Fatima Kardar, Corporate Vice President, Gaming AI, at Microsoft: Empowering Creators and Players With Muse, a Generative AI Model for Gameplay

We’re excited to announce a generative AI breakthrough, published today in the journal Nature and announced by Microsoft Research, that shows this potential to open up new possibilities— including the opportunity to make older games accessible to future generations of players across new devices and in new ways.

If I can be blunt, this is absolute bullshit. Think of any game you played as a kid and I can almost guarantee you that you can play that game today “across new devices and in new ways” today. This doesn’t need AI at all, it’s been happening for decades via emulation.

And emulation doesn’t require mega corporations to to build, it’s be done almost entirely by unpaid volunteers who have donated their time and talents to make old games playable by new generations. In fact, the biggest thing in the way of these preservation efforts are from mega corps like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. The challenge to playing old games on new hardware has never been technical, it’s legal.

It’s notable that Nintendo has been selling their old games through the Virtual Console and Nintendo Switch Online service for many years, and those games haven’t been rewritten to run natively on the 3DS, WiiU, or Switch, they’ve used emulation as well (and people who know this stuff better than me are pretty sure Nintendo is using open source emulation code to power their own solutions).

I would contend that the most consumer-friendly way for companies like Microsoft to preserve older games would be to make their entire back catalog available to owners of their latest consoles (charge a reasonable price for those games or bundle them as a subscription like Nintendo does). Run whatever games they can natively, and emulate everything else. Bonus points if they have a system that lets users show that they bought the original and play without paying again. I don’t anticipate this happening, and I don’t expect AI to solve this for Microsoft because the solution is already there and has been forever. They themselves have made old games hard to play on modern hardware – it’s never been a technical thing, it’s a business choice.