Summary
Gears of Warcreator Cliff Bleszinski has shed light upon a dockableXboxhandheld that he proposed to the console giant years ago. Despite not giving the green light to handheld ideas before,Xboxrecently expressed its keen interest in finally entering the segment.
When Valve’s Steam Deck came out to significant fanfare in 2022, it opened the floodgates in the handheld category. Major industry players, such as Asus and Lenovo, have since rolled out their own handhelds and are competing with Valve in the handheld gaming PC space. For long, there have beenrumors of Xbox launching its first-ever handheld, but no concrete details have ever followed. A recent insider story shared by Bleszinski highlights one of the ideas that the green brand decided to pass on.
In a recent post on Twitter, Cliff Bleszinski,Gears of Warcreator who left the franchise in 2012, revealed a few details about his handheld device proposal to Xbox. He said that the gaming giant didn’t pay attention when he pitched “X-Slate,” a dockable gaming handheld. Explaining what he had in mind, the game designer, whoselast game wasLawBreakersin 2017, shared that the handheld would have been an iPad-like device with a dock. Bleszinski’s tweet also underlines that his handheld pitch came before Nintendo Switch, another dockable handheld, released in 2017.
Reacting to this revelation, certain Twitter users endorsed Bleszinski’s handheld pitch, calling it “ahead of its time.” While one user simply said, “They should’ve listened,” another remarked that it was a “great idea” pitched to “poor leadership at the time.” Another popular reply suggested a few alternative names for the product idea, including “Xplore,” “Xplay,” and “Xport.”
Xbox Looks Set to Eventually Announce Its Own Handheld
Over the past few years, there have been multiple speculations pointing towards a potential Xbox handheld announcement. In recent months, these speculations have only become more frequent, in part due to Xbox’s promise of making a big announcement during the holiday season later this year. Furthermore,Phil Spencer’s latest positive commentsabout Xbox potentially having its own handheld added fuel to the fire of what many suspect could be an impending announcement.
Although the Microsoft-owned company hasn’t made anything about the rumored handheld official yet, it recently refreshed its Xbox Series console family byadding 3 new Xbox variantsto cater to more fans. These new consoles deliver the same power as the existing Xbox consoles but offer upgrades in other aspects, such as storage space.
Xbox Series X
Microsoft’s ninth-generation console, the Xbox Series X is a powerful machine that can support 4K resolution and 60 fps, depending on the game. Released alongside the Xbox Series S, the Series X has a Custom AMD Zen 2 CPU, a Custom RDNA 2 GPU, and 16 GB of RAM.
