuing that work, finding ways to recognize and reward players in multiple ways. “If you look back at the original game, it was all about asphalt and road cars,” says Bennett. “As the games have gone on, we’ve really broadened the range of vehicles you can play with. Now we’ve got everything from extreme off-road buggies to SUVs, pickups, and rally cars. You can take a conventional road-going vehicle and build it up to make it work effectively as an off-roader. So, there’s a lot of freedom that we build into the vehicle set, allowing people to have the kinds of driving experiences they want.” And while there was a massive amount of freedom on the roads when driving around the first game’s Colorado setting, Forza Horizon isn’t really a fully open world game – at least when compared to the later entries in the franchise. It had, as

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Four pillars Literally written on the wall at Playground are four emotional pillars that define what makes a Horizon experience feel like one

1 Freedom

Explore and play on your own terms.

2 Fun

Simcade While it may not have been as expansive as the latter titles, there’s still direct inspiration to be pulled from the original Forza Horizon that shapes the development of the modern titles.

Balance exhilarating challenges with relaxing play.

3 Beauty

Authentic, uplifting, and vibrant visual presentation.

4 Community

Encourage inclusive, social, and shared experiences.

Even the latest game makes that clear. Forza Horizon 6’s campaign adopts a Wristband model, where winning a set of events allows you to move up the ranks, unlocking more and more powerful vehicles. Where did we see that? The original Forza Horizon. And just look at the Horizon Festival – the original game’s DNA and inspirations remain, reimagined through the lens of Forza Horizon 6 and its setting.

Ellert puts it, a “suggested expansiveness to it.” You would have roads to follow that would carry you through the world, but you couldn’t just point your car and… go. It’s been a goal for the team to go further with exploration in each successive game. “With Forza Horizon 6,” explains Ellert, “we built an entire section of the game’s progression system around going into that huge, expansive world and finding things to do. The thing I’m quite delighted we were able to achieve as a team is creating this feeling that you come around a corner and there’s something there, something relevant to you. It might be a piece of structured gameplay, or some huge, bombastic event – or it might just be a cute mascot placed on top of a building, and you’re like, ‘How do I make my car hit that?’ “And that’s the balance, right? It’s going from suggested expansiveness to actual expansiveness, while also finding the right cadence for putting things into space. I think a metric we were considering was time-to-discover: How long do you drive before you spot something you want to go look at?”

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“Fundamentally, the Horizon Festival remains central. That celebration of cars and music is a really great conceit for what the game is all about,” says Bennett, when asked to identify elements that he feels the original Horizon nailed which remain with the series today. “And our underlying handling model still has that balance of authentic vehicle behavior while still being approachable and accessible.” “You hear people use the word ‘simcade’ quite frequently – we aim to build a car that feels like a car, drives like a car, and has the authentic performance characteristics of that car. But you can pick up a pad and get to grips with it in a way that might not necessarily be true for a more simulation-focused title. So, I think that balance has persevered, even though with every single game, we go and tweak it.” “For me, it’s how that game looked at car culture as a bigger thing than just ‘go fast, win race,’” adds Ellert. “The way that cars are adjacent to the freedom and the fun and the music, right? The way that cars appear in aspirational life. I think that was the thing that game just kind of really touched into and that every game after that has carried forward in some way.”

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Fostering positivity The idea of community has also evolved considerably from the original Forza Horizon, growing from competitive multiplayer races to now where players can meet, race, build, and create together across worlds and platforms. It continues this feeling that the series works to find ways for players to play with each other and not necessarily against each other. “I think the key decisions we made there were about fostering positivity. With very few exceptions, the game is positively loaded. Something as simple as the Link Skill System rewards you for doing something with another player: Go fast, smash something, jump off something, do a drift. It positively encourages playing together,” explains Ellert.

Rules of the road

The original Forza Horizon made strides in how players would encounter and play with each other in the world when online. If you were to come across another player on the road, you could instantly signal to them you wanted to

The first Forza Horizon established several defining features that remain central to the series:

1 The racing line

Inherited from Forza Motorsport, this guidance tool helps players learn braking points, cornering, and effective driving.

2 Barn Finds

race and the game would then auto-generate a route. Or the Speed Traps, challenging each other to lock in the fastest speed on a particular road. Those ‘dials of fun’ have been turned up over the years. “A big game doesn’t have to be everything to everyone all the time,” says Ellert. “It needs to understand that different people want different things from it and present those things in a way that allows them to represent themselves within the community. That can mean hypercompetitive chases. It can also mean people who just want to drive around and spend a bunch of credits building cool garages they can share with the community.”

The thrill of discovering rare vehicles remains alive and well, complemented by new ways to uncover cars in the latest game.

3 Music and soundtrack

Music continues to define the atmosphere of Horizon, with radio stations and curated tracks playing a central role.

4 Showcases

Spectacular events remain a hallmark of the series, combining racing with memorable set pieces.

5 A diverse vehicle roster

Pushing what’s possible And then there are the basic realities of releasing an original game in 2012, and a sixth game in 2026 – many things that would have been pipedreams on XBOX 360 are now achievable. I asked the team, if they could time travel to visit a developer on the original game, which part of Forza Horizon 6 they would show them first – and why? “I would show them racing a giant robot through Tokyo City. And then I would watch them just lose their minds,” says Ellert. “And that’s something that we might not have dared to do on earlier games,” adds Bennett. “I think the creative team is always pushing up against the limits of where that authenticity line begins and ends. On the early games, we might have felt a robot race was a stretch too far. But I mean, when you’re in it? It’s amazing fun.”

The promise of hundreds of cars, spanning a wide range of styles and categories, continues to give players freedom of choice.

“Yeah, I think the thing for me is that, over the last few games, we’ve done a much better job of rewarding people who create content. UGC [User-Generated Content] has become much more important to us,” adds Bennett. “Whether you like creating content in EventLab, or using the Garages feature – which, honestly, I think has been amazing – you get rewarded for it. Seeing players really engage with that feature has been incredible. We give our community something back for enriching the game world that other players experience. And I love the livery editor as well. Every time I buy a new car, I jump into the livery editor to see what people have made.”

“What strikes me is how many people engage with this game now – how many people really delight in playing an open-world driving game,” adds Ellert. “For the people who made that first game, imagine telling them it would become a platform flagship and that so many people would come to it. And not just people who like games, but people with different accessibility requirements; people who engage with games for relief, relaxation, or escape; and people who use games to express themselves. Imagine saying, ‘This game you’re making is going to mean so much to so many people, many of whom you can’t even imagine playing it.’ That’s the thing that strikes me.”

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by Danielle Partis

25 years of Halo, 25 ways it changed the game

This November, Halo celebrates its 25th anniversary with a legacy that very few franchises earn in their lifetime. From its very first moment, inviting players to step into an impressive new world as the Master Chief – and giving many fans their first taste of XBOX in the process – Halo not only redefined the genre of first-person shooters, but defined an entire era.   To celebrate this monumental milestone – and as Activision prepares to take the series on the next leg of its journey – we’re taking a look back. Here are 25 of the biggest moments in Halo history: that groundbreaking first launch, its role in pioneering online multiplayer on console, and the cultural identity that the series built beyond video games. From games and esports to novels, television and animation, Halo is a cultural stalwart that boasts one of the most incredible sci-fi settings ever made, and it remains right where it started, here on XBOX.

Following Microsoft’s acquisition of Bungie, the development of sci-fi shooter Halo: Combat Evolved was repositioned from a PC and Mac title to the flagship launch title for the original XBOX.

Halo: Combat Evolved launched in tandem with XBOX on November 15, 2001, marking the start of a whole new generation, ushering in a new era of first-person shooters on console.

Halo: Combat Evolved pioneered a two-layer survivability model, where shields regenerate automatically while health requires pickups. In later games, the two layers merged to create one rechargeable health bar, negating the need to collect health packs and keeping players in the fight. Halo’s ‘Golden Tripod’ philosophy – guns, grenades and melee attacks, each mapped to a different controller input – offered a new FPS blueprint. This ease of access offered smooth, quick play with a skill ceiling that rivaled PC shooters utilizing mouse and keyboard.

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Before the days of XBOX Live and online console play, Halo: Combat Evolved enabled 16-player local network matches by linking four consoles together through a wired Ethernet connection. This setup showcased how console shooters could deliver large-scale multiplayer sessions, proving the power of console LAN experiences.

games Halo 2’s iconic soundtrack became the first video game soundtrack to appear on the Billboard charts, featuring several mainstream rock bands and carried by its distinctive orchestral main theme. The piece featured in all the mainline games, and remains one of the most recognizable video game scores.

Halo gave rise to modern Machinima, with creators using footage captured in-game to create scripted comedy videos. The movement was spearheaded in the early 2000s by Rooster Teeth’s ‘Red vs Blue’ series, proving the community’s comedic interpretation of Halo could become just as iconic and enduring as the game itself.

Halo 2 expanded the series’ narrative ambitions, introducing dual protagonists in an expanded campaign. This setting allowed players to experience a story from the Master Chief’s perspective, as well as the Covenant’s Arbiter. In those sections of the game, playing as the Arbiter grants access to new skills and weapons, and sees you fight alongside other Covenant characters as allies.

Halo 2 pioneered online console matchmaking and multiplayer following the introduction of XBOX Live. With frictionless online matchmaking and balanced party systems to accommodate every skill level, XBOX Live helped transform Halo 2 from a great shooter into a social connectivity boon. The ‘virtual couch’ vision let players enjoy the game with friends wherever they were in the world.

With the online multiplayer infrastructure in place, Halo 2 laid the groundwork for esports and competitive play on console. Players could now organize tournaments, form teams, and solicit sponsorship opportunities to become full-time professional players. In 2005, Halo 2 became the flagship console esport for esports organization MLG, cementing Halo as a major player in the esports space.

Halo 2’s I Love Bees viral marketing campaign became an organic fan phenomenon as an immersive Alternate Reality Game (ARG). Fans were sent to a website about beekeeping, corrupted by a rogue AI. Solving puzzles on the website pointed users toward real-world payphones across the United States. The campaign successfully blurred fiction and reality to create one of the most memorable marketing moments in games.

Halo 3 launched in 2007, becoming the biggest entertainment launch in history. With over one million pre-orders, record-breaking day one sales and midnight launches across the globe attended by thousands, Halo 3 ’s arrival cemented its place in pop culture, extending far beyond onceniche gaming audiences and becoming mainstream entertainment.

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The introduction of Halo 3’s Forge Mode empowered players to become creators, offering the tools to build their own custom multiplayer maps and craft elaborate set pieces with items from Halo 3’s asset library – all without traditional PC modding. The accessible, intuitive interface inside Forge sparked a huge creative movement and, later, allowed proud architects to share their creations with other players.

Halo 3: ODST introduced an ensemble cast of celebrity sci-fi talent, including actors from ‘Firefly’ and ‘Battlestar: Galactica’. Their performances gave Halo a Hollywood glow, drawing more attention in traditional media circles. It also gave video games a brand-new appeal as viable projects for famous actors to partake in.

Halo Wars, ODST, and Reach showcased the Halo universe beyond the Master Chief, and spotlit new heroes, perspectives and conflicts taking place outside of the Chief’s purview. Halo Wars explored wider UNSC strategy on a larger scale, ODST delivered a grounded story following ordinary soldiers, and Reach chronicled the fall of an entire planet – a pivotal moment in Halo’s lore. Halo Wars successfully brought the franchise into the real-time strategy genre, translating its signature fast-paced action onto wide, multifaction battlefields. By expanding the series’ lore and proving Halo could thrive outside of first-person shooters, it ultimately helped introduce console players to the RTS space.

Halo: Reach featured a new squad of Spartans, each with their own distinct skillsets. These characters recontextualized the Spartans, and Master Chief himself, offering a bleaker, grittier storyline. In Reach, there’s no big ‘hero’, but instead, a small team making the ultimate sacrifice for humanity’s future, with one of Halo’s most memorable, gut-wrenching endings.

Halo: CE Anniversary introduced seamless, realtime switching between the original 2001 visuals and fully updated graphics at the push of a button. At any point during the campaign, players could flip between the two to see how every single area had been modernized.

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Halo 4 launched as an XBOX 360 graphical showcase and kicked off the Reclaimer Saga. Here, players were introduced to the mystery behind the Forerunners, and a personal story that deepens the relationship between Master Chief and Cortana.

2015’s Halo 5: Guardians introduced enhanced mobility and a massively expanded sandbox to play with. Spartans could now utilize their kit to dodge enemy fire, clamber up surfaces and slide across terrain, adding more ways to engage with Halo’s ever-evolving combat system.

Halo 2 Anniversary launched with the Master Chief Collection, bringing the legendary sequel to a new generation with fully remastered visuals and stunning cinematics created by Blur Studio. The cutscenes offered fresh detail to Halo’s characters and world, fully cementing its place among the new generation of hardware.

Halo’s deep universe extends far beyond the games, spanning award-winning novels, comics, animation and TV shows that explore pivotal events across centuries of Halo lore.

Halo Infinite, released in 2021, introduced an expanded open world campaign that encouraged exploration and side objectives. It also refined the multiplayer experience with new gameplay elements and a free-to-play structure that welcomed in a new generation of FPS fans. Halo: Campaign Evolved expanded its story with Operation: Meteorite, three new missions that take place before the events on Alpha Halo. The new additions follow Master Chief and series favorite Sergeant Johnson on a covert mission aboard a Covenant vessel, adding even more color to the story, 25 years on from the original game’s launch.

Halo: Campaign Evolved introduced 42 gameplay-modifying Skulls, the most in any Halo game. This includes the Perspective skull, a modifier that lets players experience the iconic campaign in third person for the first time ever. This fresh viewpoint offers new animations from the Chief, and showcases classic encounters in a whole new way.

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So: you made the best-selling game of all time. What’s next?

by Mike Nelson

Back in 2014, bringing Mojang in-house was one of Satya Nadella’s first major moves as Microsoft CEO. Fast-forward to today and – among other achievements – Minecraft is one of the most widely played games in the world, holds a Guinness World Record as the bestselling game in history, and has become perhaps one of the most important pieces of educational software available. What Microsoft gave Mojang was the opportunity to think at a tremendous scale, along with the infrastructure to build within it; but what never changed was that it was always Mojang’s choice to decide how. Every new idea – whether it’s for a new mob, a new spin-off, even an entire theme park – needs to answer the same question: does this belong here? “That question is what helps keep us grounded to our roots, to our Minecraft DNA: the belief that players should have the freedom to create, explore, and tell their own stories,” President of XBOX’s XP division and former President of Mojang Kayleen Walters told me in August. “It’s a world built on creativity, imagination, and self-expression, where the player is the hero. Every new feature, product, or experience has to

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Enter… the Sift Minecraft has seen plenty of projects over the years, from Vibrant Visuals to making investments in education software, but none were quite so unexpected as Minecraft Dungeons, which took the world of Minecraft and wrapped it around an incredibly engaging and fun dungeon crawler experience. This past September, players were invited to return to this world with the launch of Minecraft Dungeons II, which brought with it something we haven’t seen in Minecraft in nearly 15 years: a new dimension.

feel true to those principles and earn its place in the Minecraft universe. Without that foundation, scale might have produced a much bigger Minecraft, but a much less loved one.” It seems very easy for Mojang to simply sit, perfectly content, with the gigantic franchise they’ve already created – but what’s fascinating is how they’re thinking more about what’s next.

“The first Dungeons started as a question: what does a dungeon crawler feel like if it’s made in the Minecraft universe? It found around 30 million players, which told us there is real appetite for Minecraft in other genres. It also told us what players wanted more of: greater control over how they build a character, and more reason to keep exploring. Minecraft Dungeons II delivers both: a connected world instead of discrete missions, far more gear slots, and a proper quest system.” The Overworld, the Nether, and the End have defined the map since 2011 – now players can enter the Sift in Minecraft Dungeons II. The Sift will arrive in Minecraft Vanilla next year: “That was deliberate. We wanted the most significant addition to the Minecraft universe in 15

“It’s a world built on creativity, imagination, and self-expression, where the player is the hero” Keep digging Minecraft’s guiding philosophy centers on five connected areas: the core game, which deepens engagement and keeps the world feeling alive; the creator platform, which makes it easier to create, publish, play, and earn; entertainment, which turns stories into fandom; education, which fosters curiosity and creative problem-solving through inclusive, play-based learning; and new experiences, which invite new audiences to discover Minecraft. ‘A Minecraft Movie’ is perhaps one of the most recent and clearest cases of this in action. It brought an enormous number of people to the world of Minecraft who had never played it, and many more continued engaging with the game after release. “It also changed the game in small, funny ways,” added Walters. “Chicken Jockey went from an obscure rare mob to a global meme, and the Lava Chicken song ended up as a music disc players can hunt for in-game. The film gave players something to play with – and they turned it into folklore faster than we could have written it.” “For most of our history, the way you experienced Minecraft was to open the game. Now the front door might be a film, a theme park, a classroom, a creator server, or a friend handing you a controller. Our job is to make sure all those doors open into the same place – the connected Minecraft universe. Someone’s experience with Minecraft might start with the film, or a LEGO set, or a classroom lesson, or a sibling’s server. Whichever door they came through, once inside, the thing they build is theirs.”

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years to debut somewhere players had to go and experience it for themselves,” said Walters. In the Sift, players face powerful, mysterious threats that test their combat tactics. That includes new loadout and playstyle options such as weapons with distinct enchantments and abilities, from Lightning Surge for mages to Soul Blast for melee builds. When it comes to the core game, it’s going to be exciting to see how players continue to discover what’s possible. And that decision speaks to how Mojang, when it could simply let Minecraft continue in the same vein, continues to make room for small, unusual, or risky ideas with a franchise at this scale. “Many ideas may not survive, and that is the system working,” Walters told me. “Some become quality-of-life improvements players feel without noticing. A few become features.

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Meet Mojang’s new CEO Occasionally one becomes a whole game – like Minecraft Dungeons. The Sulfur Cube (a new mob in the game) is another recent one. It started as, ‘What if we put physics in Minecraft?’, which is a bold question to ask of a 17-year-old game. After it shipped, players found new uses, pushed new boundaries, and ultimately transformed it into something that unlocked entirely new forms of creativity.”

Adventures for generations What also makes Minecraft unique is that it’s one of the few games that spans generations. Right now, a 10-year-old might be playing their first night in Survival mode, while a veteran is running a 100-person server. What holds all this together is access – Minecraft currently runs on roughly 20 different platforms, which is an incredible feat. “We’ve always treated every player as equally important, whatever platform they play on,” says Walters. “It’s also one of Minecraft’s greatest strengths: the ability to meet players

Maria AngelidouSmith started as CEO of Mojang and Minecraft in October. Here is what she has to say: “Everyone I’ve told about joining Minecraft has lit up. It’s a reminder of how much Minecraft means to people, including my own family. I’m coming in with enormous respect for what’s been built and a lot to learn. I want to help Minecraft reach and inspire new generations of players and creators, while protecting what makes it so special.” wherever they are and keep communities connected. That’s why families can actually play together.” The Minecraft community came up with the best expression of this: the forever world, a save file that you’ve kept for over a decade, built with friends who have since moved, that you might one day open with your own kids. “Those worlds have become digital heirlooms – everything we ship has to be safe

Creators as co-authors Three insights from Walters on how Minecraft’s creator community has evolved from producing tutorials to developing maps, servers, and more.

“Yogscast’s ‘How to Survive the First Night’ was a practical guide — and it showed how content creator storytelling could bring people into Minecraft and turn it into entertainment.” “Minecraft passed two trillion views on YouTube in 2025 and is the most-watched gaming content on YouTube, and the overwhelming majority of that content was made by people who don’t work at Mojang.” “When you know the community will take an idea somewhere you never planned, you stop designing endings and start designing starting points. The best ones give players enough freedom to create something no single team could have imagined.”

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Busy Builders On any given day, teams across the globe may be working on a Minecraft game drop, film, theme park, or classroom curriculum. With all these responsibilities for this global brand, and one of the most beloved games of all time, I asked Walters how the studio’s culture has evolved to keep up with this rapid pace. “What keeps that from fragmenting is that everyone here is still a player or a fan first,” she tells me. “Decisions about a new mob get settled the way they did 10 years ago – someone builds it, everyone plays it, and the version that survives is usually not the one someone first drew on the whiteboard.

for a world someone has been building since yesterday or for decades.” “We design for someone on their first night and someone in their 17th year, at the same time, in the same build. That shows up in onboarding, in how players find their way around the game, and in a lot of quiet accessibility work that rarely makes a headline.” Walters tells me that the hardest thing to explain to someone is what happens when you first load a world. Nothing greets you. There is no overarching quest, no giant arrow pointing you in a direction, no narrator guiding you on a path. “Said out loud, that sounds like an empty game. Then you pick something up, and it turns into something else, and you are still turning it over when the sun starts to go down and you hear something moving in the darkness. 10 minutes in, you are digging into a hillside with total conviction.”

Minecraft is everywhere Minecraft is far more than just a game – it’s a phenomenon. Across games, media, and toys, it has branched into all corners of major entertainment and education

“Some of Minecraft’s best ideas have come from watching what players do. When they interact with the game in unexpected ways, we ask: what if we leaned into that? The Sulfur Cube is an example of that mindset. The point isn’t the feature itself, but the culture of curiosity behind it. What has changed is that we’re more deliberate about where we invest. We still start with player-inspired ideas, but we spend more time making sure they support Minecraft’s long-term vision and feel authentically Minecraft.” This player-first approach has allowed Minecraft to find its way into places they had never anticipated: architecture studios, hospital wards, museum exhibits, wedding venues, and entire economies built from simple blocks. Creators now earn a living from worlds, stories, and experiences made in a game about mining and crafting. None of this was on the roadmap. Players decided what Minecraft could be – and they were right. “All of it comes from one property of the game: it leaves the purpose to you. Our job is to keep opening doors and to pay close attention to which ones people walk through. We lead when we can see further than the community can, and we follow when they can see further than us – which is more often than you’d think.”

EXPERIENCES & EVENTS Minecraft World

An upcoming theme park attraction in England

Minecraft Live

A twice-a-year broadcast event celebrating all things Minecraft

Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue

A real-life Minecraft-themed interactive experience

SPIN-OFF GAMES Minecraft Dungeons I & II

Minecraft mixed with action RPGs

Minecraft Legends

The first Minecraft action strategy game

Minecraft: Story Mode

A point-and-click graphic adventure game

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MULTIMEDIA LEARNING

“Our job is to keep opening doors and to

pay close attention to

which ones people walk through” In the Year 3000… Mojang has no intention of slowing down and continues to lay the groundwork for a Minecraft franchise that is going to be around for a long, long time. I ask Walters her thoughts – years from now, what does she hope will feel truly new in the game, and what is she most excited for players to discover next? “There should be no line between playing Minecraft and creating in it. The line exists today because of tools, not because of the game. Every player is already a creator – they should never have to become one. Today that answer involves

tools, documentation and, for most people, a lot of persistence. In five years, it should involve just opening the game. Get that right and the number of people creating in Minecraft goes up by an order of magnitude, and so does the number of people earning from it.” “I also expect Minecraft to be in places it isn’t today – more classrooms, more physical places you can walk into. And I expect the core game to still be the reason all of it works, with players and creators at the center of every decision that got us there.” “There are so many things I’m excited about. One of those things is imagining the next great Minecraft experience, created by someone who may not even see themselves as a creator today. That person exists. Maybe they have an idea, and the tools are still just out of reach. When that changes, we’ll start to see what Minecraft is truly capable of. Today I don’t think any of us see a limit to what’s possible.”

A Minecraft Movie

The first motion picture featuring Minecraft

A Minecraft Movie Squared

The upcoming sequel to one of 2025’s biggest films

Minecraft Netflix Series

A new upcoming Minecraft series exclusively on Netflix

LEGO Minecraft

Official LEGO sets and mini figures based on Minecraft

Build a Better World

Global initiative focused on social impact through education, equity, and sustainability

Minecraft Education

A game-based learning platform supporting subjects including coding, mathematics, and science, alongside creativity and collaboration

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Captain Price and Ghost change the game once more

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by Dan Noel and David Hodgson, Activision

Modern Warfare’s creation, legacy, and the road to MW4 The connection between Call of Duty and XBOX runs deep. Alongside Treyarch’s acclaimed Black Ops games, Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare series has been central to that relationship. The seismic impact of its 2007 debut, the series’ unforgettable characters, its Multiplayer innovations, the introduction of Call of Duty: Warzone, and more have made it an indelible piece of gaming culture. When Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launched on October 23, it marked another defining moment in a relationship that stretches back to the XBOX 360 and offers a fitting moment to look at the impact the Modern Warfare series has had. The story begins with Infinity Ward’s original Call of Duty, released for PC in 2003. Its gripping, squad-based portrayal of World War II, told through the eyes of American, British, and Soviet soldiers, earned multiple Game of the Year awards. Two years later, Call of Duty 2 became an XBOX 360 launch title, introducing high-definition online console Multiplayer to millions of players through XBOX Live. It was also the first XBOX 360 game to sell more than one million units in the United States.

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Collector ’s Edition Cover Art from Modern Warfare 2 (2009)

Those games laid the groundwork for what came next. In 2007, Infinity Ward left World War II behind, looked toward the present day, and released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The move changed the series and helped revolutionize the wider gaming landscape.

2007: The seismic shift to Modern Warfare What came next was a major shift for the series – Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) was a globe-spanning campaign that moved through the United Kingdom, the Middle East, Russia, and other wartorn hotspots, introducing players to iconic characters who would become central to the franchise – including Captain John Price and John “Soap” MacTavish. Multiplayer made an equally important leap. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare launched with 16 maps and introduced custom loadouts, along with an XP system that unlocked weapons, equipment, and Perks. These systems are now fundamental to Call of Duty, but at the time they reshaped what players expected from a console shooter. Infinity Ward had found a new center of gravity for the series.

Know Your COD Meme

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Press F to Pay Respects

Devil Horns in The Office

In the PC version of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014), players were prompted to “Press F” to pay their respects to a fallen soldier during the funeral sequence in the Campaign mission “Atlas”. The mundane action paired with the gravity of the situation became instant meme fodder used to express condolences in response to bad news.

In Season 3, Episode 3 of the U.S. TV sitcom ‘The Office’, the employees at the Stamford branch of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company become obsessed with Call of Duty 2 as a team-building exercise during the episode entitled ‘The Coup’. Karen Filippelli, played by Rashida Jones, shoots up devil horns and whispers “Call of Duty!” to celebrate her many victories over Jim Halpert, who is a terrible player, launching an iconic cultural moment in Call of Duty canon.

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Rebooting Modern Warfare for a new generation Twelve years after the original Modern Warfare, Infinity Ward returned to the series with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019). To support that ambition, Infinity Ward pushed its technology to new heights. Photogrammetry helped create detailed digital versions of real-world objects and environments. Volumetric lighting added depth to fog, dust, and smoke. Decorated SAS officer Captain John Price brought together a team of highly capable, off-the-book operators, including John “Soap” MacTavish, Simon “Ghost” Riley, and Kyle “Gaz” Garrick. Together, Task Force 141 and its global allies faced threats including their longtime nemesis, the ruthless ultranationalist Vladimir Makarov. Multiplayer continued to grow alongside the Campaign. A new 2v2 game mode, Gunfight, offered a compact, round-based format built around skill and communication, while a comprehensive weapon Gunsmith gave players a deeper way to customize their armaments via swappable Attachments. Before Modern Warfare II (2022) and Modern Warfare III (2023) expanded the rebooted storyline and offered further innovations, Infinity Ward prepared to extend the series in a totally new direction with Call of Duty: Warzone.

During Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s iconic “All Ghillied Up” mission, Captain MacMillan surveys the abandoned city of Pripyat and recalls the thousands who once lived there. The somber observation became a long-running meme, paired with images of deserted games, servers, websites, and other once-popular places that have emptied out.

Call of Duty: Warzone changes everything Infinity Ward and Raven Software came together to create Call of Duty: Warzone, a massive free-to-play battle royale that dropped up to 150 players into a sprawling Kastovian map called Verdansk. Released on March 10, 2020, Call of Duty: Warzone arrived just as the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Players parachuted into Verdansk, gathered weapons and equipment, completed Contracts, and fought their way through an increasingly dangerous map. Eliminated players could earn a second chance by winning a fight in the Gulag, while the closing gas forced surviving squads into ever-smaller spaces.

The iconic Captain Price, from the MW (2019) Cover Art

50,000 People Used to Live Here

The original Call of Duty: Warzone artwork (2020)

Over time, Call of Duty: Warzone grew through new maps, modes, and mechanics, including Rebirth Island, whose origins stretch back to Treyarch’s fan-favorite Black Ops II Zombies map, Mob of the Dead. Each consecutive mainline Call of Duty game brought its own influence to the

Ghost Stare

Bravo Six, Going Dark

The image of Ghost staring down the viewer became a viral reaction meme in the Call of Duty community. The visual most often shared is from the Modern Warfare II (2022) Campaign Mission “Cartel Protection” as the masked character sits next to Soap MacTavish, listening to mission details with a completely unreadable expression.

Another classic Call of Duty meme courtesy of the Modern Warfare 2019 reboot. The venerable Captain Price lowers a pair of night vision goggles while uttering the iconic oneliner. Following the release of the game’s trailer, the clip went viral.

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Play as Private Park during Modern Warfare 4’s incredible Campaign

free-to-play experience, keeping the mode in motion while expanding the reach of Modern Warfare. With the arrival of Modern Warfare 4, Call of Duty: Warzone moves into a new phase. Season 1 brings full integration with the latest game, along with two new maps. Zodiac is a Resurgence map developed by Beenox, built around a drone assembly headquarters positioned along a train line. Hajin is a large Battle Royale map set in an irradiated exclusion zone spanning a border region of South Korea, North Korea, and Russia – modified from environments featured in Modern Warfare 4’s DMZ mode. With Modern Warfare 4, Infinity Ward returned to the series with a brand-new story – one that encapsulates invasion, covert operations, and a widening global crisis, as familiar faces and a new generation of soldiers alike are drawn into the fight.

The Next Stage: Modern Warfare 4 Modern Warfare 4 expanded the series’ global scope while placing the Korean Peninsula at the center of its story. Players see the conflict through the eyes of Private Park Hyun Jun, a South Korean soldier facing live combat for the first time after North Korea launches a full-scale invasion. As Private Park and his unit attempt to reclaim occupied territory, Captain Price pursues a parallel mission from the shadows.

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DMZ

The DMZ Hajin map is inhospitable. Pack a Mask

DMZ first appeared as a Beta in Modern Warfare II (2022), introducing an open-world, PvPvE extraction shooter built around faction missions, persistent inventory, and the pressure of making it out alive.

After taking matters into his own hands at the end of Modern Warfare III (2023), Price is forced into uneasy alliances and off-the-books operations. His investigation places him on a collision course with the forces behind the invasion – and with a conflict that threatens to spread far beyond the peninsula.

Players entered the map, gathered valuable gear, completed objectives, and searched for an exfil. AI combatants and opposing players created threats throughout each deployment, while radiation zones gradually closed off routes and made every decision more urgent. Fail to exfiltrate, and the equipment you carried was lost.

Built exclusively for current-generation consoles and PC, including its debut on Nintendo Switch 2, Modern Warfare 4 focuses on the latest gaming hardware to push its visuals and audio further than ever before. Infinity Ward has infused the high-intensity gameplay with environmental storytelling that brings the world alive across all modes.

In Modern Warfare 4, DMZ moves out of beta to become an entirely new strand for the game, with a larger, more structured version set in the Hajin Exclusion Zone. When returning to the Forward Operating Base, players can review missions, use the 3D Printer to build equipment, upgrade their facilities, and regroup with their squad before heading out again.

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On Duty: The Studios behind the Call Founded in 2002, INFINITY WARD created the original Call of Duty, a gritty 2003 World War II shooter. It went on to spearhead Modern Warfare, changing the series forever.

TREYARCH entered Call of Duty with Call of Duty 2: Big Red One (2005), then created Black Ops and transformed Zombies from a bonus mode into a franchise-defining universe.

Multiplayer SLEDGEHAMMER GAMES co-developed Modern Warfare 3 (2011) before leading Advanced Warfare, WWII, Vanguard, and Modern Warfare III (2023), building its own Call of Duty legacy.

Founded 35 years ago, Wisconsin-based RAVEN SOFTWARE is one of the most meaningful studios in FPS history, and has become a key Call of Duty partner and Warzone lead.

Quebec-based BEENOX was acquired by Activision in 2005 and now leads Call of Duty PC development while contributing Call of Duty: Warzone maps, features, and events.

Formed in 2002, HIGH MOON STUDIOS earned acclaim with Transformers: War for Cybertron, contributed to Destiny, and has supported console and PC Call of Duty since 2013, including Warzone’s Fortune’s Keep.

Barcelona-based DIGITAL LEGENDS, acquired by Activision in 2021, brings deep mobile development expertise to Call of Duty, including its work with Infinity Ward on Modern Warfare 4’s Nintendo Switch 2 version.

ACTIVISION SHANGHAI partnered with Infinity Ward on Modern Warfare II, contributing art, textures, and production support while helping develop Call of Duty Online for Chinese players alongside other teams and partners.

Based in Dublin, Vancouver, and Shanghai, DEMONWARE is Activision’s online services specialist, running every part of a Call of Duty player’s online experience, from logging in to ranking the winners.

Fast, fluid and frenetic Multiplayer, the hallmark of a Call of Duty game

Multiplayer has been at the heart of Call of Duty since the first Modern Warfare, and Modern Warfare 4 continues that tradition with 12 launch maps. Kill Block is the standout technical showcase. Built from three modular Slabs, the map can shift between Gunfight rounds, selecting from hundreds of possible configurations. Routes close, sightlines change, and the shape of the fight is never entirely fixed. Classic modes including Gunfight, Domination, Hardpoint, Team Deathmatch, and Kill Confirmed return alongside new additions. In Hijack, teams compete for control of a single Data Spike. It can be carried, thrown, or passed between teammates before being planted at the enemy Comm Station. Successful teams score over time and earn a bonus if the Spike detonates, while defenders work to defuse it. Inflation puts virtual cash at the center of the match. Players collect money from eliminated enemies, with the richest players marked as High Value Targets. Protecting your own HVT while hunting the opposition creates a moving contest between aggression and survival. Ground War’s Combat Outpost mode combines infantry, vehicles, and Killstreaks in a fight for territory. Modern Warfare 4 continues Infinity Ward’s longstanding balance between realism and spectacle. The aim is not simply to make each moment look bigger, but to give players more ways to shape what happens next.

The Next Chapter Infinity Ward has been part of the gaming landscape since its founding in 2002. Across more than two decades, the studio’s games have earned over 200 Game of the Year awards and more than 100 Editor’s Choice awards. Call of Duty now sits proudly within the XBOX family of seminal franchises, bringing strong characters, memorable set pieces, sharp gunplay, and one of the most passionate communities in gaming, always ready for the next match. With Modern Warfare 4, that legacy continues. More than two decades after Call of Duty first entered the fight, millions of players are still answering the call – and now, as part of XBOX, there are countless new battles, stories, and unforgettable moments still to come.

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How every Elder Scrolls game formed a step on the journey to our next adventure in Tamriel by Anne Lewis, Bethesda Softworks

A ship arriving at the docks at Seyda Neen. A cell in the Imperial Prison. “You’re finally awake.” If you’ve spent any time in Tamriel, you don’t just remember these opening moments. You remember what you did next, as soon as the world opened up. The direction you walked. The hill you climbed for no reason at all beyond wanting to see what waited on the other side. And that instinct, the one that draws you off the main path and sends you on your own unique adventure, is the whole point of an Elder Scrolls game. It’s a feeling that Bethesda Game Studios has spent thirty years building and refining.

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Bethesda Game Studios’ award-winning RPGs have always been defined by a willingness to experiment. Not for experimentation’s sake, but to push the boundaries of the genre and rethink what an unforgettable journey can be. The kind you may still be thinking about a decade or more later. From the earliest days of Arena to the vast, snow-swept reaches of Skyrim, each entry is a series of questions posed by a relentlessly curious team. The Elder Scrolls didn’t begin as the series you know today. It grew game by game, idea by idea, with each entry asking just how far it could go. All of which will take us to that next adventure in The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994) A world you could live in

A glimpse at our next journey in The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996) How much can one world hold?

Arena introduced the heart of the series that we still see in Bethesda Game Studios titles today: Player freedom. Deep character customization. And a world that felt much larger than its main questline. Procedural generation helped the team push past the limits of 1994’s hardware and build an entire continent packed with wilderness, towns and dungeons, complete with day-andnight cycles that continued as you explored. And all of this was experienced in first-person, a truly radical concept for RPGs at the time. You weren’t moving your party across a map. You were viewing the world from eye-level. And on top of that, Arena’s custom classes and spell creation system made the character feel like it belonged to you and you alone. The ability to mix and match spell effects into something the developers hadn’t specifically designed established a principle the studio has never lost sight of: the game must allow for – and respond to – an idea it didn’t see coming. The Tamriel you explored in Arena was far more than just a fantasy RPG setting. It was a world you could live in. And once Bethesda Game Studios proved that was possible, the obvious next step was to see just how far they could push that.

Daggerfall dropped you into the Iliac Bay with over 15,000 points of interest – towns, villages, and dungeons – and roughly 750,000 NPCs, all of whom you could strike up a conversation with (a fact that earned the game a Guinness World Record). Three decades of open-world games later and people still bring up Daggerfall’s extraordinary scale. It also overhauled the traditional approach to leveling, instituting a “learn by doing” system. Your character stopped being a set of choices on a character sheet and started being a record of how you actually played. Layer on a class creation system flexible enough to let you design your own archetypes, plus a reputation system that changed how the world perceived you based on your decisions, and you got a world that wasn’t just outwardly massive. It was deeply personal. A true simulation.

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The beauty of Radiant AI “I joined Bethesda Game Studios during the development of the original Oblivion and was intrigued by the Radiant AI system. While playtesting a Dark Brotherhood quest, I found the perfect opportunity to take advantage of some newfound knowledge regarding the eating behaviors of our NPCs.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002) Putting the power in your hands Then came Morrowind, and with it a different kind of leap. Rather than chase size for its own sake, Bethesda Game Studios turned its gaze toward a more intimate, hand-crafted world, dense with strange architecture and political tension. Morrowind is where the studio’s love of environmental storytelling really took hold through many people’s favorite addition: interactive clutter. Rather than spelling every detail out for you, it trusted you to examine the world around you – scattered notes, household items, bones – and fill in the blanks for yourself. All this came together to make Vvardenfell feel truly lived-in well before you ever learned its history. Of course, Morrowind is also where a certain infamous kind of player freedom came from. Bethesda Game Studios was so committed to player freedom, you could choose to kill an NPC vital to a questline. Few studios would let you get away with that in 2002. Bethesda Game Studios did, because the unthinkable alternative was to tell you no. But perhaps Morrowind’s most important legacy was in what you were empowered to create. The Elder Scrolls Construction Set put developer tools in your hands, and the modding community that grew out of it has been building alongside the studio ever since. The line runs unbroken from Morrowind through the Creation Kit and today’s Verified Creator program, where Creators have earned more than $10 million in royalties for their work. Morrowind asked whether an intimately crafted world could also be handed over to the people playing in it, and the studio’s answer has been consistent for over two decades: Yes, of course.

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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) Everyone has somewhere to be Oblivion brought Tamriel into a new generation with a world that felt brighter, more cinematic and more reactive. Massively updated physics systems made Cyrodiil more tangible, too. Objects could be knocked aside and spaces could be read through their tiniest details. Fully voiced characters turned conversations into (occasionally hilarious) moments, while Radiant AI helped create the impression that these were real people moving through the world with their own routines, needs and moments of unpredictability. Cyrodiil didn’t just look alive. It kept moving, even when you weren’t watching. Nearly two decades later, the love for Cyrodiil and its people endures. When The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered launched in 2025, it introduced a new generation to the systems and design philosophy that made the original such a landmark RPG. Its return was a reminder of how many of its innovations still feel vital to the genre.

In the quest ‘A Watery Grave,’ you’re tasked with killing the captain of a ship. Shortly upon completing the act, two of his compatriots were supposed to come investigate and a fight ensues. Instead, I snuck in while the captain was sleeping, stole all the food in the room, and left a single poisoned apple in his pocket. I left the ship, waited a few hours, and received a quest update that the captain had died. Thoroughly impressed, I raced to see Emil Pagliarulo, the designer of the quest, to praise him for taking such an unorthodox approach into account. To my surprise, he was just as shocked as I. He informed me he did not, in fact, take that into account and it was simply the systems interacting.” — Dan Lee, Associate Art Director, Bethesda Game Studios

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Fallout: same curiosity, different world Run Fallout through the same Bethesda Game Studios lens of expansion and experimentation and you get a second set of questions, albeit asked in a very different language.

Fallout 3 asked whether the studio’s brand of first-person, openworld role-playing could carry a wasteland. Fallout 4 asked what happens when players stop scavenging a world and start rebuilding it, handing over settlement construction and a full crafting economy. Fallout 76 asked whether Appalachia could hold all of us at the same time and has kept asking through more than seventy free updates. Fallout Shelter asked whether a Vault could fit in your pocket, and it has now answered that question more than 250 million times. Completely different franchise, built with the same instinct. Create a world, then see what happens when you give your players the keys.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) The game that doesn’t run out Fifteen years after its initial launch, people are still getting lost in the rugged wilds of Skyrim. Its longevity isn’t an accident. It reflects the deliberate design and Bethesda Game Studios’ steadfast belief that a game’s launch is just the beginning. Skyrim marked the debut of the Creation Engine, built for enormous, systemic, moddable worlds. With it came an evolution of Radiant AI with Radiant Story, which could generate an effectively endless supply of quests that steered you to places you hadn’t explored. You could spend hundreds of hours in Skyrim and still have places to be and people to see. The character system embraced a new philosophy as well: remove the fear of building your character “wrong.” Traditional attributes like Strength, Intelligence and Agility gave way to skill trees, perks, and an updated progression system that let you shift direction even dozens of hours in. Skyrim let you evolve your character based on the playstyle you grew to love, rather than forcing you to continue down a path. Dual-wielding expanded player expression by letting you map a weapon or spell to each hand. Crafting and, later, Hearthfire’s home-building system gave you new ways to leave your mark on the world. Skyrim wasn’t designed to be finished. It was designed to give you something to settle into, personalize, and return to again and again.

The next big question The Elder Scrolls isn’t just a series. It’s foundational to Bethesda Game Studios, defined by a stubborn curiosity about what a game world can be and a refusal to make the same game twice simply because the last one worked. Every entry begins with the conviction that the previous one wasn’t the ceiling. That work is happening right now with Creation Engine 3. Creation Engine 3 is “a shared technology platform we’ve been building since Starfield’s launch,” as the studio explained in a recent look at the future. “It allows our teams to support multiple projects simultaneously with new tools, rendering, and systems that define our games.” New tools, though, have a way of turning into new questions. Because that’s what The Elder Scrolls has always been. Questions and answers. Arena asked how big an RPG world could feel. Daggerfall asked how much freedom and systemic depth a world could hold. Morrowind asked whether an intimately crafted world could also be an open invitation for you to create, modify and extend it. Oblivion asked how reactive and cinematic it could feel. Skyrim asked how expandable and how endlessly replayable it could be. Now the only question is what the next entry will ask, and how far off the beaten path it’ll send us.

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As XBOX hits 25, Candy Crush Saga is about to hit its own big number, 1,000 times larger by Kelsey Farrell and Anthony Devenish, King

“Level up” is a phrase every gamer knows. For most, it’s about conquering the next challenge. For the Candy Crush Saga team at King, it means figuring out how to create the next bite-sized puzzle… almost 25,000 times. In early 2027, Candy Crush Saga will reach this extraordinary milestone of 25,000 levels. But the numbers only tell one part of the story. The real story is about craft: years of refining ideas, learning from players and sweating the smallest details behind something as deceptively simple as matching three colored candies. We sat down with two long-time ‘Kingsters’ – Therese Sander, Principal Game & Level Designer, and Claudiu Butnariu, Senior Game Designer – to look back at that journey and offer us insight into how their game has grown, changed, and followed its players to an almost unimaginable scale.

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It started with 65 How the very first levels came about

Following success on Facebook, Candy Crush Saga launched on mobile in 2012 with a small team and just 65 levels. The levels were score-based, timebound and largely without the blockers, mechanics and strategy that define the game today. “The famous Level 65 was legendarily hard and a true badge of honor if you managed to complete it. The funny truth is, it was that hard because we literally had no further levels to give players! It was a different time,” says Butnariu. At that time, every new level was a milestone worth celebrating. “I was the sixth-ever level designer to work on Candy Crush Saga,” continues Butnariu. “Back then we used to celebrate new episodes by printing the art and gluing it to our door. By the time we left the studio, we struggled to get out! The entire doorframe and wall were covered.” For a game that was already seeing 500 million plays a day on mobile alone, the development process was surprisingly scrappy. New levels were planned out in a giant Excel spreadsheet held together by a growing collection of homemade scripts. “Just four of us were responsible for the core part of Candy Crush Saga that millions of people interacted with every time they played. It felt like a great honor and responsibility,” says Butnariu. “I remember how the game was hitting higher and higher player counts with every passing quarter. We kept asking ourselves, ‘How far can we go in terms of growing the game?’ It was constant experimentation to evolve levels. Some of our projects were hits, some were misses. But we grew nonetheless,” says Butnariu.

The final level of the original version of Candy Crush Saga – the infamously tough Level 65

A gameboard from Candy Crush Saga’s earlier years, showing the colorful candies and blockers that still define the game today

A “Spooky Season” level from one of Candy Crush Saga’s themed in-game events, with seasonal treats, tricky obstacles and a few friendly frights

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What makes a great level? Turning level design into an art and a science. It didn’t take long for the pace of level releases to start to increase. At first, it was a few levels a month. By 2018, that had grown to around 15 levels every week. Today, the team delivers 60 new levels every week. And they need to: there are millions of players continually making their way toward the end of the map. You might assume that releasing new content every week requires some serious automation behind the scenes and, of course, the tooling has evolved over the years. But the surprising reality is that these levels are still handcrafted, one by one. “The core goal when designing levels is still the same as when we first started: levels that are fair, accessible, and satisfying,” says Sander. “We have always put the player first.” There’s a simple aim for each level: within three seconds, players should understand what they need to achieve and have a strategy to approach it. Years of trial and error have helped establish a framework for what makes a fun level and, over time, the team learned that a little constraint can actually help the designers to be faster, sharper and more creative. “It was exhilarating to constantly experiment with total creative freedom at the beginning. We created some crazy levels – including one with just two colors – but they were often unnecessarily complicated and broke very easily! Now, we have a set of recipes and guidelines for levels that still allows for a large degree of creativity,” says Butnariu. Creating almost 25,000 levels doesn’t mean coming up with 25,000 completely different ideas though. Each one uses fresh combinations of familiar ingredients: some introduce a new mechanic, some encourage experimentation, while others are simply light and playful. Together, they create the rhythm that keeps the gameplay feeling varied, surprising and rewarding.

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Our work is never done Experimentation doesn’t stop when a level is released Here’s the strange thing about looking back at Candy Crush Saga’s original levels: many of them aren’t the same anymore. The team doesn’t simply add another 60 levels to the end of the map each week. Older levels are continually revisited, rebalanced and refined as the team’s understanding of how both new and long-time players interact with the game evolves. Boosters and rewards are now a core part of the game’s ecosystem, helping players progress and feel motivated, while still preserving the fun and satisfaction of completing a level. Accessibility improvements have also been made over the years, allowing players to personalize their experience, such as by turning off flashing effects or selecting a grayscale grid. Tweaks are regularly implemented to make older or more difficult levels more accessible – honoring the original level by retaining elements that players enjoy, while fixing the things that aren’t working as well.

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Much of this is a result of direct feedback from players, but also from extensive internal testing from ‘Kingsters’. Candy Crush Saga is a truly living game – a mechanic or feature that’s released now may, in its own way, affect hundreds of levels that arrived previously. “Every time you come back to the game, it’s been refreshed and refined. The idea is simple: Candy Crush Saga should be a better game tomorrow than it is today – and better still six or 12 months from now,” says Sander. But perhaps one of the most interesting design challenges comes in the form of the levels that the vast majority of players will never even encounter. For the annual Candy Crush All Stars Live Final, Sander creates a set of bespoke levels for the best players in the world, designed to showcase just how far the gameplay can be pushed. Work begins months in advance, and the boards are kept firmly under wraps until the final begins. After all, when players are competing for a share of a $1 million prize pool, nobody should get a sneak peek. “It’s one of my favorite projects of the year. It gives us an opportunity to push the game’s possibilities, and test our players’ skills, even further,” says Sander.

Did you know?

The map and gameboard for the game’s last mega-milestone – level 20,000. Who knows what 25,000 holds?

Approaching 25,000 The future of Candy Crush Saga “What’s fun and also scary is that your work lives for a long time – players experience your decisions thousands or millions of times as part of their daily lives. If you’ve played Candy Crush Saga, you’ve played something we helped create,” says Sander.

It’s not just the level design that’s evolved over the years. In 2022, Candy Crush Saga’s audio experience was completely revamped, replacing all music and almost all sound effects.

The game’s evolution isn’t measured in dramatic visual redesigns. It’s measured in hundreds of thoughtful refinements that make each experience feel just a little better than the last.

“We recorded the music at the Abbey Road Angel Studios in London with a full orchestra. The map music has a light, adventurous road-trip vibe, while the levels have more relaxing music to reflect the reason most of our players play. There are also nods to jazz chords to honor aspects of the original lore of the game.” – Sebastian Aav, Audio Lead at King

So, what might level 25,000 actually look like? In collaboration with the Candy community, Level 10,000 featured a crown-shaped board and candies in the colors of the Swedish flag – it remains a favorite memory for many long-time players. For level 20,000, the community was again invited to share their ideas, with the most popular ones resulting in a ‘20’ shaped game board. Sander, Butnariu and the team already have ideas for the next milestone, and plan to work with the community – think boosters, color mixes and perhaps another distinctive board shape – to ensure that it’s yet another memorable moment for players around the world. Candy Crush Saga began with 65 levels and a team that wasn’t entirely sure how far the map might stretch. At almost 25,000 levels, the finish line is still nowhere in sight. 25,000 levels’ worth of learning from players will guide what comes next. It’s both a creative opportunity and a huge responsibility for the team to turn those possibilities into something players will continue to enjoy: fresh challenges, satisfying progression and, above all else, more joy and fun. “We’re evolving our levels and mechanics so Candy Crush Saga can keep going for another 14 years and beyond. We need to keep redefining what a great player experience looks like, while preserving what makes Candy unmistakably Candy,” says Sander.

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The stories that led to every game announcement at Blizzard’s biggest-ever show by Amelia Savery, Blizzard Entertainment

There is a moment near the start of every BlizzCon where tens of thousands of people roar in the same way at the same time. If you are standing backstage, you don’t just hear it, you feel it: it reaches through your body and seeps into your bone marrow. It happened on September 12, 2026, at the beginning of the countdown to the BlizzCon 2026 Opening Ceremony. And it happened over and over again for the next 90 minutes – 90 minutes of pure joy. The plan for speakers taking to the stage at BlizzCon 2026 was never to perform; to polish ourselves up or rehearse into oblivion. The plan was to unapologetically show up as ourselves, finally share what we have been making and not downplay or hide the joy we feel when we get to be with our players in person. It turned out to be the only instruction anybody needed.

What was the plan, exactly? The very first step of putting together a BlizzCon Opening Ceremony is answering two questions: “Who do we want to be speaking to during BlizzCon?” and, “How do we want them to feel?” The answers are not as simple as “players” and “happy”: we get deep in the weeds with it. We’re talking to our current player communities, sure, but who are they? We’re speaking to people who used to play our games and stopped, but why did they stop? We’re speaking to people who’ve never played our games, but why don’t they, and why should they start now? The President of Blizzard Entertainment, Johanna Faries, spent a considerable amount of time thinking very carefully about these questions and more, because the result paints a picture of what BlizzCon should be.

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The final answers fill multiple pages of documentation, broken out into sections and lists. Notably, they contain two emojis in total, even though we’re not particularly prone to including emojis in documentation. Sprinkled amongst the plethora of words was a smiley face and a palm tree emoji. The smiley face was for joy, because joy was central in what we wanted to build – we wanted everyone to see just how excited we are for what we work on, and we wanted you to share that joy with us. The palm tree represents escape – when Johanna got on stage during the Opening Ceremony and said BlizzCon is an oasis, she meant it.

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Returning to the Nexus Heroes of the Storm had gone almost six years since its last Hero release, and our players were not quiet about it: no social media post from Blizzard, or even Johanna, could go out without an immediate reply asking for more HotS news. Even people across every game team at Blizzard regularly asked the same questions. The first game announcement of BlizzCon 2026 should come with a lot of pressure, but the announcement of the addition of a new Hero, Xal’atath, came easily – with authenticity, honesty, and genuine love for the game and its community. This game means so much to so many people, and feeling that audience roar when Janitor Leoric first appeared on screen made a few members of the game team shed a tear or two. But it was only the beginning of what we’d reveal over 90 minutes.

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The entertainment in Blizzard Entertainment For decades, we’ve heard from our players that they’d love to see our worlds represented in other forms of media. This is something we’ve wanted for a long time as well, and we’ve been working hard on finding the very best creative partnerships to bring these ideas to life. BlizzCon 2026 is where we could reveal one of these projects: a new animated series for Diablo in development with Netflix. We all so wished we could’ve shared more at BlizzCon – there are great discussions being had about our other Blizzard universes as well – but everyone at Blizzard is so excited for this part of our future. Part of the reason we love our universes so much, why they still excite and inspire us after years or decades, is because of their storytelling potential: Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo, and our other worlds have always felt limitless to us. And as we take these steps to put the “Entertainment” into Blizzard Entertainment, many of us are spending a lot of time dreaming of the ways we can tell stories in our worlds in new ways all while welcoming new audiences into these places we’ve been lucky enough to call home for so long.

It’s about damn time Working on a game that hasn’t been announced is a unique experience; mostly, it can be summarized as feeling lonely. Like you and your team are on an island, creating something together that you all deeply believe in for other people to experience, but that literally no one else knows about and, therefore, cannot experience. Dan Hay of the STARCRAFT team said many times that you only get to announce your game once, and he wanted it to mean something not just for him, but for his entire team. What you could not see from watching BlizzCon from the outside is what that reveal looked like from inside the team. In the weeks before the event, the STARCRAFT developers sat through the usual BlizzCon preparation sessions – what was happening on the show floor, what we were doing for media, when they could update their LinkedIn profiles. For many on the team, it was their first BlizzCon, so extra effort was made to bring them along for the ride; to emphasize who we’d be talking to and how we’d like them to feel, as well as how we hoped the developers would feel. The moment a person who has been keeping a secret for years finally gets to say out loud “I work on STARCRAFT.” The moment a player who dedicated their life to StarCraft almost 30 years ago gets to see a cinematic of a floating barracks, or imposing Zerg overlords, crafted so intricately and beautifully when your mind had only ever seen them rendered in small, top-down ways. That is also, for what it’s worth, a big reason why we guard these things so carefully. Because when your work is announced and you get to watch a room of strangers lose their minds over it, that’s something you can hold onto forever. When the cameras cut away from Dan Hay during the Opening Ceremony, out into the crowd to show the STARCRAFT development team, that was not a directorial flourish. The STARCRAFT team was sitting among the community deliberately because they are members of this community first.

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Ten years of Overwatch Overwatch wanted the show to feel like a party for the community that grew alongside the game. Today’s Overwatch is tougher and more defiant, a universe that gets knocked down and rises back up, without losing its sense of who it is. Above all, the team wanted to show that Overwatch is made by people who love it for the people who love it. Overwatch Game Director Aaron Keller takes that to heart, and the words you heard him say about Overwatch being a future full of hope, bravery and optimism, built around Heroes who are the beating heart of everything we create, were how he speaks of this universe every single day. Narrative lead Miranda Moyer, who was tasked with catching BlizzCon up on the story so far in the Reign of Talon in about three minutes, let her love for what she does shine through not only with her words, but with her beautifully intricate jewelry snaking from her fingers up to her elbow on one arm – a loving reference to Doomfist. Of course, she also showed her love for Heroes of the Storm with a shoutout to her fellow Gall (the arguably better half of Cho’gall) mains. Who can blame her? For executive producer Ben Bell, this was his first BlizzCon, and he could be seen frequently and quietly nerding out not only at his segment, but others as well. The joy he expressed when first seeing the STARCRAFT cinematic in rehearsal led to discussions on StarCraft mods kicking off his life in gaming. Behind the scenes it was also a week of ordinary life: he missed one rehearsal because he was moving his kid into a dorm, but that’s okay, because Overwatch’s Questwatch panel at BlizzCon 2026 keeps Ben cool in his kids’ eyes.

There is no cow level, and yet I heard a cow The Diablo universe turned 30 this year, and the team’s answer to how you mark that was to tell you where they were when it all started for them. Brent Gibson was 16, sneaking upstairs to install Diablo on the computer his mother had brought home from school for the summer. He is fairly confident he never uninstalled it before it went back. Tiffany Wat got the Diablo II Battle Chest for her 18th birthday, and within a few months was at LAN parties doing Baal runs and hunting Stones of Jordan. She has been to every BlizzCon ever: the first few of them as a player, the rest as part of her work. When the team was preparing this section, someone suggested finding photographs of the two of them as teenagers to show on the screens during the Opening Ceremony. Tiffany’s first reaction was to quietly skip past the idea. Her second was to wonder aloud whether her parents still have a picture of her with that Battle Chest. That is the tone the whole Diablo segment was built in. Since 1996, more than 130 million players have shaped this series, and the anniversary is being celebrated in Diablo IV with Season of Hell’s Legacy, which allows us to relive memorable moments from Diablo’s past. Continuing the theme of nostalgia, the Amazon class arrives in Diablo IV in the first half of 2027. Then there was Diablo V. In rehearsals, the team discovered they didn’t need many words to say what mattered. Joe Shely’s lines were enough to set the stage for what they would reveal throughout the weekend. Sanctuary has stood on the edge of oblivion for thirty years, heroes arriving to push the darkness back every time… until now. Diablo V arrives in Spring 2029, and it starts after we – humanity – lose: no heroes, no towns, no safe places. What must you become when the world has already fallen? The Diablo team finished their Opening Ceremony segment with gratitude, and they meant it. It’s the power of the Diablo community, that has walked alongside us for decades, that fuels the team’s passion. Thank you for walking through the darkness with us for 30 years. There’s so much more to come.

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The golden common The Hearthstone Opening Ceremony segment was built around opening a card pack on stage, which was entirely executive producer Nathan LyonsSmith’s idea… about six weeks before BlizzCon. This is somewhat late in the process to have an idea like that, but when Nathan suggested it, we all believed in it so strongly that everyone worked hard to make it happen. The idea was that they would slowly turn cards over on the giant screens, with each card revealing a piece of news. Somewhere in the planning, someone realized that if senior game design manager Brenden Sewell was going to be introduced by flipping a card, then Brenden was, technically, a card. And if he was a card, he had a rarity. Brenden volunteered immediately to be a Common. Nathan Lyons-Smith would not have it and spent a genuinely touching amount of time working out a version of the joke where his colleague still got to be the punchline without actually being called Common in front of the entire internet. What they landed on was a golden Common, four mana, overstated, no overload, no balance patch required. It’s a good story that shows what the Hearthstone team is like: they’re very much like the whimsical, fun-loving, warm Tavern their game represents. Nathan and Brenden were their undiluted selves on that stage: from Nathan’s reaction to the previous Diablo segment to Brenden taking a selfie onstage and everything in between. They announced that the Reign of the Black Empire lands October 20, taking Hearthstone tens of thousands of years back to the Old Gods at the height of their power, with a new keyword, Assemble, that merges two cards into something new out of a pool of more than 250. The overhauled Journal arrives with it. Battlegrounds got its Aberrations on September 22. Then the last card glowed legendary, and it was the Monk, the first new class in six years, arriving in March 2027. When Nathan first saw the card-pack explosion built for his entrance, he forgot he was an executive producer for about four seconds and said, roughly, holy cow, that is going to feel incredible.

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They got to tinkering All of our announcements are difficult to keep quiet, but the new Warcraft III: Reforged campaign, Forsaken Kingdom, was close to impossible. Everyone who saw it wanted to tell somebody. I wanted to tell somebody. No one expects more story in Warcraft III! The Forsaken Kingdom campaign is the first new Warcraft III story in 23 years. It takes you to the fall of Lordaeron and how it became the Undercity, and the script the team wrote at the beginning never changed: this is a story brought back down to ground level, where fights are not decided by the actions of a hero but by the grit of armies. And we dropped it like a Beyoncé album: available as soon as we announced it at home as well as on the show floor. It shipped with the 3.0 update, a substantial graphics overhaul, and a revamped World Editor. Brad Chan, who leads Warcraft III: Reforged, is a former Warcraft III professional player, having played in the World Cyber Games back in the day. He approaches development like it’s an esport, which is such a strange thing to write down but is honestly the best description of him. While he was really easy-going about the announcement, he was also focused on the 2v2 match he would be playing in the BlizzCon 2026 Classic Cup. Which he won.

The end was always the beginning We’re currently a little over halfway through the threeexpansion story arc of The Worldsoul Saga of modern World of Warcraft, so it’s hard to talk too much about where we are going storywise without spoiling what’s on the immediate horizon. Game Director Ion Hazzikostas understood the assignment, quietly slipping numerous foot puns into the script – which we all immediately noticed, but were delighted by. Eclipse, patch 12.2, brings Xal’atath within a foot or two of the Worldsoul, with us hot on her heels. The Last Titan expansion, when it comes, will not just be a return to Northrend, but a reckoning with a whole generation of your deeds.

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The world is the main character

Good vibes only

And then we went home. Holly Longdale’s joy is near-impossible to contain when it comes to World of Warcraft generally speaking, but put her on a BlizzCon stage to announce Classic Plus, and she ascends.

BlizzCon 2026 was built to be an oasis and a reminder of the power of shared joy, and the people who took to the stage during the Opening Ceremony and across the weekend only had one job: to talk about what they love to do in the ways that feel true to them. But that’s only half of what makes BlizzCon so meaningful.

World of Warcraft: Forever is a third way to play World of Warcraft, alongside Modern and Classic. It’s set in the Vanilla era, with three new zones, more than a thousand new quests, nine dungeons, two raids and the new Skyborne race. You journey to level 60, and then you stay at 60, because nobody wants to race ahead and leave their gear, their achievements, or their friends behind. The phrase the team keeps coming back to, long before it was ever said on a stage, is that in Forever, the world is the main character: a living place where you are never quite sure what you will find, or what is going to find you. WoW: Forever exists because of our players: it is built from feedback, from surveys, and from countless community posts about what ‘Classic Plus’ could be, read and re-read over years. The designers then brought their own magic to it from their experience working on Classic, and internally, we felt we were onto something: the people play-testing

Forever in the months leading up to the announcement were playing it far more than they needed to and long after the test sessions were over. Kind of like the rest of us now, I suppose, looking forward to logging into WoW in the same way we did 20 years ago. The memories Holly reached for when describing WoW: Forever – the long walk from Teldrassil to Ironforge with the music doing some hard carrying, meeting a stranger on the road who became a friend – we had to choose those two examples from Holly’s very, very long list of memories she had.

Our players were the other half of it. You gave hundreds of developers the best days of their working lives. You made the noise that seeped into our bone marrow, and there it will stay… fueling us until we meet again at the next BlizzCon.

There is no rush in WoW: Forever, it’s the journey that counts. And in a world that seems to force us to rush at every turn, this game feels like a relief. An exhale. An oasis.

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If you weren’t able to attend BlizzCon yourself, here’s some fantastic photography of what went on during this historic weekend

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beyond the game

by Betsy Sund

XBOX worlds are coming to life on every screen (and even off them) Our ambition at XBOX is to be the number one entertainment company in the world. In October, XBOX announced the creation of XP, a new XBOX division, led by former Mojang President Kayleen Walters (see her interview on page 56). XP will partner with the right creative minds to bring the worlds of our franchises to life outside the game. From blockbuster films and prestige TV to animation, unscripted series, collaborations, and even a theme park, XBOX worlds are coming to life everywhere. Here are the XBOX adaptations that are already here – and the ones still loading:

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“With the second movie, we’re going bigger – new biomes, deeper lore and more of the creativity that makes Minecraft special – and Mojang has been an essential creative partner in making sure every idea feels true to the game and its community.” – Jared Hess, director

A Minecraft Movie The Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures live-action film brought Minecraft’s creative world to the big screen.

A Minecraft Movie Squared

Call of Duty

The Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures live-action sequel expands the world with new biomes, lore and characters, arriving July 23, 2027.

The live-action film from Paramount Pictures and Activision, directed by Peter Berg and co-written by Berg and Taylor Sheridan, arrives June 30, 2028.

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beyond the game

Fallout

The Kilter Films and Amazon Prime Video live-action TV series opens the Wasteland to new audiences through an original story rooted in the games.

“My love of Fallout started with a love of the games. I had never played anything like them – weird, dark, subversive, and brilliant. And the idea that the series could fit into the larger universe alongside the games, with its own unique setting, story, and characters, was incredibly appealing. Todd, James and Bethesda have been incredible partners.” – Jonathan Nolan, executive producer and director 086

“A reality show based on Fallout sounds odd at first, but the opportunity to work with the best, Studio Lambert and Kilter, while running experiments on real people in vaults was too juicy to pass up. And it’s fitting into the larger franchise even better than we expected.” – Todd Howard, executive producer and game director

Fallout Shelter

An unscripted reality TV series set in the Fallout universe from Studio Lambert, Amazon Prime Video and Kilter Films.

Minecraft World Opening in 2027 at Chessington World of Adventures Resort in Greater London, UK, Minecraft World will bring Minecraft to life through a fully immersive theme park land and the world’s first Minecraft-themed hotel. Created by Merlin Entertainments and Mojang Studios, the destination will feature iconic biomes, mobs and items, the world-first Minecraft coaster Escape the Nether, interactive adventures, block-built playscapes, and themed retail and dining.

“Adventure has always been at the heart of Minecraft. As the franchise continues to grow beyond the game, we’re always looking for new ways to share the magic of Minecraft with even more people. Minecraft World will bring that spirit into the physical world, creating a shared adventure for friends and families to explore, create and shape together.” – Kayleen Walters, president, XP

Never-before-seen concept art of Escape the Nether, the Minecraf t World rollercoaster

Also on the way… Gears of War film

Netflix’s live-action film tells the origin story of Delta Squad and its desperate fight against the subterranean Locust.

Gears of War animated series

Netflix’s animated TV series will bring another dimension of the Gears universe to the screen.

Diablo animated series

As announced at BlizzCon, a Diablo animated series is in development with Netflix.

Wolfenstein TV series

A forthcoming Wolfenstein TV series from Amazon MGM Studios, Prime Video and Kilter Films is in the works.

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behind closed doors

Every studio is unique – from the people who make them up, to their histories in the industry, to the cultures that form inside them. They might all make games, but the way they make them – and the way they interact with one another while making them – can be wildly different. Here, we want to celebrate some of the fun, nerdy, unusual facets that make XBOX studios what they are. Microsoft Building 87 (Redmond, USA)

Building 87 is legendary on the Microsoft campus – a borderline sci-fi location where new XBOX products are designed, built and tested. Deep within the building, you’ll find the Audio Lab, and within that you’ll find our anechoic chamber – officially recognized as one of the quietest rooms in the world, with a measured background noise of -20.35 dBA (20 decibels below the threshold of human hearing).

Rare (Twycross, UK)

There’s a lot about Rare that feels unique (if we had more space, I’d tell you about the studio building covered in cannons…) but nothing more so than the fact that the studio keeps its own beehives, with honey jarred up and sold to staff – and all proceeds going straight back into the bees’ upkeep. The only downside – as Community Director, Christina McFairholme puts it: “It’s not uncommon to receive an email warning folks that the bees are swarming outside reception...”

Obsidian Entertainment (Irvine, USA) Obsidian is known for deeply clever games – it’s no wonder its staff celebrate cleverness too. Established in April 2024, the quarterly PowerPoint Palooza brings employees together over passionate, niche presentations based on group-submitted themes chosen at random. From “Books Made into Other Media” to “Creatures & Cryptids,” each gathering celebrates and shares Obsidianites’ unexpected knowledge, unique creativity, and wonderfully varied interests.

Mojang Studios (Stockholm, Sweden & Redmond, USA)

Stepping into a Mojang office is designed to feel like stepping into Minecraft itself. In the Redmond studio, the lobby features grass-colored carpets, bamboo walls, and a subtle blue light designed to feel like the wideopen Overworld sky. And once you enter the Stockholm and Redmond office spaces themselves, traveling through them is meant to evoke crossing between the game’s different biomes – floor, wall, ceiling and lighting treatments shift as you move around the building. Word to the wise: you’re not allowed to try and smash any blocks and move them around – I’ve asked.

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Blizzard (Worldwide)

A longstanding tradition, Blizzard’s annual Fun Run is a chance for employees to get outside, get moving, and enjoy some time with their colleagues. Typically held in May at Blizzard offices around the world, employees can run or walk a 5K or 10K in person or virtually. At Blizzard’s HQ in Irvine, California, the course circles the campus, often ending with snacks for runners to refuel. Pets and plus-ones can join in the fun, and participants receive a commemorative T-shirt designed by Blizzard’s own creatives.

id Software (Richardson, USA)

id Software’s lobby holds a veritable museum of rare gaming artifacts that chart the developer’s history back to its early days of Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D. Beyond original boxed versions of their games from around the world, other fascinating exhibits include a plastic toy pump-action shotgun, which became the original shotgun model for DOOM (1993), and a two foot high cast of the Spider Mastermind, which was used as the reference model for the same game’s final boss.

MachineGames (Uppsala, Sweden)

Much of the team at MachineGames started their development journey with modding – and many never stopped. Quake Club sees staff working together, offering opportunities for anyone in the studio to learn classic level design techniques, or to contribute music, art, modeling, and scripting. It’s even benefited official new Quake campaigns: “Our latest release, Dawn of the Machine, showcased that range of talent from the team,” explains Lead Level Designer, Andrew Yoder. “We’re already brewing ideas for what might be next. As they said back in ’96: Quake is for everyone, Quake is forever.”

Infinity Ward (Los Angeles, USA & Kraków, Poland)

Playground Games (Leamington Spa, UK)

When you join the team at Playground Games, you’ll quickly be directed to a workplace chat group: PG Pets. Started during COVID lockdowns, it was a lighthearted way to stay connected with colleagues while working from home – but has gone far beyond the Teams app. PG Pets regularly feature in the studio’s internal newsletters, the group’s organized a number of fundraisers and collections for local animal charities, and Playground even curates a digital Advent Calendar of PG Pets for the holiday season.

Infinity Ward has its own studio traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. In Los Angeles, Friday Night Fights see developers randomly drafted into teams to compete in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 for championship belts. It brings together colleagues who might not usually work together, including developers from Infinity Ward’s studios in Mexico City and Austin, Texas. Communications Manager Guignard Isaac explains, “it’s definitely revealed that some of our quietest devs are secretly the most competitive people in the building.” A cozier tradition can be found in Kraków, where the team embraces a local custom, with most developers swapping their outdoor shoes for slippers when they arrive. Both examples offer a glimpse at the personalities behind this global studio.

King (Malmö, Sweden)

At King’s Malmö office, Thursdays come with a side of language learning. Every week, Kingsters gather in the kitchen for Language Fika – a relaxed, half-hour social break where anyone can practice a language, teach a favorite word from home, or simply meet colleagues from different backgrounds over coffee and Swedish fika (think afternoon tea, but better). It’s a small tradition that reflects King’s culture: creating spaces where people feel welcome, curious and connected.

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Phil Spencer during rehearsals for the momentous Back ward Compatibility announcement during E3 2015.

How backward compatibility became a cornerstone of XBOX’s future by Will Fulton

Gaming summer showcases are, in general, all about the excitement of what’s coming next. It’s why XBOX’s 2015 E3 presentation sticks in my mind so firmly – when Phil Spencer announced that backward compatibility was coming to XBOX One, the room erupted.

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Backward compatibility has become a key part of XBOX, a commitment to the medium of games and a connective tissue that binds the different generations of hardware together. Over a decade later, our Game Preservation team is still innovating with the recent introduction of digital licenses for disc owners. The key question is: why? I spoke to Peggy Lo, XBOX’s Game Preservation Program Lead – who has worked at XBOX from the beginning in 2001, and on its backward compatibility efforts since 2015 – to find out more.

“It’s funny, because you think about how we try to do this for the fans, but there are so many fans here internally. Part of the back compat experience is that when you launch a back compat game, we play the boot-up animation for either the original XBOX, with the blob, or the 360 swirl, right? As soon as people saw that, they said things like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my youth!’ It was so much fun. We hadn’t even shown a game yet – we knew the fans would love it when they saw it too.”

Preservation and legacy

backward compatibility

Early in the development of XBOX One’s backward compatibility, it was the gamers on her team that told Lo they were onto something special.

Backward compatibility is more than just a technical challenge to overcome – so much so that the team changed its name to Game Preservation.

Long live classic games

Playing classic games doesn’t mean being stuck in the past. Backward compatibility not only brings classic games to modern devices, it makes them look and play better than ever before. Developed by Eric Heutchy, the Heutchy Method taps today’s GPU power to boost resolution within the emulation layer, without changing the original game code or assets. The result? Games like Viva Piñata (and many more) look as crisp and colorful as you remember them.

Emulation is the highest form of flattery Backward compatibility is the programming wizardry that allows games made for older consoles to run seamlessly on the quite-different hardware architecture of newer devices, without needing to remake or remaster. Engineers essentially trick the game code, “so that it believes it’s still running on the original hardware it was designed for,” said Lo. Lo tells me that backward compatibility has been a priority for XBOX since developing the 360, but it was the XBOX One generation that saw the greatest leap. “We wanted to move people forward without leaving their old games behind. So, when planning for the next consoles, our team had to be there early on to ensure we had the necessary tech without compromising our ability to innovate for new gaming experiences. Being part of that planning also allowed us to leverage the new features to make older games play even better.”

That commitment to preservation “shows that we respect [players’] investment in our platform, in their gaming history. We want them to understand that if they decide to go with XBOX, we will let them play their games as long as they want, wherever they want. It’s a bridge for gamers from current generations to the next generations. And we know that the promise isn’t just about the back catalog. Every new game today eventually becomes a back compat game in some form. So, this is an ongoing promise that everything that you play today, you trust that it will continue to move with you.”

And it’s not just about preserving XBOX’s history. “We need to think about the industry overall,” Lo explains. “It’s much better as a coalition of people across the industry and academia, and it’s good to know that we’re not alone in this. We would love to have everything that we do for XBOX also benefit the rest of the industry. Game preservation isn’t about competition, right? It is about gaming.” Lo sees her team’s work as an important act of preserving history and legacy. “It’s the history of XBOX. It’s the history of our gamers and our creators, and we want to continue to respect that and uphold it. I love the ability to celebrate people’s legacies, establish these moments for people that they can bring and share with their families. I love those stories when people are like, ‘Oh, I used to play this game and now my kid plays it too,’ – even the people who created the games can share them with their kids. And then there are all the new people who will discover it.” I was struck by how deeply satisfied she seemed with her team’s role at XBOX: “Yeah, I feel really good about the work we do. Of all the jobs I’ve had, I feel like this team has a very clean, clear conscience that what we do is righteous. You know, it’s right. At its core, game preservation is a customer promise, and I’m happy that XBOX allows us to do this for our players.”

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Exploring the lesser-known history of XBOX’s achievements with one of their creators by Will Fulton

Achievements are culturally ubiquitous, but it’s easy to forget that they’re a relatively modern phenomenon, arriving in 2005 with the XBOX 360.

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As achievements continue to grow and change, it felt right to look back on their origin, so I tracked down founding XBOX team alum Scott Henson, who served in many roles around the organization between 2001 and 2017, including writing the original concept document for achievements – though he’d be the first to tell you that it was a truly collaborative effort, with no single creator.

Scrapbooking

Coin-op kids

Kart and science

Early in the development of XBOX Live, the team was blue-sky thinking about the future of gaming in an increasingly connected world – and XBOX co-creator J Allard spoke up:

The early XBOX team was filled with gamers who had grown up in the ’70s and ’80s, meaning arcades were a common formative experience:

A far less obvious influence on achievements came out of Henson’s love of competitive Japanese games:

I came for the history, but got a wonderful reminder that XBOX has always been made by people. Henson is a great example of the kind of playful forward-thinkers who gravitated to XBOX in those early days, setting the tone for what it became. What follows are my favorite details and anecdotes from our conversation about the history of achievements, at XBOX and beyond.

It could have ‘magic moments,’ like a screenshot or recording, but we’re talking in 2001-2003. This stuff was ridiculously out-of-reach for us at that point, but we knew that we wanted players to have some kind of identity.”

“He threw out this idea that he called The Scrapbook, like a shoebox of things that built up around you, and we spent a lot of time talking about what would be in that, who would define it, and how it would come to be.

Achievements grew out of this question of what would fill the virtual scrapbook of our online gaming identities.

“We were thinking about what we loved in the arcade experience. You probably remember that leaderboards were ridiculous, and unattainable for most mortals. You would sit there in awe and wonder what human being is actually attached to those three letters that could achieve such a thing?” Gamerscore, and the way you could be drawn into competition through achievements, is a direct line from that childhood experience – the present contains layers of history, like rings on a tree.

“They had these different levels of achievement – like you could complete a Mario Kart circuit, and then they would give you a letter based on your performance. I was like, ‘Okay, that’s kind of cool. What if that was standard?’” This thinking around standardized in-game grading led to mandatory achievements on XBOX. “This is where [XBOX Live Program Manager] Michał Bortnik said, ‘For every title going forward, you get a certain amount and then you can decide how you want to pace it, but we’re going to make sure that it’s uniform and consistent.’ We wanted there to be something gamers could count on, no matter what type of gaming experience they engaged with.” An overall vision is one thing, but actually implementing achievements across so many disparate developers not yet used to the concept was a new challenge entirely.

achievements

Curiosity, unlocked

One vision

Henson credits XBOX’s first-party studios, particularly Rare, with setting the tone for what made a good achievement, as well as an XBLA classic from Bizarre Creations:

While the 360 era gets a lot of attention for pioneering platform-wide achievements in the first place, there were some crucial additions made for XBOX One:

“Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved might have been the best expression of the idea of achievements at the time. It was the perfect pick-upand-play game and when it introduced the ‘Pacifism’ achievement (surviving for 60 seconds without firing) it made you think ‘Wow, there is a different way to play this game and have fun.’ That’s the big unlock of achievements: playful discovery. You shouldn’t have to go read through the entire walkthrough guide to understand all the ins and outs of it. It should just be part of the experience of playing the game.”

“Among many other things, I don’t know that the XBOX One team gets enough credit for percentage of progression, but that took it to the next level. When Chris Novak came in to run design, he and I were convinced that having the screensaver show you the next achievement would be meaningful. We were inventing rare achievements at the same time. I think rare achievements are sort of like those arcade leaderboards – aspirational. 360 made achievements a language of accomplishment; XBOX One made them a live system for progress and discovery.”

Achievements emerged out of an impulse to share play experiences with other players, but many of the later innovations were about ways to get players to engage more deeply with their games. As Henson puts it: “It was genuinely fun and inspiring to see what the industry did with this new idea.”

Achievements at XBOX continue to evolve in 2026, receiving a visual refresh earlier this year, along with new upgrades like the ability to hide games from your list and highlighting titles in which you’ve hit 100% – curatorial improvements that refine that original impulse of choosing what to share in your scrapbook.

Breaking containment

By gamers, for gamers

Within a few years of their introduction on XBOX, achievements spread to most other gaming platforms. Twenty years on, though, Henson is most surprised by how deeply the notion of achievements has penetrated culture at large:

Talking to Henson, it was obvious how much of XBOX’s developmental history was driven by the passion for games of the people working there. Achievements set the world on fire because they were born from a genuine love of the medium and sharing it with friends:

“Now it’s weird to think of a world where achievements wouldn’t exist, right? I’m listening to [LitRPG book series] ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’. I’m on the second book now. Spoiler: achievements show up a lot. There’s a voice in there that’s like ‘new achievement!’ and then a paragraph for each one, and they’re snarky and funny. Those are the best achievements, right? “Most recently, I’ve been working on Kindle. And, you know, the gamification of everything is really centered on achievements. I’m a big Peloton rider and user – oh my god, so many flipping achievements. I meditate, too – so many achievements. It’s everywhere. It’s not just games anymore. It’s life and the way you participate with life. So that’s kind of wild.”

“We were about gamers, first and foremost. We never lost that. And I don’t think you can go wrong when you put the gamers in the center. I think that’s why these things resonated, and why they’ve become what they’ve become. This is an achievement unlocked. You know, when we set the original vision for XBOX, it was a 20-year vision – so it’s a little surreal to be talking to you about the 25th anniversary.” And the team still sticks to Henson’s player-focused vision, recently adding one of the most-requested features from XBOX fans: mythic achievements, awarded when you complete all original achievements for a game. 25 years on, achievements still show us that players always guide where to go next.

The rare Rare ‘rare achievement’ achievement When Henson and the team invented the new rare achievement for XBOX One, they wanted a new sound effect to accompany it – but couldn’t quite find the tone they wanted. Fittingly, they reached out to, well, Rare. Rare’s Senior Audio Director Jon Vincent and Composer Robin Beanland helped to create the sound we still love to hear today: “We got the entire audio department involved and treated it like a mini audio jam,” Beanland tells me. “Jon and I then curated our favorite elements, honed them, and created the sound you hear today. It goes without saying that we feel incredibly proud every time we hear it!”

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designing history

2

by Jef f Rubenstein

It’s impossible to pick a favorite piece of XBOX hardware. So we chose 25 When players pick up an XBOX controller today, it’s like putting on a pair of your most comfortable sneakers, or your favorite jeans.

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“It was a convenience thing… it just made it so much simpler for people to log in, to send messages. How do you fit a complete keyboard onto a controller? That was a fun project.”

XBOX 360 S + Kinect (2010)

Everything just feels… right. That’s no accident: designers, engineers, and players have put countless hours over the last 25 years into creating and refining what many consider the industry standard for gaming input devices. While many hands (quite literally) touch the design of XBOX hardware on its journey from blueprint to boxed product, XBOX Lead Designer Carl Ledbetter has been here for all of it. A 31-year veteran of the company, Ledbetter was originally hired to create a computer mouse, which led to keyboards, trackballs, and the legendary SideWinder gaming line which all predate XBOX. With a connection to XBOX going back to day one, we asked Ledbetter to select 25 of the most iconic pieces of hardware to bear the XBOX brand.

XBOX 360 Chatpad (2007)

XBOX Controller S (2002)

“The very first controller, Duke, I know it has a whole like cult following, [but] even before Duke came out, I was approached to start to look at how we could make it better. On the Controller S, not only did we make it smaller, we started to tune the shape and size and orientation of buttons like ABXY.”

“We took all of the extraneous things from [the launch XBOX] 360 and integrated them and made it smaller… We tried to take a modern take on the 360 inhale [concave shape], so it’s still there and still present, but it had a little bit more of an angular and edgier approach.” “Kinect was jamming

3 and fitting elegantly

so much technology into a device. And it was a fundamental experience shift with new games and content.”

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XBOX One S (2016)

“This one always stands out for me as one of my favorite designs because you see that the proportions, the purity of the form… this is where you start to see the more modern and pure aesthetic of what’s in the Series S and X today. For us, it felt like kind of a breath of fresh air.”

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XBOX 360 Limited Edition Kinect Star Wars Bundle (2012)

“We had so much fun breathing the design elements of R2-D2 and C-3PO into these devices. Across the various films, there were different colors of gold and different colors of blue. So we created the gold and blue and white color standards for Lucas Entertainment that are used even to this day.”

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Tomb Raider Limited Edition Wireless Controller (2013)

“One of the principles that we have when we design special and limited editions is we don’t just slap logos on these things. The goal is to actually make it feel like the game… We used the laser etching to distress the surface of the controller and make it look like it was worn in.”

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XBOX Design Lab (2016)

XBOX Camouflage Controller Series (2013 - present)

“It’s just cool. That controller sold like hotcakes. So all of a sudden we’re like, okay, we cracked something interesting here. And then we’ve had, I think, four different series based on different camouflage patterns.”

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Halo 5: Guardians Master Chief Limited Edition Controller (2015)

“Master Chief is so iconic. Pulling details from the visor, from his armor, from the weapons, from the game itself – it’s always fun to build a device that feels special to Master Chief.”

XBOX Elite Wireless Controller (2015)

“This whole idea of creating a device that players could really change to adapt to how they play was really unique. We talked to a lot of gamers, did a lot of prototyping, worked with them to create something special. Great product, super proud of it.”

“We’re empowering people to not just buy the [controllers] that we create – designed by XBOX – but you can design your own creation… That was sort of revolutionary at the time. We’re still finding more ways to energize it.”

XBOX One X (2017)

“I’m not going to say it’s my favorite design, but it kind of is… It was the most powerful console at the time. It was our smallest console we ever made. It was probably the most innovative engineering and design feat that we’d done yet for XBOX, and it set a new bar for the type of quality that we bring to console design.”

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Sea of Thieves Limited Edition Wireless Controller (2018)

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“Everybody loves pirates, right? Everybody loves skulls… It set a new bar in translucent material, glow-inthe-dark skull, laser-etched barnacles – this sort of bioluminescent effect. It’s always one of my favorites.”

XBOX Adaptive Controller (2018)

“Of all the XBOX products, that’s the one I’m most proud of… That product unlocked gameplay for people who otherwise couldn’t play. It set a new bar not only for the industry in gaming, but in many cases for product design – it’s our most design awarded product ever.”

Gears of War 5 Limited Edition XBOX One X (2019)

“When you look at this thing, it looks like you’re looking down into ice that’s six inches deep, and then you’ve got this eerie skull staring at you through it. This is another one where [XBOX Senior Design Director] Monique [Chatterjee] and the team just really nailed it.”

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DPM X019 Exclusive XBOX Wireless Controller (2019)

“Because X019 was happening in London, we partnered with [Londonbased] Maharishi to create a unique, one-of-a-kind graphic design… You see little iconic elements of London and England in that design. You see the Eye, the River Thames…”

15

“Half of it has that whole aesthetic of this high-end ’80s glam motif, and then when you turn it around, on the back it’s graffiti – the duality of the 16 haves and the have-nots. So the controller - half is silver, and that’s the left side – the silver arm that the character has in the game. As you’re playing using this controller, you become connected with that character. You are Johnny Silverhand.”

XBOX Developer Kits

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Cyberpunk 2077 Limited Edition XBOX One X and Wireless Controller (2020)

“I love our developer kits. Developers are the creators – the people who build our games – and we want to make great products for them. And we take it seriously.”

XBOX Series X and XBOX Series S (2020)

“This is the culmination of everything we’ve talked about: Classic expressions of form, doing something innovative. We really focused on creating designs that could be equally expressive or unobtrusive, but most importantly, they could fit wherever you want to put it.”

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XBOX Wireless Headset (2021/2024)

“Audio is like 50% of the experience. This is where we can apply our ergonomics, our approach to comfort, and our approach to simple, intuitive, tactile controls… at an affordable price.”

designing history

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20

DOOM: The Dark Ages Special Editions (2025)

Forza Horizon Limited Edition Controllers and Headsets (2021/2026)

“When you go to the Horizon Festival, that’s the centerpiece. That’s where everything starts and ends. So we didn’t put what you traditionally consider racing – a livery or something on a controller. We did something expressive of the game.”

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XBOX Remix Special Edition Wireless Controller (2023)

“We did some really innovative things with resins and recycling leftover plastic resins… We were able to create a unique expression that has this whole feel of renewed and recycled and fresh.”

“The amount of emotion that was packed into these designs is just incredible. When I see these, it immediately teleports me into the game. On the console, there’s a whole story of the sarcophagus filling with blood and rejuvenation and stuff. And when you open that wrap, there’s the scripture from the hell Bible.”

XBOX 25th Anniversary Console (2026)

“It is the ultimate love letter to our fans. It goes back to our beginnings, our roots. When you see it, you smile. It’s just like: this is XBOX.”

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XBOX Cloud Gaming Server Blade

“Nobody knows about this one, which is what I like about it. Just for the people who go maintain these [server] rooms, when they walk in that room, they should feel the energy of XBOX when they see this equipment powering games to people around the world.”

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Starfield Limited Edition Wireless Controller (2023)

“We met with the [Bethesda Game Studios] team, they talked about this notion of ‘NASApunk’. It’s taking some of the vibe of the Apollo 11 era – the late 1960s and early ’70s – and then combining it with Starfield in a new way. You get a little hint of the gold from the technical details on a space suit to the graphic design coming off of the XBOX button.”

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player creations

Our studios have seen things they never would have imagined Many XBOX games allow you to create within them. Building maps, inventing modes, designing liveries, and birthing entire worlds are all possible. But sometimes, players push things further than even the developers themselves could have expected. Using simple toolsets, our studios have seen things they never would have imagined – let’s celebrate a few of them.

Creators with Creations

Forza Horizon Sea of Thieves

Sea of Thieves’ Custom Seas mode only arrived earlier this year, but it’s already produced some deeply unexpected results. Offering tools to let players change the state of the world, control the camera freely, and invent modes, Rare designed Custom Seas to allow players to make what they want – but they probably weren’t expecting… Dodgeball. Built by a player called TatoTunes, this early creation was immediately recognizable as the sport we know – aside from the fact that everyone’s yeeting spears at one another.

Community creations are an intrinsic part of the entire Forza Horizon series, so picking just one is tough – but special mention goes to ‘The Tower,’ created by player Twisted Knot for Forza Horizon 5. This, er, towering creation turns the open world racing game into a platforming challenge, getting you to ascend by way of increasingly tricky block placements. It’s an incredible use of game tools to make something all-new, and was duly recognized when it won one of Playground Games’ Golden Tank community awards back in 2024 (and was followed by a sequel, The Tower 2.0). Try them yourself with Sharecodes 293 634 315 and 681 077 267.

Bethesda Game Studios Creations allow enthusiasts and professional developers alike to create and release everything from subtle tweaks to all-new adventures within Starfield, Skyrim, and Fallout 4. With so many Creations available, we couldn’t choose just one – so we asked two Bethesda developers to speak to some of their personal favorites (and you can find all of these in-game on console or PC).

Daniel T. Lee, Associate Art Director, Bethesda Game Studios In Skyrim, I use Immersive Movement paired with Survival mode for a slower, more thoughtful experience. Of course, adventuring is more fun with friends, so I’m almost always traveling with my fully voiced Argonian pal, Xelzaz, and exploring new dungeons like Sirenroot, or the massive new lands such as those found in Heart of the Mountain. I have always wanted to play as a ghoul, which we recently added to Fallout 76, and now I can do the same in Fallout 4 with Ghoulification. In Starfield, I recommend zone79’s Cryomancers – A New Faction, which adds an entirely new breed of Spacer enemy, as well as missions, companions, and weapons. I would be remiss if I didn’t also recommend At Hell’s Gate, a very fun DOOM crossover created by the very talented Kinggath Creations. Finally, I often find myself running around with D.E.R.E.K. – a unique follower with 1,000 lines of dialogue across multiple personalities, and who is always calling me “Dan” (to be fair, I might be biased on that last one).

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Grounded

Playgrounds Mode in Grounded lets players alter the parameters of the game itself – but no one at Obsidian expected that to result in one player creating an entire management sim. “I was absolutely blown away by M09264’s Lemonade Tycoon,” explains Senior Community Manager, Aarik Dorobiala. “It’s incredible. We never considered the possibility that someone could create a sim game within Grounded that provided the process of creating lemonade, selling it to daily customers, and progression to automate it all to make even more lemonade. It’s worth checking out. The download code is TGG-NZQ-2XQ”

Grounded 2

Even while it’s still in XBOX Game Preview, Grounded 2 has already spawned some truly wild player creations with its own Playgrounds mode. With the addition of Buggy Racing, creator RossoCCX created Mite Mine to take full advantage of the new high-speed pursuit. “It’s a small twoplayer racing map located within a confined mine,” says Aarik Dorobiala. “The level design is so vibrant, with pitfalls, obstacles, and hidden passages to get the upper hand in a head-to-head race. I can’t wait to see what players can do as we add more tools throughout early development. Challenge a friend with download code DCL-LN2-N3Z.”

Microsoft Flight Simulator

The MSFS Marketplace is a portal for aviation enthusiasts to buy (and then fly) hundreds of add-ons for this incredible simulator – and it includes creations made by the game’s community. One of the most incredible additions made by fans comes in the form of the A220 Airliner – an astonishingly complex recreation of one of the world’s newest jet airliners, made by Synaptic, a group of designers fresh out of high school when the project began. You can try it for yourself in both Microsoft Flight Simulator and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.

Halo

Minecraft

In a game where player creation is at the heart of the experience, it takes a lot to go beyond what anyone thought possible. Enter Minecraftception, created by user sammyuri, which uses the game’s programmable redstone blocks to create a working computer that plays Minecraft inside Minecraft. Years after its release, it’s still cited by Mojang developers as one of the most mindbogglingly impressive creations ever made in the game.

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft’s Housing features gave the denizens of Azeroth new ways to express themselves when they arrived this year. You can build houses to your exact specifications, in multiple styles – some enterprising folks even worked out how to make them fly. And then there’s user IInnsmouth, who looked at the suite of tools and... built a Large Hadron Collider. It’s one of the dev team’s favorites so far.

Is there any bigger validation of a community’s work than making something so good it becomes an official part of the game? In Halo 2, the community began playing a custom mode they called Zombies – a red team has Magnums, a green team has Energy Swords, and any time a red player is killed, they switch to green. Played with honor rules, it became a huge hit – so huge that the developers made sure that an official game mode, Infection has been included in almost every Halo game since.

Andrew Griffiths, Senior Community Content Manager, Bethesda Game Studios I love exploring, so I gravitate toward Creations that add large new locations like Clockwork by Antistar, and Coven of Crones by Hightale Studio. Both are fantastic adventures for Skyrim that provide interesting encounters, beautiful locations, and engaging NPCs, as well as strong central narratives. I love being able to immerse myself in a story, or just hang out, depending on my mood. Sometimes, I prefer more psychological exploration, and one of my favorites is The Machine and Her by NikaNine. This Fallout 4 Creation introduces Kit, a companion whose sophisticated affinity system reacts to the choices you make. In exploring the Commonwealth together, you may learn more about her background while trying to unravel a greater mystery together.

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artistic visions

Two members of the XBOX community introduce their creations – which you can download now The community isn’t just a part of XBOX – it’s why we’re here in the first place. Our 25th anniversary is about celebrating the people who’ve been with us from the very beginning, and those who joined us along the way. That’s why we asked two creators from the XBOX community, Klobrille and Ben Kenobi, to create a collection of gamerpics, backgrounds, and a dynamic theme for XBOX consoles – by the community, for the community, and available now. We invited both to share their creations, and the journeys they’ve taken to inspire them:

Klobrille (@klobrille) When I think of my past 25 years with XBOX, it’s the games that come to my mind first. The worlds that carried this platform for all this time do have a special place in the hearts of many, both for nostalgia reasons, but also for what’s next. When I think of XBOX, I think of Master Chief and Cortana discovering unnatural caves, I think of Marcus finding brotherhood in war, and I think of… kicking chickens through the streets of Albion? Well, anyway. When XBOX asked me to create an XBOX Dynamic Background, I knew that I wanted to highlight games the

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Profile theme by Ben Kenobi

Ben Kenobi (@benkenobi2020) When I was very young, my parents believed I was non-verbal – until my mother discovered that I had been speaking, but only when I was alone. Due to a combination of autism and early trauma, I learned at a very young age that I felt more comfortable communicating through art.

Dynamic background by Klobrille community connects with XBOX, combined with a layout inspired by the classic “Blades XBOX Dashboard.” I hope the community likes this design as much as I liked making it. Thanks so much to everyone involved at XBOX for making this a reality!

When XBOX reached out asking if I was interested in creating background images and Gamerpics, they suggested I take a personal approach. I wanted to create a set of scenes that visually express how it felt being alone in those moments – where the outside world did not exist and I was safe, in my own space. This is a part of my life I have not fully revisited – it has been an unexpectedly healing process. I wanted to show how we all get something different from gaming. For me, when the outside world did not make sense, I had a place to go. Video games were the first artform to not only provide a place to escape, but taught me it’s possible to express myself through creativity – and that other people were out there dreaming, creating experiences and communicating through their art.

How to use these designs ON CONSOLE: Gamerpic & Theme: › Settings › Profile › Customize profile. Dynamic background: › Settings › General › Personalization › My background › Dynamic background.

ON XBOX APP ON PC: Gamerpic: Open View Profile and select the pencil icon over your current Gamerpic. Theme: Open View Profile › Customize profile and choose your Theme.

picture perfect

A reveal event for XBOX 360, where players try out Per fect Dark Zero’s multiplayer

XBOX’s Press Briefing at E3 2003, where in-game footage of Halo 2 was shown for the first time.

A glimpse back at XBOX events from across the generations

Forza Horizon 3 wows players at E3 2016

Unpacking for the enormous Zero Hour launch event for XBOX 360, held in the Mojave Desert

The enormous X019 event in London, where Grounded got its debut, among many other announcements

One attendee gets in the spirit at an E3 2017 XBOX FanFest event

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n o i t u l o v e R e R e i d In

ars of indies on XBOX

: Celebrating 25 ye om XBLA to ID@XBOX

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ith The followed up w Course DLC buted at st de La d ea us io ph lic Cu De When ter. six seconds a few years la E3 2014, the a in n ow sh e of footag small team esented Created by a development montage repr me drawn e m fra ga with no nearly every ut childhoods far, but it experience (b Sega Master of the game so inations e th ag spent with ignited the im ed to see S tapes az System and VHoons!), of players am 30s-style rt ca e 19 ag n w nt vi ra of hand-d ed the a game. Cuphead show ndent animation in pe de in of er pow to enable unch in fall of development The wait to la but it was to take rs to , ea new cr 2017 felt long n-and-gun we never ru es ith ac w pl it, us th or w ible. gameplay imagined poss and boss-rush tight as d an ry tte as bu . The team the animations

ckbuilder. G. Metroidvania. De Run & gun. Action RP d like worldthose genre titles soun On their own, none of grew up nds of developers who changers. But in the ha true” can d s that sound “tried an with the classics, genre honing, on al, as creators focus become fresh and magic them to t ou elements that stood refining and redefining

) Balatro – Playstack (2024 Balatro began life as a side-project for solo developer, Localthunk. He started it as a take on a Chinese card game, before pivoting to the poker deck-builder that took over the world. Blending familiar rules with deck-amping jokers leads to endless calls of “one more run,” as you work to perfect the ultimate build and beat Ante 8 (or enter endless mode and quest

for Ante 39). Play your cards right (literally) and a humble pair can score so high it overflows the largest number the game can store. Paired with an ultra-lounge soundtrack by LouisF, the game cleaned house at the Game Developers Choice Awards, proving that even games that start as “hobby projects” can change the world.

Tunic – Finji (2022) Andrew Shouldice wanted to make a game with as many secrets in it as he imagined games had when he talked about them on the playground as a kid. The result was Tunic, an action-RPG with lore so deep, some Easter eggs were hidden in spectrographs of game audio! Luckily, most of Tunic’s secrets are found onscreen, and in the

in-game manual, finding pages of which is crucial to deciphering the Golden Path. With deep puzzles everywhere, incredibly tight combat and wicked boss fights, Tunic remains one of the most engrossing indies ever shipped on XBOX. It’s also one of the cutest, with a little fox protagonist you fall in love with instantly.

familiar is something that feels ult res e Th ys. wa e iqu in un t even new. And it’s proof tha while also being totally room for of s ton types still have well-trodden gameplay takes to sh fre ng when teams bri innovation and growth classic styles.

ong – ight: Silks Hollow Kn erry (2025) Team Ch mbat than

lt!) co (and difficu . al in ig or e th in anages to The game m etimes very om (s d be hard ways fair an hard!) but al the brutality nd A learnable. is softened of the game is lush and e th w s, ar ye n by a world song After seve see the next mately, Silk lti U g. tin to vi in ht tig in finally got ss la a by Team is a masterc d perfect Metroidvani was more eplay an it m d ga an y rr he C d proof that the wait. animation anare worth than worth a e or gs pl in ex to great th Players got detailed world, waiting for! larger, more e more deep nc rie pe and ex

die ticipated in The most an Very possibly, ? sequel ever of “Silksong ns if the millio ments on when” com eams can XBOX livestr be believed!

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Deep Rock Galacti c– Ghost Ship (2020)

You’re a fantasy-trop e dwarf in space and you have a job to do. It see ms so easy... pick your class (Scout, Engineer, Gu nn or Driller), drop onto er a planet, gather resou rce and then get out. Wh s at could possibly go wr on Basically everything. g? This co-op FPS minin g/ escape game featur es incredible play balan ce (the team nailed the ir to build something no goal obs

could easily play wit h vets), tons of variety in missions and proced the ura generated environme lly nts, along with the most fra tension we’ve experi ntic enced in a game. Getting swarmed by alie as you’re desperately ns to get to an extractio trying n with only seconds lef pod t will leave you and your frie smiling (and shouting nds ) whether you make it or not. Rock and stone, eve ryone!

Local Heroes One of the coolest things about the modern indie landscape is the way regional sce nes have appeared. Whether it’s Melbourne, Eastern Can ada or the Pacific Northwest, certain areas seem to produce a lot of cool games. Every game on this page hail s from Scandinavia,

Goat Simulator – Coffee Stain (2015) What happens when a tower defense developer decides to blow off steam with a little joke game? if you’re in the gaming hotbed of Skövde in Sweden, Goat Simulator happens. The game brags about its many unfixed bugs, and the bonkers physics. And that’s the whole point. So what do you do? Whatever you want. There are challenges

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and things to unlock, but mostly you just attach your rubber band-tongue to objects, break things, become a devil goat, trigger massive explosions and live your best goat life. With the series still going strong a decade after release, Goat Simulator helped launch Coffee Stain into publishing to give back to other indies. That’s the power of the goat in action!

INSIDE – Playdead (2016) The deeply atmospheric follow-up to 2010’s LIMBO, INSIDE may or may not have been the impetus for XBOX to introduce brightness options for the XBOX controller’s guide button with Night mode, but it certainly is best played in the dark, with the volume way up. The incredibly well-crafted puzzles, the vast array of bespoke death animations that trigger when you (fatally) fail them, and

subtle, but deeply effective (and disturbing!) audio cues create a videogame with a sublime crescendo of tension and creepiness through the entire playthrough. It just keeps getting weirder, and better, and the ending(s?) and unresolved secrets are still being discussed and debated by players. It’s an absolute triumph of design and implementation by the Playdead team.

and while the games are all different , you can sense a commonality of spirit. The dev com munities that spring up in specific geographies all have thei r own flavor, as well as worldwide context and appeal. It’s just one of the things that makes playing indie games end lessly interesting.

Planet of Lana

– Wishfully

(2023) Still images were In this cinematic Planet of Lana’s crucial to pu cre platformer that av zzleIt was studio co-fo ation. combat and draw oids Adam Stjärnljus’s under inspiration from s drawing of a youn 2017 so as varied as INSID urces looking up at a ro g girl bot that Miyazaki films, yo E and helped spawn th u control e Lana and Mui, a for the game. La concept cat-like ter, a creature. The pa screenshot attra ir cted to each other in speak the attention of a Takeshi language as they fictional Furukawa, comp work os to deal with the The Last Guardian er for inv of their world by asion prompted an un , and alien so machines. (but happily acce licited pt to compose what ed) offer The result is a be the fantastic scor became autiful e for and memorable Planet of Lana. adventure. We ♥ Mui!

fanzine

Vampire Survivors

– Poncle (2022)

There’s a point in a Depth comes from str successful Vampire ate You can focus, shootin gy: Survivors run where the g for the ultimate evoluti screen looks like it’s ons to ma xim ize you covered in the glitche r build, or s of a jus t get in there and see dying graphics card, and what happens. Along a glorious sight to beh it’s the old. wa y you get to watch your Poncle’s breakout hit cha racter go from slow helped popularize and and weak to incredibly define the genre now powerful, with consta known as Survivors-lik nt e: visual and audio cues automatic combat, and toa sts as you focus on discovering power up. and developing your ide It’s a compelling com build, and a balance of al bo that led to BAFTA hon onscreen intensity wit ors h and a player base that’s stil laidback controls. l passionate and growin g.

But wait, there’s some thing missing! Coming up with 12 ico nic XBOX indies is easy. Trying to come up with only 12 is basically impossible ! Where’s Bastion? Where’s Celes te? Where’s Strange Bri gade? Where’s TABS? Where’s Brotato? Where’s Ark: Survival Evolved? Where are all the 360 games? Where ’s Fez? Where’s Alien Hominid ? Where’s Trials? Where ’s that

The Artful Escape Beethoven & Dinosaur (2021) Calling The Artful Escape a “narrative game” doesn’t do justice to the title at all, because you have to hold a controller and play to appreciate the vibes of the game and to really understand the journey that young Francis Vendetti, nephew and presumed heir apparent to a late folk singer, takes in this title. It’s a story that can’t be told anywhere but an interactive medium, where Unreal can be (ab)used to take you on

a psychedelic trip through Francis’ own growth as a musician and person. The game was the debut for the studio founded by Johnny Galvatron, a rocker turned game maker. It snagged the BAFTA for Artistic Achievement, but its real impact may have been in expanding what interactive entertainment could do and be. There is simply nothing else like it on XBOX. (Or wasn’t, until Mixtape arrived...)

Palworld – Pock

There’s a moment when you befriend a Pal, and it looks up at you an d its head, that’s jus tilts t. pure. that it’s hard so. not to fall in love.

etpair (2024)

world is, and how cu the Pals are. Eithe te r way, you start with one Pa pretty soon you’re l and running a massive base, bu ild a team of your fav ing orites, and losing yourself meaningful detou in rs everywhere.

Coming off the cu lt of Craftopia, Pock success etp open-world surviva air’s l game lets you befriecrafting Palworld helped de and defend Pals, the nd fine the new, hyper-massiv them help you. Or n have e scale you can of “indie success” wi hunt them and ea th a t them. blockbuster early The choice is yours ac – an d launch, killer 1.0 rel cess it’s a pretty stark ch and millions of pla ease, given how beautifu oice yers l the on XBOX.

blocky little indie from Sweden, Minecraft? Th e answer is they’re all on your XB OX waiting for you to pla y them, along with thousands more worthy indie titles ! Maybe someday we’ll get to do issue 2 of this zine, and get about 100 more pages so we can really do justice to this list. Until then, keep explorin g and keep having fun !

Clair Obscur: E xpe Sandfall Intera dition 33 – ctive (2025) Like Palworld, Ex

pe The game has a 33 has also helpe dition nu d fresh takes to go mber of what “indie succ redefine with ess” co means, selling eig mpelling and some its ht mi llio n tra copies in the first gic narrative, inc times real-time dodges luding and sweeping th year, and e parries in the tu Game of the Year big five rn combat that keep -based (TGA, DICE, GDC, Awards BAFTA engaged througho you and Golden Joys tic entire battle, and ut the pretty nice debu k). A t that begs for exploa world trio who founded for the of every detour. ration And it’s easy to Sandfall! Finally, se Lorien Testard’s had such succes e why it soaring s. It offers score enhances a gorgeous (and th sc game at every tu e world with real pa ary) rn th os an d lifting boss battl , consequence in es the story. sublime experie to nces.

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emerging franchises

Meet Emerging Franchises, the team behind Crash, Spyro, Tony Hawk, Sekiro, and what’s next for Activision by Valerie Lee, Activision

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Some spin across tropical islands. Some soar through fantasy worlds collecting treasures. Others simply spend their days chasing the perfect combo on a skateboard. For decades, the likes of Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, and Tony Hawk have led players through unforgettable adventures. They have built legacies that have lasted far beyond their first appearances, but keeping beloved franchises alive (and kicking off new ones) isn’t as simple as dusting off an existing game and placing it back on store shelves. Activision has a team dedicated to figuring out exactly how to do that. Meet Emerging Franchises. Emerging Franchises was born from a simple realization: players still cared deeply about Activision’s most beloved characters. Following the success of character collaborations in Skylanders, Activision began exploring a bigger question: if fans were excited to see familiar faces appear, what other beloved worlds might be ready for a comeback? A small, but mighty group was formed, responsible for evaluating opportunities within Activision’s rich library of games, whether that meant reviving a beloved franchise,

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extending an existing brand, or helping to bring new experiences to players. Research, fan feedback, and a deep understanding of what players cherish most about these franchises act as important guides for the team’s decision-making. This realization culminated in 2016, when fans gathered at a gaming industry event. The energy in the room was electric with anticipation. Suddenly, the familiar sound of Aku Aku’s “OODA BOOGAH” echoed through the speakers. Moments later, the unmistakable silhouette of Crash Bandicoot appeared on screen, and the crowd erupted. That marked the announcement of Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, a compilation remake of the original three Crash Bandicoot games. “The hairs on my arms still stand up when I re-tell the story,” recalls Michelle Bresaw, current Vice

President of Live Services for Call of Duty, who led Activision’s Emerging Franchises team at the time. “It was one of those incredible moments where you could physically feel what a game meant to people.” The room exploded with energy, a rare convergence of nostalgia, emotion, and shared excitement. For fans, that moment was a nostalgic reunion with a familiar childhood friend. For the team at Activision, it represented something more: proof that these iconic franchises still had plenty of stories left to tell. Tasked with stewarding these cherished franchises and discovering how they could resonate with today’s audiences, the team understood that winning over fans would require more than simply recreating games as they once were. “The real challenge was understanding what is sacred: the feel, the characters, the humor, the memories that people have attached to [the franchises] and then deciding very deliberately where modernization can make the experience better for players today,” Bresaw explains. The opportunity wasn’t just about nostalgia. Emerging Franchises saw the potential to reconnect longtime fans with characters they grew up with, while also introducing them to a new generation of players. As Bresaw describes it, the audience often consisted of “kidults,” fans whose connection to these franchises remained strong long after childhood. Whether it was remastering a beloved classic, developing a new franchise installment, or creating a memorable fan experience, Emerging Franchises approached each project with the same goal: finding new ways to reconnect audiences with the worlds they loved. “Emerging Franchises is made up of people who care a lot about delivering games that teams are excited to make, and fans are excited to play,” says Joshua Taub, Chief Operating

Officer at Activision. That mindset extends beyond the games themselves. Team members embraced a “yes, and…” culture, building on each other’s ideas and pursuing unconventional concepts that larger teams couldn’t consider – from building gigantic statues, to delivering a copy of Spyro Reignited Trilogy to Snoop Doog… by a lifesized Spyro the Dragon fire-breath drone. Beyond remasters and revivals, Emerging Franchises also shepherds the exciting and uniquely challenging experience of bringing brand-new games to life. In 2019, Activision released Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, developed by FromSoftware. Unlike some of the other projects in the company’s roster, Sekiro wasn’t rooted in an existing Activision franchise. The opportunity was different: helping support another team’s ideas to become a truly blockbuster proposition. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice sold over two million copies in its first 10 days, making it one of FromSoftware’s fastest-selling titles. “We understood the rigor it took to take things from good to great,” says Kelly Patt, recalling the Sekiro era of Emerging Franchises. Patt is currently the Senior Director of Brand Marketing, Live Services for Call of Duty and was also one of the founding leaders of the team in 2016. That year, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice went on to win Game of the Year at The Game Awards and became Activision’s first win of the prestigious category. Across remasters, new releases, fan celebrations, and unexpected opportunities, Emerging Franchises has never limited its focus to looking backward. Spyro: A Realm Beyond, the franchise’s first completely original game since 2008, was announced during the 2026 XBOX Games Showcase for 2027 and will introduce free-flight mechanics to allow players a new, expansive freedom to explore around the game world [Editor’s note: read much more about that in our Upcoming Games section]. And beyond that, Activision has announced a new studio, Elsewhere Entertainment, exclusively focused on creating a new narrative-based and genre-defining AAA franchise. There are plenty more expansions, stories, and adventures in the making. Some will return us to familiar worlds. Some will introduce entirely new worlds. Some are still waiting to be discovered.

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gaming romances

Romances forged by the love of gaming. ’Til death do us restart by Joe Skrebels

Gaming can be a deeply social experience, so it’s no wonder we see friendships bloom out of squads, party chats, and the occasional matchmaking lobby. But sometimes, things go even further than that. Over the years, XBOX games have resulted in some truly spectacular stories – from meet-cutes, to engagements, to weddings, simple entertainment has served as a space to form genuinely life-changing relationships. Here are some of the romantic tales our developers remember best from their work:

Sea of Thieves

Sea of Thieves is all about sharing stories with other players – so it’s no surprise to learn that it has spawned love stories among them. Two of the game’s moderating team, 0wl and Mikez, met through the game, regularly staying up into the early morning on their adventures. Their friendship blossomed into romance, which in turn became a real-life wedding witnessed by members of the Sea of Thieves team. As a Sea of Thieves community post put it in 2024: “Here’s to full sails, overflowing treasure chests, and endless adventures together. May your nights be filled with voyages and your days with happiness and love.”

Call of Duty

Not so much a meet-cute as a meet-shoot, streamers TheCallofDutyDJ and chloejagger started chatting while trying to snipe one another on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s Crash map – yes, they got a crush on Crash – and their romance became so tied to the series that they chose to tie the knot at 2025’s CoD NEXT event. Their Black Ops 6-themed wedding included vows such as, “It was love at first snipe,” and a full CoD-themed cake. Oh, and they even delayed their honeymoon to make sure they could play the BO6 beta.

The Elder Scrolls Online

Not only did Selina and Danny meet thanks to a mutual love of The Elder Scrolls Online, but they even got engaged at the ESO Tavern fan event in Cologne, Germany in 2022. But, three years later, they went even further by holding a full Elder Scrolls-themed wedding at the 2025 edition of the event. Nine close friends came together to create a truly unique moment for Selina and Danny – from gameaccurate cosplay, to a ceremony that invoked all of the Divines from Elder Scrolls lore (with Mara, Goddess of Love, front and center, of course). Their story is a beautiful testament to the deep connections and real-life magic that can grow within the ESO community.

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Danny and Selina walk down the aisle at their Elder Scrolls-themed wedding in 2025

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blizzard’s historian

by Joe Skrebels

Meet Sean Copeland, Blizzard Entertainment’s chief... historian

Copeland's expertise was tapped for World of Warcraft: Forever, where he's contributed a new storyline.

Developers, directors, testers, artists, writers – these are all gaming jobs we’re familiar with. But you might be less au fait with gaming historians – the folk tasked with chronicling entire fictional universes to keep them on track. When I found out about Sean Copeland, Blizzard’s Lore Historian Lead – or ‘Loremaster’ as he prefers to style it – I had to ask, how do you even get this job? Turns out: by accident. “I was a game tester,” he tells me. “I was the guy testing collision – I was running into walls for eight hours a day.” But one day, he wrote to a World of Warcraft quest designer about a routine bug fix, and misspelled the name of a character in the process (the name being ‘Alexstrasza’ – an understandable error, if you ask me).

“Your stories ring true, it feels authentic, and your fans come with you. That’s the win”

That simple typo effectively led to an entirely new career. Copeland vowed not to make that kind of mistake again: “I better keep a little book around me.” Copeland began to fill his little book with the tiniest details about WoW – things you’d likely never need to know unless you were working intimately with the game. Over time, people started to notice, and he became the friendly local lore guy. At this time, Blizzard had already hired its first in-house historian, who quickly realized she needed an assistant. Copeland spotted the role, and immediately applied – who better to take it on than the friendly local lore guy?

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“It was the worst interview of my life,” he laughs. “I failed it. I bombed it. I was interviewing for my heroes, man – the manager of Creative Development, the world’s first historian of Blizzard, and [Warcraft Creative Director] Chris Metzen himself. And at the end, they’re like, ‘Do you have any questions before we never see you again?’ And I said, ‘So I’ve got this book...’ “Metzen looks at it, and he’s like ‘OK, we’re going to start this interview all over again, but I want you to just focus on this.’” Copeland got the job on the basis of his incredible lorekeeping and a leap of faith from his original boss. Two decades later, he’s now leading the team – and his little book has transformed into a network of support systems that keep all of Blizzard’s franchises in check.

“We use a lot of wiki-based material to keep our information. It’s self-service – any designer, any QA person, any producer can go there and find summaries of anything we’ve archived. If it’s not there, we’ll make it for you – it’s always growing, because the lore itself is growing. We also have a digital resource with all the text ever written for all the games we’ve ever created, so we can search that. “We’re always developing new tools – one of my favorites right now is a digital whiteboard we use for art reviews. We can go through pages and make sure magic looks right, fingers and toes are right, everyone’s ears are pointed in the right direction...”

It is, without doubt, one of the least normal jobs I’ve come across in gaming; something he revels in: “I get to help people, and I also get to be nerdy as possible. That’s like chocolate and peanut butter.” There is no regular day for Copeland and his fellow historian, Ian Landa-Beavers. They could be upkeeping those gigantic internal archives, answering specific questions from developers across the company, checking in on art designs, or even adding his own contributions to the lore (in a personal triumph, he invented the name of Hearthstone’s Innkeeper, Harth Stonebrew). “I like to think of us as park rangers,” he explains. “We don’t own the forests – we get paid by somebody else to maintain them, but our job is to know these forests better than anybody else. When we have writers or creators that go off and get lost in the weeds, we’ll do search and rescue. We’ll pull them back and be like, ‘Hey, we got you.’” The key for Copeland is not to keep things static – “I never want to be Captain Red-pen” – but for new ideas to make sense. He’s a resource, a fountain of niche knowledge that lets Blizzard’s creators across all teams react to what’s come before, never breaking the established timelines, but allowing them to extend in exciting new directions. And as time goes by, his team’s work becomes ever-more important – the longer a franchise has been running, the more detail inside of it, the more you need someone to understand and archive the totality of it. “I know there are Loremasters at other XBOX studios – even if that might not be their job title – and we want to work together, to grow, and share that value. With a Loremaster, your stories ring true, it feels authentic, and your fans come with you. That’s the win.” Copeland clearly has big dreams about the future, but looking back, how does he feel about having taken this truly unexpected path through gaming? “I’m grateful to do this,” he smiles. “I want to keep doing it as long as they want a little nerdy guy like me to say, ‘This is important – and let me please tell you why.’”

Mountains of Minutiae

Some of the smallest details in Blizzard’s historical archive Detailed explanations of the exact direction that the ears of Warcraft elves should point in.

The scientific reasoning behind why a StarCraft C-14 “Impaler” Gauss Rifle ejects cartridges when fired, and how big the spikes it fires are.

Instructions on how to write a song in Shath’Yar, the language of the Old Gods.

Why the Orcish word “lok-tar” is spelled differently in Warcraft games and books (and it definitely wasn’t a mistake that resulted in an entirely new fictional language being written).

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goodbye!

How well do you remember the games of November 15, 2001? 25 years is a long time, but we’re guessing that, as a reader of this magazine, you may well have a pretty good memory of where you were that day. Getting a console for the first time has a tendency to stick in the memory. Maybe you were in line at an electronics store, or waiting patiently for the mailman to arrive with a big black-andgreen box. But what about the games you got with it? We wanted to really test your memory of that day, so we’ve collected boxart for nine games released alongside the original XBOX’s launch in North America – but redacted the game titles. How many can you name?

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©Konami Digital Entertainment

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Answers: 1. Halo: Combat Evolved 2. Fuzion Frenzy 3. Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee 4. Cel Damage 5. Dead or Alive 3 6. Dark Summit 7. Airforce Delta Storm 8. Arctic Thunder 9. Mad Dash Racing

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