Hopefully some of these will return eventually
Over the weekend, we highlighted the top 10 most-requested Xbox backwards compatibility games courtesy of the Xbox Game Preservation website, which had reached 350k votes at the time and has almost passed the 400k mark.
The reason it’s getting so many votes is due to a tweet from Xbox’s VP of next-gen, Jason Ronald, back at the start of May. At the time, he recommended the website to an Xbox fan who wanted to share their back compat requests:
Due to the flood of interest, this website has continued to evolve in the days since, and it’s just added a new Delisted Games section that allows you to vote for titles that Xbox could bring back in the future.
It’s got its own tab on the leaderboard as well, with the initial top 10 showing as follows:
- Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (Xbox 360)
- Ultra Street Fighter IV
- Left 4 Dead 2
- Left 4 Dead
- Batman: Arkham Origins
- The Orange Box
- FEAR
- Peter Jackson’s King Kong
- FEAR Files
- Halo 3
Here’s the explanation about this feature courtesy of the website’s creator:
“Feedback I constantly get is the wish to vote to relist de-listed games or make “X” game available digitally… now you can! I’m keeping these games outside of the global leaderboards since these requests are a bit different than general backwards compatibility.
I’ve also added pagination to the leaderboard, so now you can scroll past 100 games without hitting a hard limit. Some games like King Kong or Arkham Asylum have never been made available digitally, but the verbiage will remain the same despite not ever having been “delisted”.”
It goes without saying that there are no guarantees here, and Xbox hasn’t said anything publicly about bringing back delisted titles to the Xbox Store. This is simply a way to track the most-requested titles in case they could brought back.
To be honest, we’re just fans of this entire Xbox Game Preservation tool that’s been set up. Having a place where we can track the biggest requests is not only interesting for us as Xbox fans, but hopefully provides a useful resource for Team Xbox when considering backwards compatibility and game preservation efforts in the future. Fingers crossed we see a few of these making a return at some point down the line!
What would you want to bring back to the Xbox Store digitally? Tell us down in the comments below.
Fraser is the News Editor at Pure Xbox, where he spends his time reporting on the biggest stories in the world of Xbox and beyond.
