I translated my “Videogames don’t age” article into English recently, and while reading it I remembered some personal opinions I didn’t include and some other points I should’ve gone over. It’s no surprise, I wrote it almost a year ago and in the meantime I’ve read (and watched videos) more on the subject. Some remakes of games I’ve played and enjoyed were released, too, so I also had the chance of both reviewing and reflecting upon the reaction of the community at large and the opinions of a wide variety of gamers.

Why do we like remakes so much?

The remake phenomenon is unthinkable in both music and literature. In the former they’re usually called covers and in the latter, adaptations. As you can see, the perception we have on the closest thing to remakes in those mediums is that of a totally different work. One that doesn’t seek to replace that which is based upon, more like celebrating it or offering a fresh take on it.

In movies, they’re either received poorly or celebrated on their own qualities as independent creative works, not bound to a base material. In the case of the former, they’re seen as both creatively bankrupt and a disrespect to the original and no one truly sees them as a “replacement” of the originals. In the case of the latter, they’re seen more as adaptations, and as such, offer a fresh take on the story of the base material. They substantially change the setting and characters and they’re as decoupled of the base material as the most loosely based adaptation. Scarface, The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers come to mind. They are not concerned in either replacing the original or offering a take more in line with “modern audiences”. They’re creatively rich movies that do not feel bound to the fact that they’re not entirely original.

Ironically enough, unnecessary sequels are usually frowned upon more frequently than remakes. They’re seen as quick soulless cashgrabs and as the most obvious reflection of a creatively bankrupt industry, while those unnecessary sequels at least warrant an entirely new story and continuity, something that is arguably more engaging than just regurgitating a past movie’s story.

In games, remakes are usually celebrated and the public can’t stop asking for more. They love to see their favorite games being adapted by people that didn’t participate in the development of the original. The trailers generate hype, fandoms of game franchises that include titles not available for purchase on modern platforms can’t stop asking for remakes. They can’t stop discussing about how some things about their favorite games aged poorly (!) and how much they’d love to see those old games “modernized” (i.e. changed). Bizarre.

A case for availability

I have a plausible explanation for this: bear with me, this is not research backed, there’s no peer reviewed study confirming this, this is just product of my perspective.

A sad reality of games is that they’re by and large, inaccessible. Most of them, at least. The videogame history foundation published a study a year or two ago showing that up to 87% of games weren’t available to legally purchase, in other words, most of the medium’s history is behind an insurmountable technical barrier for some. You can’t just buy them and be done with it as you could with a movie or a music record or a book, electronic or otherwise.

This contributes to a warped perception of the medium. It’s not as easy to engage with past titles as it was when they were new. Their abandonware status relegates them to enthusiasts: enthusiasts that do not mind having to pirate videogames, downloading emulators and jailbreaking consoles. Something that is not asked of music fans, readers and moviegoers.

Under this context of general inaccessibility, us, as the public, end up asking for crumbs, for anything, so we can experience our favorite games of the past in a convenient manner.

Remakes become the obvious choice of publishers that both fear losing money on publishing a game that doesn’t appeal to modern audiences and covet the possibility of selling a new one that doesn’t require further development of new and existing IPs. It’s a win-win situation for them. Straight up ports and backwards compatibility end up hurting their bottom line: it is more financially rewarding to gatekeep their catalogs and to produce soulless remakes for the modern gamer. They don’t want old games competing against their new ones, remakes or not. They don’t care about preservation, because preservation goes against the business model they’ve been building for decades.

This is how poor availability is wielded as a weapon by the big studios, but the effect these practices have on us in the public at large is in the end making us see the medium through a warped perception: the difficulty on engaging with classic games renders us, the people that actually bother to play them, a minority. And as such, when you appreciate an old game for what it is, you’re adopting the minority position.

The gaming public has exploded dramatically since the 2000s, that translates to a wide sector of that same public that didn’t even play (currently considered) old games in their childhood. Whatever they know about the history of the medium in general and of game franchises in particular is consumed in any way other than actually sitting down and playing old games.

Contrast this with music, literature, cinema. Of course, it’s not rare to come across the occasional out of print book, but if games were commercialized in the same way these other mediums are (no vendor lock-in, physical media you bought a long time ago still works with modern devices, multiple ways to both buy and experience a work) do not think that games like Demon’s Souls or Silent Hill 2 would be out of print.

Comparing gaming with cinema specifically gives depressing results: the reality is that, as I said before, most games are inaccessible, regardless of their cultural significance or popularity, past and present. Mainstream Hollywood movies, specially culturally significant mainstream Hollywood movies are accessible in a way games could only dream of.

Imagine that not only can you play your original Silent Hill 2 copy on any modern system you currently own, but that there’s also an infinite amount of retailers online that (legally) sell you both the physical and digital version of the game, for peanuts, ready to be played right now.

The perceptions we would have on videogames in this hypothetical world

Now, do you think the public would be excited for remakes in a world where you can pay a fair price for almost any classic game and play it right now? A world where most people won’t compare the remake and the original via video footage but with the actual experience itself: playing the remake alongside the original as the original is as accessible as any mainstream movie is now?

How would we perceive classic videogames in this world? Do the ideas of “games aging” and that “progress” on non-technical aspects of the game such as control schemes, mechanics and overall design invalidate that which came before would’ve taken root? I mean, I know people, probably you do too, that simply refuse to watch movies in black and white, be they modern or old. But, don’t you think that’s a kind of insane opinion to have? I think anyone who watches movies beyond the Hollywood movie of the minute available in cinemas would consider it insane.

I don’t have the answer for this as I’m threading on hypotheticals. But taking me as an example, someone that, if unable to buy a classic game, just decides to pirate it and call it a day and play it via emulators or a jailbroken system (no, I am not embarrassed about this confession. Any gaming enthusiast will resort to piracy sooner or later as a response to the lack of commercial offers), someone that is open to new gaming experiences, that plays games past and present… I do feel that way about remakes.

I’m not willing to spend money on them and the majority seem like the product of a stagnant industry to me. And I do think my openness to play games regardless of when they were released plays a role in that. Play a sufficient amount of Playstation 2 games in an earnest fashion and believe me, you will stop thinking that saying “Playstation 2 graphics” is a pejorative.

Do the products of the future delegitimize those of the past?

I’ve come across a wide variety of opinions in favor of the notion of videogames aging: that this means that the past way of doing things at the time seemed like the right thing to do, but because of further advancements in the medium, these (creative) decisions lost both their appeal and legitimacy: it is valid then to say that the good things about those games are bad in retrospect.

As I explained in my previous post on the topic: no, I don’t hold this opinion. As I stated there, I believe that which was bad then still is and that which was good then still is.

I don’t hold this opinion because it seems to me that it ignores the wider context: the game those decisions lead to. I find it bizarre to think that it is a negative to not be able to aim up and down in Doom when it is a standard in modern first-person shooters. This ignores the fact that Doom is balanced around that fact. It knows you can’t (or shouldn’t) aim up and down.

As I said on my previous post, anyone who honestly engages with old games would not see this (obvious technical) limitation as a negative. The game knows this, the game would never ask you to aim up and down and it provides you with generous auto-aim for that.

Of course the impossibility of vertical aim is a limitation of the BSP engine Carmack developed for the game. A couple years later we would see FPS games that did let you aim vertically (actually… it was possible just a year after Doom’s release. System Shock came out in ‘94). Does that make Doom bad in retrospect? It is valid to think that maybe if they were able to implement vertical aiming in Doom they would’ve done so, but this would’ve resulted in a radically different game. You don’t even have to imagine, GZDoom and some other source-ports let you do that. Have fun.

Does the existence of Doom negate Wolfenstein 3D? One uses BSP as the rendering algorithm, the other uses raycasting. It is obvious to notice that one opens up a world of possibilities over the other, that one is technically superior.

Still, does the lack of verticality affect Wolfenstein 3D that bad? Is the level design bad? Or, more plausibly, is it fair to consider that the game was designed around the use of raycasting? That the experience it provides, while shackled by technical limitations as most creative endeavors are, still offers a solidly designed experience?

That’s why saying a game aged badly, for me, just seems like an excuse to not engage with games that do things in a way you don’t like. It’s a misguided value judgement because it’s just judgement for judgement sake.

It just reveals you don’t like this or that about some game, regardless of how the experience is as a whole.

Advancement towards standardization

It is not totally incorrect to infer that (mainstream) games were more varied in the past. It was a wild west, there weren’t going to be a lot of people complaining about your game having blocky graphics or tank controls. As more and more games came out and technology inevitably progressed, games were starting to play a lot like each other.

Third person games must be over the shoulder, no tank controls, no fixed camera angles, (console) first person shooters all use dual analog, turn based combat turns off a lot of people so there aren’t a lot of games that still do turn based combat. This could lead to people thinking that yes, there is a “right” way to do things, just do what everyone else is doing, there you have it.

That’s why the Silent Hill 2 remake is an over the shoulder game, or why the Resident Evil 4 one lets you move while you aim. Not being able to walk as you aim in RE4 is not a negative because the game is designed around that creative decision, but Capcom knows the mainstream audience wouldn’t like that in a triple A remake, they would prefer a cookie cutter game instead.

Implying that there’s a right way to do things leads to that: cookie cutter design. Everything plays the same because everyone is doing the “right thing”. And games that aren’t doing the “right thing” risk alienating an important percentage of the mainstream public, a death sentence in such an expensive and competitive market.

There’s no “right way” to do things in game design… so what do we have?

Creative vision. That’s it. If you make a game where you make use of every single aspect modern audiences supposedly hate like high difficulty, tank controls, fixed camera angles, blocky graphics, etc. that means that the active decision to include them, regardless if it is technically possible to NOT include them, was a creative one.

You’ll end up taking them into account in designing your game. If in the end you do end up with a bad game, believe me, it wouldn’t be the fault of tank controls, it’d be your fault for not being able to design around them. Just like ID software designed Doom around the lack of vertical aim, how Resident Evil does the same with its tank controls and camera angles, how GoldenEye designs around being a console shooter on a console that doesn’t even have dual analog controllers.

Creative decisions implemented in a cohesive way result in good experiences. That’s true for when you both follow the crowd or when you go against conventions.

The damage remakes and disapproval towards old games ends up doing

I do think that the ubiquity of remakes in the medium do end up causing harm, let’s review that:

Harming the collective memory of the public

I recommend watching Tepho’s video on the matter but as it is a spanish video with no subtitles, I’ll summarize his thesis: remakes harm our collective memory. He exposes the case of Ys, a legendary japanese ARPG franchise infamous for having a myriad of titles across a myriad of systems and having a hard to trace lineage. A lineage that is hard to trace due to the fact that most of those titles are they themselves remakes of older Ys games.

This reliance on remakes ends up muddying history: neither wikis nor information sources can get the release dates of the original games right. An important percentage of the Ys fandom believes games that weren’t the first ones, were. In just 40 years, the official PC8800 release is inaccessible as both a game and as a piece of history. Nihon Falcom relegates it to the annals of history and insists that a vastly different remake, which is in itself based on another remake, is the canon version.

You can experience this harm to our collective memory, right now with modern remakes: our main ways to retrieve information on the digital age, search engines and LLMs, put the remakes front and center and relegate the original game to the second page. Entire wikis are rewritten to accommodate those remakes (see the case of Demon’s Souls). You have to insist on looking for the original to get information about the original.

Remakes also nowadays eschew subtitles that could indicate that they’re, in fact, remakes, publicizing them as both the definitive and only way to experience a game. It is not strange to think that, due to the obscurity and general lack of availability of some games, their remakes end up as the de facto version: the original ends up being forgotten by almost everyone, excluding specialists. Legacies purposefully obscured by studios, publishers and the public at large. A damage done to the collective memory of an entire community.

Obscuring the objectively superior version

I feel kind of bad using “objective” in an opinion piece like this one, as for every opinion, thinking this or that is better is subjective in nature. But, in this case, the use of this word is warranted: I can’t say, in good faith, that a game that both disrespects and misrepresents the original like how the Demon’s Souls remake does is the superior way to play anything: as the original is the baseline, any title that decides to deviate from that baseline experience in such a way that you end up with a vastly different game in terms of aesthetics has decided to ignore the baseline in its entirety: if you want to play the superior version of Demon’s Souls you play the original, because it’s the only version available. With this I’m not saying that this or that remake is a bad game: they’re just incomparable to the game they remake, and as such, can’t be the “definitive” version of anything other than themselves.

But this won’t really matter to the public at large: if, in their mind, there’s two ways of playing Demon’s Souls, and one requires downloading an emulator and a ROM or buying an expensive copy off a scalper and fiddling with configurations, and the other is just a matter of clicking “Buy” in a storefront, people will take the path of least resistance, every time.

And after finishing the remake, they will tell themselves that finally, they have played this game everyone was talking about, depriving themselves of the original vision: they will be unaware of the fact that they experienced a fake.

I know this, because it happened to me.

Conclusions

I think the generalization of these sentiments towards videogames are a direct product of the state of the market.

I also earnestly believe, that, if you seriously consider games as art, if you think they’re a creative endeavor as any other, you wouldn’t think that they’re so disposable as to warrant “replacements” meant for a “modern” audience. You would engage with them on their terms, you would notice that which you enjoy, that which you do not, you would judge them by both their virtues and defects as products of their time. Just like we do with movies and books. Classics remain classics now and forever. They spur discussions, passions, people keep enjoying and criticizing them in equal measure. The works are seen through the lens of history, we worry we’re not engaging with a sufficiently true to the original reprint or facsimile.

Is it to much to ask for the same standards to be applied to games?