One of my old Xbox interviews hits different in 2025

So does a 2015 Metroid interview.

We’re in a video game season of nostalgia right now.

Last Saturday, for example, was 20 years since the launch of the Xbox 360.

I remember meeting Microsoft reps for a demo of the console in New York City and how they sat me down to explain the then-novel concept of video game Achievements.

(And what a concept achievements were! Xbox 360 launch game Peter Jackson’s King Kong doled out a clean 100 points per completed game level; arcade shooter Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved awarded an achievement for not shooting for 60 seconds.)

Then there’s the new Metroid Prime game coming out for Switch next week, first one in over 18 years.

That gave me a reason to dig up my last interview with the series’ producer, Kensuke Tanabe, from E3 in June of 2015.

It’s easily the most uncomfortable interview I’ve ever done with a Nintendo developer. The company had just revealed a Metroid Prime spin-off, a 3DS game subtitled Federation Force. It appeared to barely involve series protagonist Samus Aran and was a co-op multiplayer action game in a series that’d focused on solo sci-fi exploration.

More problematically, Nintendo had barely shown the game before I interviewed Tanabe. Federation Force’s sports side-mode was on the E3 show floor, but the first glimpse of anyone playing the core mode of the game wouldn’t come until a Nintendo-hosted demonstration scheduled for the day after Tanabe and I spoke.

The interview is a laden with my confusion over the game’s existence as I tried to work with Tanabe, through a translator, to better understand what Federation Force even was.

To my 2025 eyes, I wish I’d spent a little less time harping with him on what that game wasn’t. I’m also now really fascinated that he brought up another Metroid Prime spin-off to me, 2006’s Nintendo DS game Metroid Prime Hunters and his affinity for its bounty hunter characters.

As noted in my 2015 write-up, Tanabe’s translator mentioned one of them to me: “I think he left Sylux for something later on.” (He was translating for Tanabe there, but translators sometimes slip into the third-person rather when conveying what the speaker said.) Just what “later on” referred to for Sylux wasn’t clear at the time.

Hunters’ bounty hunter Sylux does indeed make a cameo at the end of Federation Force. Sylux is also now the main advertised nemesis for next week’s Metroid Prime 4. This new game also prominently features the frequently-solitary Samus teaming up with Federation Force troopers, the controversial characters who were the focus of that 2015 3DS game.

Sylux? The Galactic Federation? Now I’m marveling at how much Tanabe might have already had Prime 4 planned out when he and I spoke a decade ago.

Even wilder: Back at E3 2015, Tanabe gave an even more retroactively incredible interview to Eurogamer, right before or right after he spoke to me. In that one, he floated that he had an idea for a future Metroid Prime game that a) has Sylux as the main foe, b) is set on a single planet and c) uses time travel. Sylux in Prime 4? Check. Single planet? Check, so far. Time travel? Well, there was that thing I spotted a couple of weeks ago and mentioned at the end of my preview, but I don’t know for sure. The thing is, this Eurogamer interview was also 10 years ago.

Can someone please land an interview with Tanabe soon to discuss whatever he has planned for 2035?

And now, that Xbox interview…

The most extraordinary blast from the past for me this fall has been my accidental re-discovery of an interview I did at E3 in June 2019 with Microsoft’s past and present gaming chief Phil Spencer.

I found it while I was working on my recent Game File report about Microsoft’s unusually robust 2025 video game release slate. I was sure Spencer had previously talked to me about wanting to increase the cadence of big Xbox game releases, and I wanted to backlink.

That sent me name-searching for me, him and my old outlet Kotaku, when I stumbled upon our June 2019 chat, an interview that—yes, I’m complimenting myself—is fascinating to read in 2025.

The interview includes such still-relevant questions as:

Totilo: I know some people wonder: “Does Xbox even need to have a box?” long-term. Does it need to have all its games all on one device anymore? Where does this go eventually?

And…

Totilo: But you can make enough money doing what you’re doing? This is a business.

And…

Totilo: Would you value at some point having a Gears or a Halo on a PlayStation or a Switch?

You can go back and read the interview. Or you can stick with me here, as I put a lot of context around it, in terms of what was going on with Xbox then and how it compares to the extraordinary phase Microsoft’s game division is now in. It’s stunning to see how much of what we discussed in 2019 augured Microsoft’s modern, much-debated multi-platform/multi-device/is-anyone-still-buying-an-Xbox approach.