Remember when you had to ditch your old consoles and in this process lose the games that you owned for them just because it was not possible to play them on their successors. While Sony managed to keep the tradition alive until PS3, they have dropped all support for backward compatibility this generation. Nintendo seems to have followed in their footsteps leaving Microsoft the only one in the current market to offer true backward compatibility for their console.

The backward compatibility program is nothing less than a miracle considering the benefits it offers and the way it is integrated into the Xbox One. In some cases, Xbox One X even offers a better visual quality with rendering support of up to 4K that completely transforms the look of the game. This is further boosted by the improvement in the frame rate of any backward compatible game making it the perfect way to experience the classics that you have loved in the past.

PC remains the best platform for playing any of the classic games but if your choice is only a console, it is simply astonishing to see how many game series are now playable on the Xbox One just thanks to the backward compatibility support. If you are a fan of Star Wars, you can play through Knights of the Old Republic, Battlefront 2 and Force Unleashed. If you enjoy Lego games, all of the classics from the Xbox 360 era are playable. If you want to go play Saints Row, you can now enjoy the whole series on the Xbox One.

The 4K support for Xbox One X has basically given fans free remasters with the likes of Red Dead Redemption, Gears of War and Crackdown all getting the 4K treatment with the potential of more being added later down the line.

The most recent example of a backward compatibility program is the Assassin’s Creed series. Ubisoft has released many games ever since the series started with the Xbox 360 but until today, if you never owned PC, it was not possible to play them on a single platform. After the announcement of Liberation HD being backward compatible, it is now possible to play every Assassin’s Creed game on the Xbox One. The image clearly shows the benefit of owning an Xbox One especially if you are a fan of the series.

This is something I hope Microsoft continues to support in the near future. Even if we get next-generation consoles, it will be nice to have our games library playable on them since the current digital age has made the process of owning physical games rather trivial.