The announcement that probably should surprise no one came today. The original XBox is officially dead in every sense of the word, Live is being shut off on it as of April 15th on the original big black and green box. I personally am not bothered by this since I’ve transitioned to the 360 for my online play, and also because I would just assume mod and hack up my original XBox system. But that aside, there are a few games that I bet quite a few people will miss playing, and while some might still be playable through System Link emulation, I think Microsoft has a nice quick opportunity to make a few bucks here with the biggest and likely still most popular XBox game in Halo 2: make it 360 native (or make system link emulation an official tool).
I believe that a lot of people would be willing to pay 800 or 1200 Microsoft Points for the ability to upgrade their Halo 2 and continue to play it. An updated client (or even a tool to adapt the maps and the game to the H3 engine) would be a cool way to bring 1080p to a great old game, to provide continued support, and to make some money. If 100,000 people were to buy such an add-on (and in the world of Halo, that’s not a big number), that’s a million bucks. Surely Microsoft or Bungle or someone can find a programmer who can code this up for a lot less than that.
Looking at it in the other direction, I can see why they would never want any part of this though. More people playing old Halo games means less people buying and playing newer Halo games, or at least they could feel this way. I don’t believe that’s the case, I instead think the fan base is vibrant enough that it would not make a dent in future sales, it would just be a quick and useful cash-in to an old game series, and while some people would view it as blatant, I would actually think of it as useful. Bungle has always been good about supporting their products for a long time, this might be a good way to do it!
What do you think? Do you think there’s room for just straight-up original-to-360 ports like this?
