Durango

As far as surprises go, Microsoft Windows Live General Manager Brian Hall’s frank admittance that there will be a successor to the Xbox 360 fell somewhere between Michael Phelps’ recent dominance of a multitude of swimming events at the London Games and NASA successfully concluding the 352-mile journey of its 2,000-pound rover Curiosity on Mars last night. To narrow that down a bit, that Microsoft is working on the follow-up to the nearly seven-year-old home of XBLA is about as (un)surprising to most gamers as that guy who swims really well swimming really well.

Despite the best wishes of the Big Three first parties of gaming that cyclically dump enormous sums of money into developing, launching and marketing home video game platforms, the life-cycles of their systems are always finite. The trio has managed to stretch the elastic holding this console generation together further than most industry vets and gamers would have thought possible only a few years ago, yet they have been unable to magic up the secret to console immortality. And so there was Hall letting the X out of the Box last week just over a minute into The Verge’s podcast. What’s more, the general manager mentioned Windows 8 — the software developer’s next operating system, coming to retail October 26 — in the same sentence as the next-gen Xbox.

“We’ve had Hotmail and operated Hotmail for about sixteen years. We obviously have Exchange, and Outlook, that people use at work,” he told The Verge before continuing on to mention Windows 8 and the 360’s eventual replacement. “We just decided it was time to do something new and bring the best from each of those and put them together and release it right in time for the new wave of products that we could have coming out with Windows 8 with the new version of Office with the New Windows phone and the new Xbox.”

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If an IGN source is to believed, then production has officially begun on Microsoft’s next-generation video-game console. The insider reports that Flextronics International, manufacturer of the both the original Xbox and the Xbox 360, just recently fired up the production line for the console believed to be codenamed Durango at its Austin, TX plant. Flextronics declined IGN’s requests for comment on the story.

Before reaching this stage in the process, Singapore-based Flextronics is said to have formed an internal division solely concerned with testing the Xbox 360’s successor. IGN claims that said division, operating autonomously from the rest of the company, focused its efforts on “comprehensive marketing, software, and hardware tests” of the device it is said to be producing. With those efforts behind them, the time to build is now.

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Microsoft recently stating on the record that the Xbox Durango/720 won’t be officially announced at E3, and likely not until next year, has done little to quell the constant stream of “insider sources” reporting this, that and the other about the next-generation console. The trend continued today. Tipsters informed VG 24/7 that Redmond-based Microsoft plans to launch the Xbox 360’s successor during the holiday 2013 season. That wasn’t all they had to say, either: the next Xbox will also feature a Blu-ray drive and two GPUs if these informants are to be believed.

Today’s release whispers are in line with what some previous industry canaries have been singing, but they fly in the face of the 2014 launch scuttlebutt that has arisen from other loose lips that sink ships, and they certainly don’t match up to the 2012 reports that some deep throats had falsely reported prior to the console-maker’s assertions to the contrary. The lesson here is that while game console rumors, while fun, are a bunch of bologna as often as they are legitimate leaks. On top of that, even legitimate leaks can end up being inaccurate down the road when the manufacturer in question changes its strategy in response to technology developments, movements by the competition, cost issues or any of a great number of other factors.

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