Phil Spencer really, really wants someone within Xbox Game Studios to make a new Hexen game. First, he wore that Hexen T-shirt at the Xbox Games Showcase earlier this year. And now, he’s name-dropping Hexen repeatedly as a franchise he wants someone within Xbox to revisit somehow. But, Spencer notes, only if the team doing so is genuinely passionate about it — or whatever other older franchise they’re plucking from Xbox’s catalog to refresh.
Speaking on the Official Xbox Podcast, Spencer spoke on the company’s strategy for how it allocates its owned catalog of IPs to its development studios, reassuring that Xbox isn’t out there compelling anyone to revive older franchises they aren’t interested in. He said he frequently meets with Xbox teams to learn what they’re passionate about, and is happy to let teams dig into the Xbox vault for franchises they’re personally interested in.
“I just don’t think that a team working on something that isn’t their passion leads to the best result,” Spencer said. “So I might have my list of things from my memories and history that I want to see made again. Everybody will.
“When I just think about, not just about Activision-Blizzard-King, you add in Bethesda, you add in Xbox’s history, Rare… the amount of franchises that we now have in our portfolio is kind of inspiring, it’s daunting, I feel that we have to be a great custodian for the content that we touch. These are memories for people on different platforms, different decades, and I want to make sure that when we’re going back and visiting something that we do it with our complete ability — a motivated team that wants to go work on something and make a difference, not just create something for financial gain or create something for a PR announcement and not deliver.”
Spencer continued, calling out Game Pass as a useful way to revisit franchises that might deserve a little love but might not necessarily warrant something more intensive. And he admitted he thinks that while Xbox has “done an okay job” looking back on its older franchises, it hasn’t “done an A+ job”, and he hopes to rectify that in the future both through Game Pass and through full-blown new projects.
This isn’t the first time Spencer has spoken on this subject, either. In fact, the Xbox head seems extremely keen to encourage studios to dig through the Xbox vault for gold, especially if that gold is 1995 Raven Software FPS Hexen, which Xbox now owns. “If teams want to go back and revisit some of the things that we have and do a full focus on it, I’m going to be all in on that,” he reiterated during the podcast today. In the same interview, he also reiterated “100% parity” for Call of Duty across all platforms, and explained why there weren’t any major Activision games on Game Pass just yet now that the acquisition has officially closed.
What else might Spencer and co be interested in? At Tokyo Game Show, Spencer said he would love to see a MechAssault revival. Meanwhile, fellow Xbox executive Sarah Bond said she was aware of fan requests to revive Blizzard’s StarCraft series, and wondered aloud whether the much-loved real-time strategy series could enjoy a comeback.
As soon as Microsoft announced it had bought Activision Blizzard, fans set out their resurrected games wishlist. Activision’s dormant Guitar Hero series was a popular nod for a revival, as well as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
But all that aside, the message Spencer is screaming loud and clear is that he’s “all in” on revisiting classic Xbox-owned games, especially if they are Hexen. Now someone, please, for Spencer’s sake, go pitch a new Hexen game so the man can rest.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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