Gaming remakes — more than just a lucrative cash-in?

It’s as if a rift has opened in the space-time continuum, catapulting players back to the 2000s or earlier. Dead Space’s foreboding space station, the plague-infested villages of Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime’s sleek sci-fi interiors: these are the virtual playgrounds of some of 2023’s best reviewed video games, and they are all either remakes or remasters. Their paths have been trodden by many players before, but now they sparkle anew, and perhaps feel a little different too; crisper, snappier, more responsive — yesterday’s classics reimagined with today’s technology.

The video game remake is nothing new, but it occupies a newly enlarged presence in the release calendar and thus the minds of players the world over. If you peruse a critical aggregator such as Metacritic to find your next gaming experience, there’s a good chance you will come away with a title that was first released 10, 20 or even 30 years ago. Hankering after a tactics game? Then give Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp a shot. A first-person actioner? The recently released System Shock remake should do the trick.

Sometimes, though, it can feel as if time is speeding up, such is the dwindling gap between initial release and remake, remaster or re-release. The third highest rated game of the year on Metacritic is the “Complete Edition” of critically acclaimed RPG The Witcher 3, released just eight years ago for a generation of consoles many players still use now. 

The Witcher 3 shows the semantic slipperiness involved in resuscitating the past. “Complete Edition” refers primarily to the newly high-resolution textures and a higher frame rate, so it is not a wholesale remake nor quite a remaster (a term that generally applies to much older titles). It’s better described as an “upgrade”, one that brings its presentation in line with what players expect from current consoles and PCs. Perhaps more than anything, this “Complete Edition” is a canny bit of marketing, updating the experience just enough in order to sell it to players once again, all while maintaining the brand’s ongoing cultural relevance.

Remakes, though, generally go much further than upgrading or remastering original assets (3D models, textures, animations and the like). Rather, they recreate a game from the ground up, sometimes hewing close to their forebears (as with Resident Evil 4) and, at others, introducing more fundamental changes to game mechanics, if not the story (the remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3 swap fixed camera angles for a more modern third-person “free camera”). The upcoming remake of another survival horror classic, Silent Hill 2, looks as if it will opt for the latter approach by introducing, according to producer Motoi Okamoto, a “more immersive” camera and, interestingly, combat that is “more fun than before”. This detail will rankle some purists (like me), who consider the original’s punishing combat a vital part of its storytelling.

As video games age (they are well over 50 now), so does their audience. The medium not only contains a rich history of beloved titles but an older demographic that enjoys revisiting them. In short, the current vogue for remakes, what cultural critic Simon Reynolds would describe as “retromania”, is here to stay. CEO and chair of Atari, Wade Rosen, almost said as much in a statement announcing the company’s acquisition of Night Dive, maker of the recently released System Shock remake. For Rosen, the developer possesses “proven expertise” in “commercialising retro IP”, highly prized attributes for a company such as Atari looking to leverage its extensive back catalogue.

While it’s natural to feel cynical about the relentless retreading of old ground, these remakes do more than enrich long-established companies. Video games, like movies and music, are beholden to trends. Currently, the most popular games are either all-consuming open-world behemoths or never-ending “live service” experiences (both at once in the case of GTA Online). What the current crop of remakes does is let players peek beyond such trends to enjoy more focused, arguably tighter experiences. For players of a certain age, these remakes may remind them what first drew them to the medium. For younger gamers, they offer a chance to see how designers of yesteryear imagined its possibilities, only now with more pixels and better hardware. It’s not that video games are necessarily bereft of ideas; some, it turns out, are timeless.