Kieren Platts

Remake culture became big in the 2010s, and the 2020s show no signs of the trend slowing down, with remakes, remasters and ports being actively requested. The audience is hungry for them, it reduces workload (still a huge undertaking, but slightly reduced nonetheless), they sell well, and some of them innovate, offering an improved or even completely reinvented gameplay. There’s no doubt that Resident Evil 2’s changes to the camera and combat system struck a chord with its veteran and new audience, but there’s something else at stake.

Remakes can update a game, introducing it to an audience who might not even have been born at original release, but it’s not all positive. Take The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, for example, a famously rushed, incomplete Zelda release with clear areas where the game was missing content. It also arguably has aged the best out of all the 3D Zelda titles, its original cel-shaded, low-poly world making the best of the GameCube’s capabilities. It still looks polished to this day. So, in 2013, when Nintendo announced a remake for the Wii U, their approach was confusing. If the aim was to improve the resolution, leaving the unfinished sections of the game untouched, then why remake Wind Waker at all? If the quality that holds up in the game most is the cel-shading, why overwrite that aspect with saturation, bloom, and unfinished lighting effects? Yet, in all its material, Nintendo has conveniently ‘forgotten’ about the original Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and all references to the games now pretty much exclusively use the remakes as standard. Why hide away the original in embarrassment? The Majora’s Mask remake in 2015 strips away what made the entry unique, and becomes a uniform, standardised Zelda experience that encourages short-term play sessions for what originally was a time-based masterpiece. The stand-out example of how Zelda games can stray from format and still create powerful experiences became homogenised and stale with a few tweaks intended to “fix” the experience. But, as most would agree, the tweaks don’t accentuate that experience. They gloss over it.

This is the concern with remake culture; by replacing works with newer versions, entire games are now disposable. Where Resident Evil 2’s use of fixed cameras and tank controls defined it as a horror game, transforming fumbling and resource management as mechanics, the over-the-shoulder shooter remake encourages us to forget those original efforts as mistakes. The Wii remake of Metroid Prime encourages and forefronts the first-person shooter, over the exploratory L-targeting of the GameCube original. 

This disposability isn’t by nature a terrible thing. If Resident Evil: Remastered or Ocarina of Time 3D can show us anything, it’s that accentuating original design decisions and not intruding upon the original experience of the game can lead to remarkable results. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone, including fans of the original, who prefer the original Ocarina of Time to it’s 3D remake. And when one of the highest regarded games of all time can be replaced, that’s an accomplishment to behold. And yet, there’s a lingering sadness. It’s not necessarily true that companies choose between producing a new title or a remake – both are often produced concurrently, so the resources argument doesn’t always apply. However, by openly regarding carefully designed products as mistakes in some way and treating them as disposable can lead to some pretty unhealthy dynamics. Streaming services and the fast-paced nature of how we consume media nowadays train us to blast through creative works as quickly as possible, moving onto the next thing, then the next. We’re not encouraged to cherish the media we consume, and we are actively encouraged to dispose of older works because they’re old, and there’s a newer version coming out next year. This time next year, the iconic character models of Final Fantasy VII, a milestone in the games industry and a pivotal moment in many childhoods and adulthoods alike, will be replaced in culture and in practice by high-resolution recreations.

Perhaps that’s sentimental but replaceability in my mind seems like something we should aspire to avoid. Right now remake culture and cultural significance seem to be on very different pages, and that’s the concern. You can fix oversights and update the game to widescreen all you like, but no game deserves to go unloved, even less so have its love given to a newer, flashier version of itself, which may or may not understand why the original was loved in the first place.

Kyle Moffat