Xbox Is ‘Exploring’ AI To Make Its Older Games Playable On Modern Hardware

Microsoft has today announced ‘Muse AI‘, a new artificial intelligence program that it thinks “could radically change how we preserve and experience classic games in the future”.

Muse is a work-in-progress over at the Xbox owner, and it sounds like it could have big implications for the future of gaming. What we’re interested in most though, is how this could help game preservation – a point Xbox makes in its new blog post about the AI toolset.

“Today, countless classic games tied to aging hardware are no longer playable by most people. Thanks to this breakthrough, we are exploring the potential for Muse to take older back catalog games from our studios and optimize them for any device. We believe this could radically change how we preserve and experience classic games in the future and make them accessible to more players.

To imagine that beloved games lost to time and hardware advancement could one day be played on any screen with Xbox is an exciting possibility for us.”

The announcement goes on to say that Muse could have much wider implications than just game preservation too. Microsoft adds that these AI tools could be used in the game development process itself – allowing studios to “inject new experiences” while they’re building new projects or supporting existing games.

“Another opportunity we are exploring is how Muse can help game teams prototype new gameplay experiences during the creative process and introduce new content—taking games players already love and enabling our developers to inject new experiences for them to enjoy, or even enable you to participate in the creation process.”

So far, Xbox developer Ninja Theory has been collaborating on this AI work, testing out its 2020 shooter Bleeding Edge to see what Muse can do with it. The announcement isn’t totally clear on how and why Bleeding Edge is being looked at here, but the team does provide a more detailed look — including some short gameplay gifs — within the full blog post.

This is a pretty interesting announcement here from Xbox, even if the use of AI in game development still feels like uncharted territory at this stage. Things sound like they’re pretty early on in development right now, but the full post is worth a look if you’d like to see what else you can parse from Microsoft’s Muse AI announcement.

Comment down below and tell us what you think about Muse.