There is a similar approach for a modern age - use the hypervisor for the debugger agent. The application called HDBG[1]. It was never production-ready though, so not so famous. Another similar application is PulseDBG[2]. It's not exactly like SoftICE, but allows you to observe the execution process locally[3], which is sometimes enough.

[1] http://fdbg.x86asm.net/hdbg/hdbg.html

[2] https://github.com/honorarybot/PulseDbg

[3] https://github.com/honorarybot/PulseDbg/wiki/8.-Local-debugg...