prosekhans

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (3/17/2023)

Added 2023-03-17 23:06:03 +0000 UTC

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about everything that’s happened in the video game industry this past week. Well, usually, but not a lot has actually happened this past week solely in games. Those that did are also kind of bummers! So this week, I’m going to talk a little bit about something that’s slowly been taking over the industry: remakes.

Why Are So Many Games Being Remade Right Now?

Good question! So far in 2023, we’ve had a fair few remakes as major tentpole titles. This of course won’t sustain, the rest of the year is packed with newly-created games that can’t be classified as remakes. But in early 2023, we’ve had Dead Space, Metroid Prime, and Resident Evil 4 to hold up as major titles for the quarter. These aren’t just (potential) sales successes either, these remakes are some of the most critically-acclaimed games in some time. It’s likely that the latest Kirby title, itself a remake, will sell a cool million or so off the name alone. If you lay claim to some of that nostalgia, whether through direct work or IP ownership, it’s increasingly starting to feel like dereliction of duty if you are not monetizing it through a new remake or remaster.

It’s not hard to see why remakes happen with such frequency from that perspective. They’re usually decent guarantees that an existing enthusiast audience is eager for it, a non-enthusiast audience remembers it, and a brand new audience from a larger-than-ever gaming industry can be exposed to it for the first time. But that’s the financial argument, which is kind of obvious to everyone. Instead, I’d like to make a creative argument for remakes.

At E3 2019, which was Final Fantasy VII Remake’s re-debut, when I was still working at Game Informer I got to sit down with Kitase in a casual conversation. Kitase himself had worked on the original game as the Director and Scenario Writer and viewed a remake as a fun challenge. He spoke about getting a chance to try again at something that a lot of people felt was perfect the first time around and, for a lot of creators, that’s not really possible. You make the thing and move on.

More than that, though, he talked about how the team making the game played Final Fantasy VII growing up and were vocal about their love for it. Despite loving the game, though, they didn’t just want to make the same game over again, they wanted to make the game they believed Final Fantasy VII could be back when they were first playing it. Kitase remarked that he knew the game wouldn’t be trapped in the past because people who played it then weren’t looking at a game they developed, but at a game that built a foundation for their development.

(In retrospect, man, I really should have seen that FFVIIR twist coming, huh.)

I don’t know if every remake ever made has these same kind of epiphanies or motivations for the people making them, but I do think it’s very easy to look at game remakes and consider them bereft of new creativity. Even the shot-for-shot remakes like, say, Link’s Awakening on Switch are joyful expressions of love for a game that mean something for the people making them. In an ideal world, that should translate to meaning something to the player, too.

I feel like there’s an inherent cynicism about remakes that views them as side projects or inferior work, which I get to an extent. They’re definitely safer choices to make. Games take so long to make now that you could start a project that completely misreads the market in five years, but remaking a classic like Resident Evil 4 will likely not find itself out of step with the marketplace in 6 months or 60 months. It’s why Nintendo could just release Metroid Prime Remastered whenever they want because there’s no market trends they really need to consider there.

This isn’t to argue that all remakes are good or that all-remakes would be a good direction for the industry, but it’s not baffling to figure out why we have so many right now. They’re easy bets at the moment and they give new players an experience that older players used to have. Someone who wasn’t gaming in 2006 can next week experience one of the best games of all time within a zeitgeist of other players experiencing it. And sometimes, like Final Fantasy VII Remake, the games can fuck with our existing knowledge in a way that some will appreciate and some very much will not.

Either way, I would like to play Resident Evil 4 now, please.