Surprise! If you are a Game Pass subscriber, you now have access to dozens and dozens of retro video games. And Xbox and Activision plan to add even more classic games in the future.
On May 21, Xbox announced that over 50 retro Activision games were now available via a new app called Retro Classics. The new app is available only via Xbox Game Pass for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and streaming. It is available to all Game Pass subscribers, including Game Pass Core members (unless you live in Japan). Let’s ignore that it should obviously have been called Xbox Retro Arcade, and instead focus on the new app.
According to Xbox, Retro Classics is powered by Antstream Arcade’s streaming game tech, which is a mostly solid way to instantly play tons of old games across many different platforms. The new app supports challenges, multiplayer, multiple saves, weekly tournaments, user profiles, and leaderboards. And yes, Retro Classics has achievements. Finally, you can get a nifty Xbox achievement for playing River Raid.
“This initiative is a step in our commitment to game preservation and backwards compatibility, allowing players to experience many timeless games on modern devices,” said Xbox in a post on the company’s website.
So what games are currently available on the Retro Arcade Classics app? Here’s some I spotted and tested: Kaboom!, Pitfall, Pitfall 2, River Raid, Grand Prix, Commando, Barnstorming, Fishing Derby, and Mech Warrior 2. Oh and Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist is available, too. That’s a game that a young Geoff Keighley helped test back in the day, long before he had a whole game award show.
According to Xbox, this is just the start. It plans on adding more Acitivison and Blizzard games to the app in the future. While I’m not a huge fan of streaming old games like this, and would prefer actual downloads and offline play, this is still better than nothing. It’s nice to see Xbox finally digging into Activision’s deep library of classic games and doing something with them after buying the publisher back in 2023. If Microsoft wants to own the entire game industry, the least it can do is make it easier to legally play the old stuff it gobbled up in the process.
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