I fear that games might get trapped in the world of remakes…

If you were born before the year 2000 you might have noticed something curious going on in the world of entertainment. I don’t know about you, but it feels like everywhere I look nowadays there is a remake, remaster, sequel or reboot of a franchise from the late 90s or mid 2000s. 

By now we know that the movie industry loves making money and milking franchises for all their juice, look no further than Disney’s golden superhero goose and space wizards, but it feels like it’s starting to get a little out of hand… Right? Or am I the only one who feels that way?

Look, I love seeing remakes and reboots of beloved franchises from my childhood or teenage years as much as the next guy, but I miss the days of watching something that I don’t already know how it’s going to end. And I’m not saying that original media – be it games, movies or TV series – aren’t being made, but it just feels like there’s way less of them.

I don’t know about you, but this year particularly feels like I should start looking for my fedoras, start wearing my hair as an emo band vocalist and getting my DVD of the 2006 Paramount hit movie She’s the Man, because boy does it feel like we’re back in the 2Ks.

Have you seen the lineup of movies at the theaters? We have a new Indiana Jones movie, a new (amazing) Spider-Man movie, another Transformers movie, The Little Mermaid (again), Fast & Furious (again, somehow) and I could keep going. Again, it’s no surprise that Hollywood is squeeeeezing out reboots, sequels and remakes for all the nostalgia money they can, but maybe it’s time we look towards another industry that seems to be going down the same dark path.

Once again the video game industry seems to be following in the footsteps of its older brother – the film industry – and has started to walk down a dark path of no return. The path of nostalgia.

NOSTALGIA NOW COMES IN BOTTLES!!

We’ve been walking it for a while actually and I don’t think it’s fully bad. While movie remakes like Disney’s amazing attempts of re-telling good stories in the most terrible way possible get a bad rep, I think there’s a good reason for it. 

Usually people can see what is happening behind them, just soulless cash grabs of a businessman who wants more money but doesn’t want to go through the exhausting process of finding a good new idea and taking a risk on it. So we get reboots. Sometimes good, other times not so much, but always the trending topic on Twitter for a couple of days or weeks.

The film industry is still looking for the perfect amounts of nostalgia juice, fan service and celebrity cameos that they need to put into reboots. But that’s not the topic today, or at least it’s not the whole story.

The video game industry has done – like in some other cases – a better job than its older brother at doing remakes and reboots. Mainly because it’s a way for giving new life to old games and bringing them to a generation that gets to play them for the first time, but it also gives a chance to new game developers, maybe fans of the original game, to polish or build upon what the original developers created. In some cases even developers from the original game come on board to add things they couldn’t the first time around.

All around the gaming industry has taken the possibility of remakes for old games to bring them new life and, hopefully, bring the game to its intended final form that couldn’t be achieved by the limited technology of past generations. But I think right about now it’s starting to get a little concerning.

Doing remasters or remakes of games can be good, there’s plenty of other reasons than the ones I previously mentioned, but it could also mean bad news. Sure, remaking games like Resident Evil 4 or Dead Space will expose new audiences to games that became staples of the third-person horror genre, but it’s also not bringing anything new to the table. They’re telling a story that has already been told, the only difference being that now it’s in 4K.

I understand that games like those are so revolutionary and beloved that we want to see them modernized, and also, thanks to the nature of gaming, it’s harder to get a GameCube and a copy of the original Resident Evil 4 than it is to watch the original Little Mermaid. But just like the Little Mermaid, I would rather hear a new cool story over a retelling of an old one, an incredible story, but one that I’ve already heard many times.

AT THE END OF THE DAY, IT’S (SADLY) ALWAYS ABOUT THE MONEY.

Looking at this year’s game releases I’m surprised not only at the amount of remakes and remasters, but at the amount of mid-late 2000s games in there. We’re talking Metroid Prime (2002), Resident Evil 4 (2005), Dead Space (2008), Pikmin 1 & 2 (2001-4), Final Fantasy 7 (1997), Silent Hill 2 (2001)… I could truly keep going. This doesn’t even cover the games that got next-gen ports or thrown into Nintendo Virtual Console like Golden Eye and the GameBoy Advance.

And again, don’t get me wrong, I love being able to play remastered games as much as the next guy, but as a creator and designer I do get worried about what this might mean for the industry. 

I know that there is no shortage of new game ideas and indie developers creating awesome new games, what worries me is that the industry as a whole might start pushing those down. And I don’t mean the consumers and gamers that love the indie scene, but the big evil-monocle-wearing corporate people that want to sell as many games possible for as much as they can.

As you may know – depending on your gaming habits – there are a lot of games to choose from, and every single day there are thousands of new games uploaded to platforms like Steam, Itch.io, GameJolt and the Epic Games Store. There is no shortage of games, but also, maybe not all of those are worth your time or your buck.

If you read some of my previous posts, you might’ve heard of the gaming masterpiece that is Megacraft Hentai Survival and it’s sister titles Megacraft Hentai Battlegrounds and Megacraft Hentai Apocalipsis. Contrary to popular belief, no one should play them, yet they exist.

There will always be independent developers creating new awesome games, coming up with interesting game mechanics or creating deeply emotional stories, and yet I worry about games becoming stale soulless remasters that the only thing they bring to the table is “groundbreaking graphics”. Why?

Well, there might be developers having awesome ideas, but the people that pay for games to be made are probably going to pick the one they know for sure is going to get them the money. “But Notzack” I hear you say “Indie developers will always be able to create for passion without needed money to back up their games. It might take time, there will always be a creator like that”. And you’re not wrong my dear passionate reader, but that doesn’t change that it’s still going to be hell for those small developers. 

Sure, indie studios and developers will always exist and create cool games, but they still need a big company to help them publish their game. And yes, self-publishing a game is still a possibility, but that’s where the second problem comes in. 

Let’s say that an indie studio created an awesome game called Mentalnaughts (no specific reference at all…) and they wanted to show it to the world. After months of trying to find a partner company to help them publish it, they get rejected time after time because the new remaster of Demigod of War is also being made and it’s sure to sell millions of copies. So the indie studio decides to publish it by themselves, no need for big companies, they can just put it up on Steam!

The only problem is that without a marketing campaign, release trailers, social media strategies or announcements, not a lot of people are going to find out about Mentalnaughts. Some people might find it and love it, spreading the word about this new game they love! But with how quickly things come and go nowadays, the new Demigod of War will get more attention and the amazing concept that is Mentalnaughts will die forgotten by many and loved by few. Just like Megacraft Hentai Survival.

THE DEATH OF INNOVATION (NOT TO SOUND DRAMATIC OR ANYTHING)

There’s a reason why games from the 2000s are being remade and remastered, it was an era when technological limitations were no longer a problem, or at least not like in the 90s. Game developers could create 3D worlds with controlled cameras, in-game cutscenes, complex world interactions and have more than 16 pixels to create a character! It was the wild west.

Game franchises that had been around for a while started telling more complex and profound stories. Not only were the graphics getting better, but also the sound was immensely better. Now they could have animated cutscenes with voice acting that didn’t sound like someone talking into a megaphone through cans connected via a string.

Games were getting bolder, stories more complex and the game worlds were bigger. If you ask anyone born before the year 2000 what their favorite game character is, they’ll probably say someone from a game that came out between 2000 and 2010. It was an incredible era for gaming for both the creators and the fans, one that maybe it’s better left off as just that, a past era of gaming.

When it comes to making games from the past more accessible and just in general playable, I’m all in. I’m a firm believer in game emulation as a form of conserving gaming history, just like movie streaming is an awesome way of watching the history of the film industry and archive it.

There are plenty of games that I would love to see remastered, just so I could see what they would look like with current graphics, processing power or better controls. At the same time, I’m happy that some of those games haven’t been remade. I like going back and playing them the same way I did all those years back.

I’ve been recently playing through the Castlevania GameBoy Advance games and having a blast with them. At the same time, I’ve been playing Hollow Knight and seeing all the awesome things that those old Castlevania things had, but in a new form, a new world and a new story, all of them taken and improved to fit a new story.

See that’s the kind of remake I want. Where an old game can be clearly noted as the “source” or “root”, but the new game builds on top of that, not just to polish some quirks or fix loopholes in the story, but to tell a completely new story.

And that’s why, I fear that games might get trapped in the world of remakes.