Microsoft Shows ‘Sneak Peek’ of Xbox Hardware Following Next-Gen Project Helix Console Confirmation

Microsoft has posted a set of “sneak peek” photos showing work-in-progress hardware, following last week’s confirmation it was building Project Helix, its next-generation PC and Xbox hybrid console.

A trio of black and white photos were posted to social media this morning by Microsoft’s official Game Dev account. They show a console shell labelled with “XDK”, the company’s usual label for an Xbox Developer Kit (an early hardware prototype used by developers, which typically provides technical performance in the ballpark of the final console).

Peer closer at the images, however, and there’s something familiar about the machine’s design — or what we can glimpse of it. Indeed, the console shell is very similar to several past Xbox dev kits — and in particular the XDK for Project Scorpio, the console we now know as Xbox One X. Today’s photos show the machine is even a bit dusty — like it’s been sat around since the days of Scorpio’s development, and recently brought out of retirement.

https://twitter.com/MSFTGameDev/status/2031595513741738382?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

So, what’s going on here? On the surface, the suggestion from the images is that these are photos of the Project Helix dev kit, the upcoming Xbox and PC hybrid console that Microsoft’s newly-installed gaming boss Asha Sharma announced the codename of just days ago. Indeed, Sharma made that announcement in advance of this week’s annual Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, where the company is now talking with developers about its next-gen plans.

The post is clearly supposed to create hype for that, though there’s confusion among fans over why this looks like an existing XDK shell. Of course, it’s possible that Microsoft is simply reusing Scorpio’s XDK casing for Helix. Inside, the XDK may now have freshly-installed components designed to replicate Microsoft’s next-gen plans.

But it’s odd to see the design reused, if indeed that is what is going on here. In a video showing off the Scorpio dev kit back in 2017, Microsoft showed its console shell alongside various other Xbox devkits from the past, including developer versions of the original Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. The company does not appear to have reused a hardware shell previously, several generations on.