1400 retro games have been added to Xbox, largely thanks to Phil Spencer

Retro game streaming service Antstream Arcade is now available on Xbox, and according to its head this is in large part down to Xbox boss Phil Spencer’s involvement.

The service, which lets players access a streaming library of over 1400 retro games, is now available as a native app on Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One.

The full list of games available currently stands at 1470, including 200+ Amiga games, nearly 300 arcade games, 350+ C64 games, 50+ Mega Drive games, 40+ SNES games and 350+ ZX Spectrum games.

Games on the service include Mortal Kombat, Metal Slug X, Earthworm Jim 2, Space Invaders, R-Type and Robotron 2084.

While Antstream Arcade is available on PC and mobile, the Xbox version is a separate product and users will have to create a separate account for it.

“We’re looking into account linking in the future as part of our big project vision update towards the end of the year,” the official Antstream Twitter account stated.

Players can either buy a year’s subscription to the service for $29.99 / £29.99, or a Lifetime Pass Edition for $79.99 / £79.99.

In an interview with the Xbox Expansion Pass podcast (as spotted by Pure Xbox), Antstream studio head Mike Rouse said the creation of the Xbox app was mainly due to the involvement of Xbox boss Phil Spencer.

“My background has been in running studios and making AAA games for the last 23 years,” Rouse explained.

“I set up the London Xbox development studio back in 2012 and had a good relationship with a large number of people on Xbox [including] Phil Spencer.

“When I went to Antstream a lot of the focus had been on trying to get on things like smart TVs, and I said, ‘look, we need to get where gamers are’.

“So I did a bit of a tweak in strategy and said ‘let’s go for consoles’, because it’s perfect for us – a nice big TV, a joypad in your hand, these games were built to play on these devices.

“So I got in touch with Phil Spencer, I had a meeting with him. And he loves games preservation. He talks about it a lot, but  when you see him and you’re one-to-one with him he’s extremely passionate about it, and he essentially gave us the go-ahead to get it working on Xbox.

“And so we’ve spent the last year getting our tech in place, optimising the code so that it can run on Xbox, and without the support of Phil and his team it may never have come over.

“But yeah, they’ve been super supportive of Antstream coming to Xbox. They get the vision, and for Xbox players there’s 1400+ games landing on day one. You’re not going to like them all, but there’s enough in there probably to keep you playing for 10 years.”