Reading Games Writing: Remakes are Cringe and There’s Nothing We Can Do by TheGamingBritShow

less posting and more conversation

Nothing I love more than setting up a structure and then breaking it down, which is why this reading is of a video! Last August the SuperCulture discord (which you can join too!) ran a book club on Jordan Minor’s Video Game of the Year: A Year-by-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977 and in it Minor whined about having to pick between two very influential games that released in the same year, to which my response was, “It’s your book! Do whatever you want!”

I picked this video because it is a bold stance I like to see within the space. I’ve written before about how prevalent and useless an opinion is when it clearly lacks a spine or is presented with a fear of being “wrong.” Charlie (TheGamingBritShow) has bite in this script, another underrepresented element of most games writing. Video game remakes are one of those “forever topics” within the space, mostly because they continue to be made and so we continue to talk about them. You can find Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert complaining about the amount of remakes and sequels released in theaters in 1976. I find Charlie puts to words some feelings I’ve had about remakes and the loop of their production, and I’ll additionally be culling from the comments for some prompts.

How do you respect the original in a remake? Well, you can't. At the end of the day, the ultimate sign of respect would be to just accept the original as a singular perfect work in no need of alteration.

To clarify a remake as opposed to remaster: remakes change the original work into something new, remasters are generally straight up the same game but running on later hardware, with higher resolutions and frames than the original. The analog to film becomes difficult to uphold as a mirror due to film remasters not really doing anything other than maybe having a different transfer from the original reel than what you go on VHS as opposed to a 4K UHD Scan¹. However the content of the film remains untouched since film can capture in such detail and fidelity that we don’t need to reshoot a scene with updated cameras. However, with games, due to both the platforms evolving (PS4 being unable to play PS3 games, PC games from the early 2000’s requiring fan made patches to run on modern operating systems) and the rendering detail being pushed ever onwards towards realism, we either do a strict port of a game to run a little better on the newest console (think of the endless HD versions of games released on the PS3/Xbox 360) or end up re-making the same game and do re-shoot it through a modern graphics lens (Dead Space (2023), Demon’s Souls (2020), Shadow of the Colossus (2018)). Due to this remaking, we tend to make smaller changes to the structure and play of the game because we just can’t help it. Despite this, most are slaves to the original in such a way that they are not remakes in that they are taking the old and making something new. Instead they are intentionally creating replacements for the original work under the assumption that the original needed to be improved by adding higher fidelity visuals and a more “modern” control scheme and feel. This is how you end up with Charlie’s conclusion,

Silent Hill 2 remake may look like apocalyptic cringe, but even the odd tolerable big budget remake seems rather disposable and feels like they're keeping us walking in place. They not only ask us to pick apart the past to decide what was worthwhile, but they also ask us to canonize what being modern means. Validating the notion that the only form big budget games can take now is one where they have an over-the-shoulder camera perspective where you hold L1 to aim and R1 to shoot, by updating everything to that same model. When people talk about modernizing a game for the 2020s, that's all they really seem to be talking about. Being modern is this one perspective and control scheme all new major games are supposed to have for some reason. All this to say, I've accepted reality, but it hasn't made my dreams any less restless. And it would be nice to wake up and be somewhere different this time.

This is a follow up to an earlier thought he had, when talking about TimeSplitters and the evolution and homogenization of the modern shooter control scheme. There was a time before when not every game controlled exactly the same way, which led to experimentation and different feelings. My perspective on this has always been through the evolution of the Halo games, whose control scheme slowly over time became more and more like Call of Duty. Now we are dealing with a homogenization of what a big budget game is: an over-the-shoulder camera perspective where you hold L1 to aim and R1 to shoot, and remakes now have to adapt to this form. Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater will undoubtedly continue the homogenization that already began with the remake/re-issue of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater with Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence which took the top down camera perspective and changed it to an over-the-shoulder one.

Right now we're all being forced to live our life in this weird culture that loops every 20 years. Nobody who's seen the 1989 Little Mermaid cartoon would claim to have an understanding of the 1837 fairy tale. Yet today remakes do seem to be sold as a way to catch up on something missed.  So if you play SH2 Remake, don't kid yourself into thinking you've experienced Silent Hill 2. If that statement sounds at all offensive, I'm not sorry because it's just a statement of fact. 

This homogenization also leads to an erasure of history and of imagination in design. We have become built to only accept one control scheme for each genre that exists. As we remake previous iterations and force them to conform to the “modern” version, we erase the historical context they once occupied. This is the alteration that removes the work from being a preservation and into the kind of “cultural slop,” he regards them as. The naming convention often being to replicate the original serves as additional erasure in the time of SEO dictating what becomes the canonized entry in history. Search “Dead Space” and the served results are going to be the 2023 game, not the 2008 original. Films are culpable of this as well, but searching “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” more readily presents the 1956 original alongside the popular 1978 remake instead of only the 1993 one. However with more recent, and IP-ified films, you see that erasure continue such as with Charlie’s The Little Mermaid example and its 2023 remake.

Violin-scored tales of how the game is inaccessible to you this minute unfortunately won't change that reality. Silent Hill 2 is a PS2 game, not an abstract concept that needs to be bent into a different shape for consumption because it's been a couple of decades.

Platform-specific technology behind most games keeps them bound to existing only during their moments and not carried onwards. Xbox’s backwards compatibility is a rare exception and truly only exists due to their placement as 3rd of 3 when it comes to console sales for two generations now. Silent Hill 2 only ever existed as a disc for the PlayStation 2, a console whose life ended over a decade ago. The game could easily exist alongside Jak and Daxter and Dark Cloud on the “PS2 Classics” for the current PlayStation 5 ecosystem but instead it would be more profitable for Konami to chase the success of Resident Evil remakes and remake the game in the same “modern” style. 

We might as well let the computers turn out this kind of cultural slop…After all, is there even a big difference between a human taking the original game and then mapping it onto the look of whatever the most current games look like, and a computer doing it?

Erwin Panofsky stated that, “However, if commercial art be defined as all art not primarily produced in order to gratify the creative urge of its maker but primarily intended to meet the requirements of a patron or a buying public, it must be said that noncommercial art is the exception rather than the rule, and a fairly recent and not always felicitous exception at that.” Yet in the age of creatives being told pitching new ideas is harder than it has ever been, when Disney is becoming an ouroboros of continually remaking worse versions of its own movies, when Sony continually resells us “remasters” of games that already exist within its current console ecosystem, I cannot view remakes as anything other than greed personified in the form of recognizable images that lure you to bed them and shower them with praise and money.

That description of Konami sounds like the programming of an AI, and if Silent Hill 2 Remake is to receive any praise, then there's no doubt in my mind a lot of gamers will be perfectly happy with AI being used to create whole games in the near future. And when it comes to remakes at least, I'm honestly prepared to just let them have that future. A limp regurgitation of something that came before, offering us little more than a thought experiment as to what something written in the language of the past might look like fed through the accepted language of the present.

@SigtryggrWithWhiskers

The main difference between your comparison with the little mermaid and modern remakes is that remakes used to be intrinsically artistic (if you ask me, at least), since back then people would usually take old stories and either adapt them to a completely different medium like with the little mermaid or to tell basically an entirely different story like with scarface, which has a completely different narrative and message than the 1932 original, essentially using old stories as a jumping off point and not a blueprint. Modern remakes are not trying to create something new, in fact, they are trying as much as humanly possible to remind you of something you've experienced before, and are created entirely with that purpose in mind, while also using modern technology to justify a reason to even remake that original story in the first place.

One of my favorite “remakes” is Blade Runner, which is an adaptation of the excellent novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. The 1985 film is more remake than adaptation as it looks towards the novel only for inspiration and is picky about what it decides to adapt and what it decides to exclude for the purposes of its own story. Deckard has no wife in the film, there is no emotion controlling machine, no electric sheep, no kipple, no empathetic religion, and instead of a near-vacant world the one portrayed in the film is overcrowded and dense and eternally experiencing rainfall. Blade Runner doesn’t respect the original novel. Instead it pilfers it for ideas and contributes its own new ones. Blade Runner 2049 was the rare sequel to introduce new fiction instead of endlessly repeating the images of the past. Even when it does so, with a deep fake Rachael, it is emphatically rejected by the work itself. The 1997 Westwood Studios game Blade Runner exists alongside the fiction of the film but chooses to incorporate much more from the book, including replicating a scene in which the protagonist is captured by a replicant replication of the LAPD. Each of these adaptations remakes the original fiction for its own purposes, which is more than I can say for something like Dead Space (2023) or The Last of Us Part 1. At least Final Fantasy VII Remake, even though I didn’t agree with its bloating of Midgar into a 30 hour RPG, is attempting to integrate awareness of the original work and its own alterations into the fiction itself.

@CramerGamer99

While I understand and mostly agree with your main point, I think the whole sale handwaving of remakes as a concept is a bit narrow minded. It isn't just new teams adapting old work, it's also the original teams reinterpreting older works of theirs while expanding scope and introducing new ideas (easy example of this is FF7 Remake). It could also be a case of the original creator updating their original work to make it more in line with their original vision, which wasn't achievable with the technology at the time (example: George Lucas and the Star Wars Special Editions²). People don't carry this same sort of cynicism towards song covers/remixes, or stage plays having new runs with modified scenes/cast members. Many famous artists revisited and remade their own works years apart- look up the history of Da Vinci and “Madonna of the Rocks”. It's common in the music world as well, and has been for centuries. 

Shakespeare isn't just remade and adapted in today's time to modern media- Shakespeare's plays themselves were also tweaked and changed throughout their original runs as well.

Art isn't all originality. It's also iteration, evolution, and adaptation.

Stage plays exist purely for the crowd currently in front of the performance, whereas film and game remakes exist as permanent fixtures to be visited and revisited  time and time again. I would have to consult someone who is more familiar with the music world but I think the breadth of music tracks in existence and being created vastly overshadows the amount of covers/remixes and the field is not being seemingly dominated by those cover/remixes.

Quality will always overturn broad statements such as “remakes are cringe,” in the music world it’d be Alien Ant Farm’s “Smooth Criminal,” which slaps just as much as Michael Jackson’s original. I can’t say the same for Fall Out Boy’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” a Billy Joel track he himself doesn’t quite understand the appeal of given it was a lark of a production and also Fall Out Boy’s isn’t even in chronological order! Film has The Thing (1982) as the most beloved remake and too many terribly obvious ones to list here. For video games… I’m not actually quite sure if any remake has superseded the original in quality to the point of replacement, perhaps Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions?

To the point of creatives returning to their prior work, unfortunately many times these remakes are being made by entirely separate studios from the original creators. The Dead Space remake was handled by EA’s Motive Studio, because they had shut down the original developer, Visceral Games in 2017. Now EA is picking at the corpse to renew profits off of Visceral’s previous labor. Even then it isn’t enough, as they reportedly canceled pre-production on a Dead Space 2 remake due to lower than expected sales. Now Motive is free to pursue other IP: Battlefield and Iron Man. What happens when the IP tent collapses? Will we simply continue to consume our tail until the circle tightens to the point that my offhand joke about Ghost of Tsushima 2 Remastered coming before the original game releases becomes reality? What are next?

1.  I am aware that even this process can call into question what the “original” work is supposed to look like, with the most notable example being The Matrix.

2.  This would not be my first choice to cite!! Naughty Dog is likely the closest we have to George Lucas’ Special Editions. They are seemingly compelled to continually revisit The Last of Us.