Four games have unexpectedly become playable on PC, and we’ve already written about it. Those who’ve taken a look “under the hood” have discovered surprising results.
After years of rumors and speculation, original Xbox games are finally playable on PC thanks to the early access launch of the official Xbox backward compatibility program on Windows 11. Microsoft has promised to significantly expand the program in the coming months, including adding achievements. However, data analysts have made interesting discoveries suggesting that Xbox 360 games will likely be released on PC in the future as well. The reason this is highly likely is simple. The four games currently available on PC, including Fuzion Frenzy, use the same technology that the Xbox One and Xbox Series use to run Xbox 360 games: XeO3.
By combining Microsoft’s recently-released PC port of XeO3 with specific components of XWine1, SlimEra namely, it becomes possible to run dumped backwards-compatible Xbox 360 and Xbox Original games before they see an official PC release, with varying degrees of success pic.twitter.com/6eocCCT1cW
— XWine1 (@XWineOne) July 23, 2026
“Yesterday, Xbox shipped back-compat titles as native Windows 11 apps. I grabbed Fuzion Frenzy and spent the night taking it completely apart. What’s inside is wilder than ‘a 360 emulator for PC.’ The binaries call the emulator XeO3, which is also the chemical compound xenon trioxide—fitting. It’s an unstable xenon oxidation state, Xbox devs have a sense of humor, and it’s the same technology that the Xbox One and Series use for 360 backward compatibility, now repackaged as a GDK/MSIX desktop application. It emulates the 360’s Xenon PowerPC CPU, PPCState, the 360 hypervisor, Hvx calls, and the Xenos GPU on top of Direct3D,” wrote security researcher Milenko on Twitter.
The interesting part is how all of this works. According to Milenko, it essentially involves emulating the X360, which, in turn, emulates the original console—a rather complex setup for achieving backward compatibility on a PC. However, tech-savvy users didn’t stop at simply uncovering the data for the four backward-compatible PC games. The developers of XWine1, an Xbox One compatibility layer for PCs, integrated the XeO3 code into certain components of their compatibility layer. This made it possible to run original Xbox titles and some Xbox 360 games, such as Plants vs. Zombies, on a PC. If a nearly functional Xbox 360 emulator already exists with the complex setup described above, it wouldn’t make much sense if there were no plans to bring Xbox 360 games to PC. Therefore, it’s safe to assume that this will happen sooner or later.
Although expanding backward compatibility was expected as part of Project Helix, which aims to bridge the gap between PC and console games, it’s still great news that we’ll soon be able to play more timeless classics with enhanced graphics and new features. For example, Gears of War 2 or Gears of War 3…
