Double Take: An Examination of Videogame Remakes

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. It's the feeling that prompts one to recall memories of long-gone years just as easily as it spurs others to sell those memories back to us. A quick stroll down a department store toy aisle reveals countless Generation X brands -- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Care Bears, G.I Joe -- back in force, not only revamped and reworked for today's iGen, but hoping to snag a reminiscing thirtysomething who's overdue for that quarter-life crisis. After all, youth looking to be relived, plus a disposable income, equals an easy sale.

Of course, things aren't always that sinister. Sometimes repackaged goods come with noble intentions, as brands threatening to disappear into the mists of time are relaunched, reprinted or reproduced in order to keep the good times rolling. New editions of timeless novels, for instance, ensure that classic pieces of literature are kept alive throughout the generations, allowing audiences new and old to discover, or rediscover, their magic.

Videogames are handled in a similar way, but with one key difference: they're driven by increased necessity. Unlike the printed medium, which will continue to function for as long as humans have eyes, gaming technology effortlessly marches forth, and constantly threatens to leave a world of classic titles stranded as new hardware turns its back on old software. Good games obviously endure -- just look at the likes of Tetris and Pac-Man -- but even so, there's the very real danger that a genuine masterpiece can be forgotten when the new boys enter the block at every generational handover.


Care Bears are back (apparently), while Tetris never went away.

A videogame remake will see beloved titles put through the Upgradotron and emerge out the other end, primed for play on modern-day hardware. Doing so ensures that these games are kept alive amid all the change and kerfuffle. But are these remakes really the same game at all? Are we receiving the same experience, or a smudged photocopy? And is change ever appropriate when an established experience needs to be maintained? Time to discuss!

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Let's set up the battle lines. In film terms, a remake comes with a fairly established set of expectations. You've got a different cast reciting different dialogue, with a different director running the show. The special effects are updated, new music plays over the new action, and chances are there's more cleavage and explosions thrown in for good measure. Pretty much everything in a film remake comes to you courtesy of a new team, bundled together with new ideas, new angles, and a new presentation.

Take that approach with a game remake, however, and you haven't "remade" anything -- you've pumped out an altogether new product. It looks, sounds and plays differently, and isn't at all the game you were expecting. Instead, a game remake -- in the context we know it -- will stick to the blueprint, sometimes going as far as bringing the original team back to oversee the update. Yet despite this, a videogame remake can and will never be 100% faithful, despite the best efforts made to keep it so.

Technology is largely to blame here, as with its inexorable march forward, the degree that videogame remakes can move away from the original product becomes greater. After all, hardware isn't just becoming more powerful, but more diverse, and between the touch screen of the DS, the waggle sticks of the Wii and the watchful eye of Kinect, today's games are allowed to be anything from conventional to crazy. Throw a remake in the middle of all this, and its faithfulness immediately comes into question.


Let's hope Microsoft doesn't remake the Kinect unveiling.

A game such as Breakout on DS might be a logical fit, given that the device's touch-screen affords easy and intuitive control, but it's an altogether different feel from the way the game was originally designed: incorporating the use of paddle controllers. (The Japanese-only paddle peripheral for the DS was a noble attempt to alleviate this, but obviously wasn't deemed important enough to bring to the rest of the world.) Change the controller and you change the experience, and while the underlying game code might be faithful down to the last binary zero, the manner in which we're interacting with it is just the opposite.

That's assuming that the game has come across untouched. When it comes to reproducing an old title on a new platform, the temptation to tweak is simply too great. The porting process essentially gives developers a second crack at their game, allowing them to go back and add that extra bit of polish they initially ran out of time for, or address coding criticisms that were aimed at the original release. In their minds, how can they not? Problems that existed then are hardly problems that they want to exist now, and the chance to turn something great into something greater is an opportunity that any sane mind is unlikely to pass up.

The natural side effect is that the result is, by definition, a different one. It's not the same game that was released all those years ago -- it's been tweaked, changed and modified. For the better? Probably. But just because a book publisher can snip all those boring songs from each Lord of the Rings reprint in order to tighten the flow, it doesn't mean he will, or should, or even be expected to.


How could anyone want to cut Tom Bombadil?

As things escalate, we come to the remakes that go even further and make grand, sweeping changes to how a game looks by updating the graphics. Perhaps one can make the argument that such cosmetic modifications are making things more palatable for today's audience, accustomed as they are to anti-aliased polygons and real-time shadows and who would apparently cut their fingers on any sharp jaggies, heaven forbid. But even so, should a remake take full advantage of newer hardware to paint a prettier picture, or simply use what it needs to in order to more accurately present the game's original experience? After all, graphics of the time can add to the charm of playing an old game, even if they look almost comical compared to what modern titles are achieving.

Then there are issues of posterity to consider. If a remake bumps up the graphics, isn't this most superficial of changes -- going back and writing over history with fancy new effects -- the very same thing that we deride George Lucas for with every re-release of Star Wars? Isn't it the same reason why no one gives the colourised version of Casablanca the time of day? Isn't it why Gus Van Sant should never be allowed near a Hitchcock film ever again?


Mr Beardy peers into his magical looking glass to decide what part of our childhoods to ruin next.

The argument, right across the board, is the same: such changes turn an original work into something different, assigning it an updated version number rather than re-releasing the genuine version 1.0. It's out with the old and in with the new, and considering the efforts that other creative mediums go to in order to preserve works in their original state, to sacrifice a timeless game to our desire for better graphics seems a little shortsighted in comparison.


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