Time to dust off your pixel brain - Microsoft just added over 50 classic Activision games from the 80s and 90s to Xbox Game Pass under the new "Retro Classics" collection, and it's giving serious NES library on a sugar high energy.
We're talking Pitfall, Grand Prix, Cosmic Ark, MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat, Atlantis, and a bunch of other titles you probably haven't thought about since your last encounter with a CRT monitor. They're playable across Xbox, PC, the cloud, smart TVs, and even the Meta Quest headset - so yes, you can now play MS-DOS classics while lying on your couch in a VR headset like the nostalgic space wizard you were born to be.
The best part? It's all included with Game Pass. No extra charge. No separate app. No weird emulators. Just pure, unfiltered retro joy piped directly into your modern console.
This is part of Microsoft's whole "commitment to game preservation", which, translation: we finally get to play the weird stuff from our childhood without finding an old floppy disk in the attic.
And it gets better: more than 100 Activision and Blizzard titles are coming to this collection over time. Plus, Game Pass members can get a full year of Antstream Arcade (which has 1,300+ retro games) for just $9.99 until June 4. That's less than the price of a single Sega Genesis cartridge back in 1994.
So yeah, it's a good time to be old and nerdy.