Original Xbox Games Won’t Have Achievements On Xbox One

One of the biggest surprises that Microsoft unveiled last week during its E3 press conference was that it would continue its backward compatibility program for Xbox One, this time to support original Xbox games. Thus far, two titles have been confirmed – Crimson Skies: High Road To Revenge and Fuzion Frenzy – and more are likely to be revealed in the months ahead as the program gains momentum.

That said, one thing you won't be able to do with the program is pad your Gamerscore with additional Achievements, as it appears that the games won't include them when they come to the Xbox One later this year.

Xbox's own Mike Ybarra answered a fan question this weekend about whether achievements would be coming to the earlier games in the program. When asked, "Will the backward compatible original Xbox games come with achievements, even though achievements were introduced on the 360?", Ybarra simply replied, "No."

This makes sense, because the original Xbox games weren't encoded with any sort of Achievements, and trying to input them into each title would take a great deal of time. On top of that, let's say that games like Panzer Dragoon Orta or Burnout 3: Takedown get introduced to the program (which we hope they do). The original teams aren't even together anymore, so having to go in and re-input the Achievements would be damn near impossible. Plus, it means having to actually go into coding and set up the Achievements for when certain accomplishments are reached – and that's just too much work.

We should be happy that the original Xbox games are arriving the way they are, but with small visual upgrades to take advantage of both the Xbox One and the Xbox One X when it arrives later in the year. And this opens up a wealth of possibilities for certain titles to shine again – yes, even you, Blinx.

We'll see what else Microsoft has lined up for the program in the months ahead. Hopefully we'll see more Xbox 360 games make the cut as well – some Radiant Silvergun and Split/Second would do us a lot of good.