It’s funny that at an event clearly designed to focus attention on Microsoft’s unified Windows platform and their designs for the PC in general, an off the cuff remark from Phil Spencer about upgrading the hardware on the Xbox One became the takeaway. Not funny for them, I imagine! My suspicion is that news about unannounced and unavailable upgrades to another platform were not the intended payload. I unplugged the Xbox and spun it around in the air, trying to figure out where you would put it. Came up with nothing.

The first thing Gabriel thought was, well, what we put in the strip. Except that the 32X as a reference is, like, twenty-two years old, so you might not know what the fuck he’s talking about. As a Sega partisan during that time, he was in a position to know.

It was a peripheral for the Genesis that acted as a kind of stopgap until the next system, the Saturn, could come out. Except it kinda came out here while the Saturn came out in Japan…? Shit was weird back then. Compared to the way it works now, where everything seems to be conducted from the stand with a baton, that seems truly insane. These motherfuckers had cartridges that plugged into other cartridges and shit, like the Beast spoken of in Revelations.

Hardware additions are one way to manifest the idea that this is the last “console” generation, though; but there have always been peripherals that extended the mandate of the boxes - Move, let’s say, or Kinect. They don’t tend to have amazing reputations, and there are lots of reasons for that. I didn’t hate the thing, but the Xbox 360 got worse and worse the more they focused on it. Move keeps coming back for some reason, pulling a Necron, but weirdly enough I think Sony’s VR play will make them seem like a good idea all along.

Upgrades like this, though - in the manner of a PC - are more rare. That seems like a dangerous thing. And by “seems dangerous” I mean “is a literal danger” from a market splitting perspective. This generation started so rough for Microsoft you’d think it would grind the weird shit straight off the roadmap.

(CW)TB