When I was a wee bairn, my grandparents rented one of those giant “luxury” vans with the curtains in the windows for a cross-country roadtrip. In the back it had a 13-inch CRT television and, wonder of wonders, a Super Nintendo hooked up to it. I thought it was the height of technological accomplishment. Microsoft agrees, it would seem, though its latest Xbox Game Pass push is a little more current.
In partnership with LG, which extends its WebOS smart TV platform to some connected car screens, Microsoft is making the beta version of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate available on those devices. The latest vehicles from Hyundai and Kia (unsurprisingly, massive auto makers from LG’s home territory) are equipped with the streaming PlayWare system, and by extension, smart TV apps including the official Xbox app. Naturally, to get it all working you’ll need to connect a compatible controller and have a mobile connection in the vehicle.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen video games integrated into cars and other vehicles — even high-end, recent games that typically require dedicated hardware. Tesla includes an “Arcade” that lets drivers and passengers play games on those cars’ dedicated central screens (while it isn’t moving, since most countries don’t allow active video on a screen accessible by the driver). Those games are played locally on the car’s centralized computer, but Xbox Game Pass is streaming in this iteration, as it is on LG’s connected televisions. And of course various custom solutions, legal and otherwise, have been possible for decades.
My first inclination is to scoff. Surely anyone who wants this and can afford all the requisite hardware and data already has a solution on their phone or laptop, or something a Steam Deck, which Microsoft/Xbox is also pushing by proxy with Asus. But of course, that requires juggling a lot of hardware, in a moving car and a relatively limited amount of space. So yeah, having it all pumped through a fixed screen does make some practical sense. And naturally it’s a boon to anyone trying to keep kids occupied in the back seat on a long drive. But sadly this futuristic version of the luxury van will have to go without Donkey Kong Country.