Answering the timeless question: Is the Xbox 360 backwards compatible?

It's surprising. When it happens that someone hears you work with people from Microsoft on a nearly daily basis, after the obligatory next sentence which includes some reference to this "Bill" guy, the first real question they ask is... "so will I be able to play my old games on the new Xbox?"

And it has an answer, now that marketing collateral is being produced for the Xbox 360. Unless something goes horribly wrong (a phrase I can't get enough of lately), the answer appears be: yes, "original Xbox games are still compatible."

Soon, the next question may be, "what the heck is this site about?" Plenty of speculation including something about a massive marketing effort on September 27, perhaps race-themed console demos, circles (which are also prominent on the XBox 360 site) and really, who knows or has the spare cycles to give a proper damn until September 27th.