Remakes, remasters, and revisions: an exploration of the gaming industry's greatest idiosyncrasy

Or, revitalising a game to match your memory of it.

Curiously, video games are the only form of entertainment to encourage their creators to routinely revisit past works. Save for a select few cases within the film industry, notably Psycho to nominal and the Rebuild of Evangelion to commentative effect, passive entertainment preserves the sanctity of an original work. Granted, the process of upscaling celluloid, wherein prints are mastered to a higher definition for contemporary distribution, serves as a parallel means of remastering; the film itself retains data to a greater end than its fixed digital kin. However, due to the instrinsic technical elements of the form, video games are dependent on real-time measures of rendering. Unlike film, steadfast in its chronology, games have a number of variables influencing their delivery.

For instance, when Grand Theft Auto V debuted upon the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, its presentation was perceived through the prism of those consoles’ aged hardware. Two generations later, its arrival on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S raised the fidelity closer to the intention of its conception. This case is perhaps closest to the film industry, in that it exemplifies a port: a translation of the same game with identical assets and functionality, produced to a higher standard of visual excellence. Whether one is watching Citizen Kane on VHS or 4K Blu-Ray, they are viewing a copy of the original master print. The same is true for a port; the game is adjusted to run itself on the hardware it is being exercised upon. Though personal computers are siginificantly less standardised than consoles, a suite of toggles are available to aid optimisation.

The graphical discrepancies between platforms, as in the case of Mortal Kombat 1 on the Nintendo Switch, can be rather noticeable.

As distinguishing visual upgrades with each console generation lessen, instead focusing upon improving mechanical intricacy and animation quality, porting has become a fixture of our current era. However, the wily dialect of marketing teams has employed an alternative phrase to sell these titles upon: remaster. This moniker typically concerns ports that feature a greater deal of remade assets, imbuing staid components with fresh detail. Thus, in the instance of Mass Effect Legendary Edition, developed upon the trilogy’s core of Unreal Engine 3, its alterations were on identical terms to the games’ initial development. In the earliest stages of its design, the team at BioWare spoke to Epic Games about transcribing the game to Unreal Engine 4. Due to the bespoke code penned for UE3 that did not have a peer in UE4, each title would have to be remade from scratch; little of the base game would remain. Evidently, the antiquated framework of the engine did not prevent the game from presenting itself as a graphical marvel, raising the standard of lighting, control, and character model. Animations, nevertheless, were distinctly of their generation; the excellent storytelling remained sound, fortunately.

This leads to an examination of the often nebulous distinction of a remaster against a remake. Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, asserting its ambition through its title, can be perceived as a remake. Character models were revised, AI was improved, and dialogue was re-recorded. However, with respect to its mechanics, the game is identical in its structure, cinematography, and gameplay, despite being developed upon Capcom’s RE Engine rather than the original’s MT Framework.

Considering that both of the aforementioned engines are proprietary to Capcom, transferring assets for the development of this deluxe remaster may not have required measures of recreation. Therefore, despite sanctioning better physics and smoother animations, it is indeed a remaster, rather than a remake. Regarding the latter, the term itself can be considered an indication of ambition, signifying a complete reprisal, if not reimagining of the original sheet music. In the case of the Crash Bandicoot N’ Sane Trilogy, the team at Vicarious Visions used their in-house Alchemy engine to recreate Naughty Dog’s punishing platformer - a decent twenty-one years from its first spin to market. Curiously, as the level progression and quirks remained in tact, the game was marketed as an advanced remaster of a deluxe standard, had Capcom an influence on marketing. In an interview with ArsTechnica, designer Dan Tanguay noted the team had only the 3D meshes from the three titles, requiring unorthodox means of decoding.

"The original engine was specifically built for PlayStation 1 … Naughty Dog pushed [the PS1] to the limits. They made a fantastic engine for doing that. That engine didn't see the light of day beyond PlayStation 1, as far as I know, and it certainly wasn't usable by us. Any code, anything like that, we didn't have access to."

Tellingly, the article referred to the game as a “remaster with no old code”; advetising campaigns promised the collection retaineed the integrity of their prior iteration, simply delivering them to a modern standard. Principally, however, Vicarious Visions had produced a remake. Yet, the timeless folly of watching Crash suffer a grizzly fate remained so.

New threads, with respect to both coding and clothing.

Conversely, when Square Enix announced an gaudy retelling of the Final Fantasy 7 saga, beginning with an eponymous Remake, the paradigm delineating remasters and remakes shifted once again. Evidently, the game endeavoured to reimagine the three-disc epic for a two-Blu-Ray generation, elaborating upon greater ends than Cloud’s hair. Indeed, the studio’s laboured recreation of Midgar imbued with the city with a suite of side quests, cannily portending a coming crisis at the mercy of the One-Winged Angel. Wait, a game bearing remake as a suffix of an expansive classic limited itself to one location alone? The notion of a remake became an overarching project, rather than an individual endeavour. Furthermore, the team behind Remake considered it to be a commentative prelude; the game itself deviated from canon through changing the chronology of events. Thus, Rebirth did as its name suggested, christening the burgeoning trilogy as a renewed take on its source material. However, Square Enix have not reported on Rebirth’s sales to date; one can infer its twisting tale to have cast an impenetrable spell against its accessibility.

Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi believes its successor will be “one of the most loved, most popular games in the whole history of video games once again.” No pressure, then.

Perhaps the phrasing is a matter of semantic concern. If marketing for a particular title benefits from a fielty to its history, then lessening the profundity of a remake may aid in placating consumers. The upcoming Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater will closely follow in the radiant potency of Silent Hill 2’s flashlight beam of success, prioritising mechanical adjustments against creative reimagination. Unfortunately, we are consigned to this cursed mortal coil wherein Horizon Zero Dawn has received a remaster before The Simpsons: Hit and Run has become accessible on contemporary platforms, either via a remake or a clean port. As Homer Simpson is known to say: D’oh!