Video game remake

• 1. Introduction

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  Video game remakes sit at a strange crossroads between preservation and reinvention. When Capcom released Resident Evil 2 in 2019, they took a game that originally ran on tank controls and fixed camera angles and rebuilt it entirely around over-the-shoulder third-person shooter mechanics. The gameplay felt closer to Resident Evil 4 than to the 1998 original. Same story, same monsters, same doomed police station. But a fundamentally different experience.

  That tension is what makes the remake a distinct art form. Is it the same game? A sequel in disguise? A tribute or a replacement? And where does a remake end and a remaster begin? These questions have followed the games industry since the 1970s, and the answers have shifted with every new generation of hardware.

• 2. What Makes a Remake

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  The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D for the Nintendo 3DS illustrates the line clearly. It counts as a remake rather than a remaster because it features entirely new character models and texture packs, not merely upscaled versions of existing art. The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD, by contrast, kept the same visual style as the original Wii U title and is classified as a remaster.

  A remaster tends to stay faithful to the original gameplay, making only limited tweaks for convenience. A remake, on the other hand, may overhaul gameplay entirely when the original mechanics have aged badly. Sierra's 1991 remake of Space Quest replaced the text parser interface with the point-and-click engine and graphical style of Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and The Time Rippers, while keeping the narrative, puzzles, and sets largely intact.

  Black Mesa, a fan-built remake of Half-Life, went even further, rebuilding the entire game from the ground up in Valve's Source engine with new textures, models, and facial animations. The events of the original game remained the organizing structure, but almost nothing of the original code survived.

• 3. From Conversions to Nostalgia

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  Gun Fight, released by Midway in 1975, was a reprogrammed version of Taito's arcade game Western Gun. The main technical difference was the use of a microprocessor, which allowed smoother animation and better graphics than the original's discrete logic circuits. At the time, nobody called it a remake. It was a conversion.

  In 1980, Atari released the first officially licensed home console conversion of an arcade title, bringing Taito's 1978 hit Space Invaders to the Atari 2600. That version became the first killer app for a home console by quadrupling the system's sales. That same year, Warren Robinett created Adventure for the Atari 2600, a graphical reimagining of the 1970s text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure.

  The distinction between conversion and remake came down to intent. Conversions were made to fit a specific piece of hardware, usually around the same time as the original release. Remakes arrived later, with modernization as their explicit goal. By 1985, Sega was making that intent explicit. Pitfall II: Lost Caverns was an arcade remake of the home game that introduced new level layouts and colorful, detailed graphics. That same year, Sega adapted the 1982 computer game Choplifter for arcades, adding new environments and enemies. The Choplifter remake later appeared on the Master System and Famicom.

  Sierra's early-1990s releases of King's Quest, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry marked another shift. These remakes used the interface of the most recent games in Sierra's catalog and replaced the original assets with graphics in a dramatically different style. The goal was not simply to port old games to new hardware. It was to make dated games feel current again.

• 4. The CD-ROM and Download Era

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  By 1994, the spread of CD-ROM technology opened a new chapter for remakes. Publishers filled the new disc format with digitized voices and, sometimes, improved graphics. Trade publications noted the amateur quality of the acting in many of these productions. The format encouraged quantity over craft.

  Downloadable game services eventually did something different. Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network allowed publishers to sell older games at lower prices, which matched what players were willing to pay for retro titles. Games like Bionic Commando Rearmed, Jetpac Refuelled, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix reached audiences who might never have bought a full-priced remake. Wipeout HD was unusual in that it was a remake not of the original Wipeout but of the two PlayStation Portable entries in the series.

  In 2003, Sega launched the Sega Ages line for PlayStation 2, initially conceived as modernized remakes of classic titles before later expanding to include emulated compilations. The series closed with a release that took a distinctive approach: a remake of Fantasy Zone II that ran, via emulation, on hardware from the era of the original game. It was one of the few enhanced remakes that made no attempt at modernization.

• 5. Fan Remakes and Demakes

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  Skywind is a volunteer project rebuilding Morrowind, originally released in 2002, inside Bethesda's Creation Engine, which powers Skyrim from 2011. Bethesda Softworks gave the project their approval. By 2014, more than 70 volunteers working as artists, composers, designers, developers, and voice actors had completed half of the game's environment, recorded over 10,000 new lines of dialogue, and composed three hours of original music inspired by the Elder Scrolls series. The same team is also building Skyblivion, a remake of Oblivion in the Skyrim engine, and Morroblivion, a remake of Morrowind in the Oblivion engine.

  OpenRA is a fan remake of the classic Command and Conquer real-time strategy games that adds cross-platform support, comfort functions, and gameplay features inspired by later entries in the series. Other notable fan efforts include CSBWin, a remake of the dungeon crawler Dungeon Master, and Privateer Gemini Gold, a remake of Wing Commander: Privateer.

  Running in the opposite direction are demakes: games that adapt modern titles to the constraints of older hardware. D-Pad Hero is a NES demake of Guitar Hero. Halo 2600 brings Microsoft's Halo series to the Atari 2600. Princess Rescue, released in 2013, is a demake of Super Mario Bros. for the Atari 2600, created partly to showcase the outer limits of what that hardware could do. For much of the 1990s, black market developers in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan produced unauthorized Famicom adaptations of then-current games like Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, and Final Fantasy VII. These sold well because low-cost compatible hardware was widely available across those markets.

• 6. Playing Both Versions at Once

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  Metroid Zero Mission, the 2004 remake of the original Metroid, hid a bonus inside itself: completing the game once unlocked the original as a separate playable mode. The 2009 remake of The Secret of Monkey Island went further, letting players switch between the original and remade versions at any moment with a single button press. That feature carried into the sequel and later appeared in Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary and Halo 2 Anniversary, the latter packaged inside Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

  The Nintendo DS and 3DS became hubs for this kind of dual-mode design. DS remasters and remakes included Super Mario 64 DS, Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, Final Fantasy III and IV, and Dragon Quest IV through VI. The 3DS added Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, Metroid: Samus Returns, and Star Fox 64 3D to the list. The 16-bit console generation had accelerated this appetite for remakes: Super Mario All-Stars collected the entire NES Mario series in one package and met with strong commercial success, followed by remake compilations for the Ninja Gaiden and Mega Man series.