EA's First XBox Live Arcade Title Gains Backwards Compatibility On XBox One

The list of Xbox 360 games supported by XBox One backwards compatibility grew to 230 this week with the addition of EA's Boom Boom Rocket. We began closely watching this title in early 2007 as Electronic Arts first began developing games for Xbox Arcade, the name for early downloadable content on the platform. BBR was a pretty fun rhythm/puzzle game, and it was followed by Wing Commander Arena a few months later. These early pioneers had to squeeze into many restrictions, such as a 50 megabyte cap that limited everything from graphical texture quality to the scope of the games themselves, but a whole lot of creative energy went into this first class of releases that makes them stand out to this day.

In addition to emulation of their original features, backwards compatibility adds in some nice modern additions such as enhanced parties/team chat, DVR game recording, built-in screenshots, controller customization and streaming to Windows 10 PCs, so it's really nice to have for older games you love. When BC was first announced, Microsoft noted that the publishers would need to take an interest to enable XBox One support. EA has brought forth Portal 2, Left For Dead, Dead Space and other higher profile 360 standouts to date, and now it's great to see them reach back into their relatively little known Arcade lineup. Could Arena be in the pipeline? It celebrated its ninth birthday on Monday. Here's hoping we're all playing a tenth anniversary tournament on the XBox One next year!