Xbox could revive 1 vs 100 for Series X/S, Phil Spencer suggests

Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has suggested that the platform holder could be working on a trivia game “from our past.”

Spencer made the comments during an official FanFest live stream on Friday, which was intended to run alongside a special website quiz. However, technical issues ultimately meant that the trivia game did not take place as planned.

“I just want to say, when our teams are trying to do new things that we’ve never done before, I want to be 100 percent behind those things,” Spencer explained on the live stream. “Sometimes they’ll turn out amazing, sometimes they’ll be good learning experiences for us.

“But for all the fans who have been on this with us, we’re going to make it good with you guys. We don’t know exactly what it is yet, so thanks for hanging with us during this and our little experiment,” he added.

“We’ll learn. Maybe we should even be building our own trivia game, like from our past, that allows people to play a trivia game more often, maybe that could happen…”

Spencer could be referring to Xbox 360 online quiz title 1 vs 100, the MMO trivia game which ran for two seasons in 2009.

The online show ran weekly on Xbox Live, with one player placed as “The One” against a group of 100 others that made up “The Mob”, with the rest making up “The Crowd”.

The One had the opportunity to win 10,000 Microsoft Points, while the remaining members of The Mob split the winnings and each received a free game if they were able to defeat them.

Last year Phil Spencer specifically mentioned 1 vs 100 as a title Xbox would love to revive, and revealed that discussions had taken place on how best to do it.

“We should do it again,” he told Stevivor in November 2019. “The problem with 1 vs 100 specifically is it’s an IP that’s owned by a game show company.

“But I’ll say Matt [Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios] and I have had a lot of discussions about the idea, whether it’s that IP specifically or just the idea of what it was, is something that we’d love to go do.”

He added: “So we’re out there kind of looking at ideas and talking to teams. Because I think that was one of those ideas — and it’s a cliche, almost — that might’ve been a little ahead of its time.”