The Video Game Remake Boom Is Producing Nostalgic Hype and Uncomfortable Questions
Video game remakes like ‘Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’ are the definitive single-player trend of the past decade. But they also represent a distinct set of challenges for an art form that doesn’t really “age” like other entertainment does.The Video Game Remake Boom Is Producing Nostalgic Hype and Uncomfortable Questions
Video game remakes like ‘Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’ are the definitive single-player trend of the past decade. But they also represent a distinct set of challenges for an art form that doesn’t really “age” like other entertainment does.
Last year, HBO introduced millions of viewers to The Last of Us, a postapocalyptic TV drama about a weary smuggler named Joel and his precious cargo, a teen girl named Ellie, who together embark on a perilous trek across the United States, a wasteland of zombified bio-mutants and cynical survivalist factions. Of course, The Last of Us was originally a video game, developed by Naughty Dog and released in June 2013 for the PlayStation 3. It was one of the most beloved original titles of its generation and at the height of critical regard of video games as a creative medium.
In anticipation of the live-action adaptation on HBO, Naughty Dog also remade The Last of Us for the PlayStation 5. This remake would mostly consist of technical improvements: better graphics, sound, and performance to put the older game, which had already been remastered, on par with the technical specs of its sequel, The Last of Us Part II, released seven years after the first game. This would put Part I and Part II in the same console generation, thus reinforcing the continuity of the two games and seemingly rejuvenating a modern classic. Still, the remade The Last of Us Part I rubbed some players the wrong way, on a fundamental level. Why is this relatively recent, already-remastered game getting a remake? In a review for Kotaku, Ari Notis panned Part I as “technologically impressive but ultimately unnecessary” and furthermore questioned the rationale driving the general trend of video game remakes.
Like it or not, video game remakes are the definitive single-player trend of the past decade. Video games are hardly the only form of entertainment to turn remakes into big business, but the gaming industry faces unique challenges. The production of single-player video games has in recent years become exorbitantly expensive and increasingly risky at the level of a Last of Us. Remakes, like sequels—as Hollywood knows—represent safe bets on established titles. But video game remakes also represent a relatively new and fraught path to preservation for an art form that’s based in code, bound to machines, and prone to breaking in the great shuffle from one console generation to the next every decade or so. The remake trend brings a lot of nostalgic hype but also a lot of uncomfortable questions. What should a remake be, and how—and when—does a game earn one? And does the current glut of remakes represent a passing fad or a new, persistent phase in the precarious life cycle of video games?
The remake of the moment is none other than Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, one of the year’s most widely anticipated titles, released on Thursday, and the second installment in the ongoing serialization that’s refashioning Final Fantasy VII—originally launched as a three-disc set for the PlayStation in January 1997—into a trilogy. This trilogy is conspicuously (and delightfully) untrue to its source material. The original Final Fantasy VII was a turn-based role-playing game with low-poly character models and pre-rendered backgrounds; the first title in the new trilogy, somewhat confusingly called Final Fantasy VII Remake, is a real-time action RPG with a far more credibly cinematic style. But, perhaps more importantly, it isn’t strictly a remake—narratively—and neither is Rebirth. These new releases are as much remakes as they are subversive sorts of meta-sequels to the original game, with its characters in explicit rebellion against the old plot. Naoki Hamaguchi, the director of Rebirth, explained his outlook on these remakes to The Ringer: “This is a trilogy, and if the first title and second title are very similar in feel and play, then perhaps there would be less excitement going into the third. We really wanted to keep that feeling of excitement and newness.”
Remake—remember, the first of the trilogy—has sold more than 7 million copies to date, exceeding sales of the most recent title in the mainline series, Final Fantasy XVI, and ranking among the bestselling single-player titles of the past five years. The Last of Us Part I, despite the doubts about its necessity, is still a huge selling point for the PlayStation 5. These are two very different, equally viable ways to remake an enduring title: The Last of Us Part I is a faithful and straightforward remake of its predecessor; Remake and Rebirth are radical reimaginings of Final Fantasy VII. But other remakes function more as substitutions for their source materials. Capcom has at this point remade several of the mainline entries of Resident Evil, including RE2 and RE3, two games that haven’t been widely available to play since the GameCube. Bloober Team is developing a remake of Silent Hill 2, a survival-horror classic that’s been similarly unavailable for more than a decade now. Ubisoft is remaking the original Splinter Cell after decades of poor reception to later entries in the series. So remakes have also recently become lifelines for franchises on the brink of discontinuation.
Resident Evil, in 2002, was a novel release at the time. There’d been plenty of colorizations of handheld games, like those on the Game Boy, and regional rereleases of certain titles, but not many full-scale remakes. The original Resident Evil, released on the PlayStation in 1996, was a defining title for the first generation of 3D graphics on consoles, but it was also a janky game with spotty localization, stilted voice performances, and rigid controls. Capcom would overhaul the gameplay and presentation of the series in later titles, most notably Resident Evil 4, but first, in 2002, Capcom opted for modest enhancements: better graphics, stronger acting, smoother localization, updated controls, remixed set pieces, and a few gameplay tweaks. The remake was a modest hit in its release year but, with time, came to be regarded as the definitive version of Resident Evil. Later, in the same decade, Konami would launch The Twin Snakes, a remake of Metal Gear Solid, for the GameCube, and Crystal Dynamics would release Anniversary, a remake of the original Tomb Raider, for multiple platforms. These remakes wouldn’t simply propagate classic games to newer consoles—they’d ideally ensure that these games got to age a bit more gracefully on later hardware. The remake trend had begun in earnest.
Fans had been clamoring for similar changes to Final Fantasy VII since the early 2000s. This was less than a decade after the game’s release, during the era of the PlayStation 2, when Square Enix was finally able to incorporate realistic character models and lip-synched voice performances into its epic Japanese RPGs—and on a single disc, no less. These advancements came fast.
At E3 2005, Sony presented a legendary tech demo for a potential remake of Final Fantasy VII, targeting the PlayStation 3. The proof of concept was purely cinematic, re-creating the game’s iconic opening cutscene—the long aerial shot tracking Aerith and Cloud in the steampunk city of Midgar—with greater detail and smoother performance. The tech demo was a huge deal, one of the most widely hyped showcases in the history of the now sadly defunct E3. But the tech demo conspicuously didn’t show any gameplay, and Square Enix wasn’t actually announcing a full-scale remake of Final Fantasy VII and wouldn’t officially do so for another 10 years. But at this point, a remake seemed inevitable. Fans, left to their imaginations in the meantime, came to expect a new and improved Final Fantasy VII, with an emphasis on graphical upgrades; maybe incorporating some of the lore established in the spinoffs, such as Advent Children and Crisis Core; and perhaps some modest gameplay updates, as well.
Of course, remakes weren’t the only option for renewing a classic video game. You also had remasters—developers would effectively rerelease an existing game with upgraded assets and improved performance, often targeting newer hardware. This would produce a game that maybe looked a bit prettier or ran a lot smoother but still fundamentally was the same game. Remasters are relatively easy to produce, at least compared to redeveloping a title in a different engine from scratch, but they also are inherently limited in their (re-)creative potential: A remaster can only do so much to iterate upon the underlying game. Earlier this month, Crystal Dynamics released Tomb Raider I-III Remastered, updating the Tomb Raider games developed for the original PlayStation. These remasters—to a fault, in the eyes of some reviewers—for the most part preserved the old-school design, including the wonky movement, designed before the popularization and streamlining of dual-stick controls for console games.
Over the years, Crystal Dynamics has taken a variety of approaches to rejuvenating Tomb Raider; the company made Anniversary but also rebooted Tomb Raider altogether—successfully, if also controversially—with the most recent Survivor Trilogy, which spans Tomb Raider (2013) through Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018). Dallas Dickinson, an executive producer at Crystal Dynamics, explained the rationale: “We have an iconic game with an iconic character and iconic moments. We don’t want to change much, if any, of that.” The remasters are “love letters to the fans of the originals,” he says, but “with a few options to make them more accessible to new players.” Remastered, in particular, lets players opt for slightly smoother textures and a somewhat more modern control scheme. For the most part, though, Dickinson says, “This is the original Tomb Raider experience from the 20th century.”
Remakes, in contrast with remasters, represent a wider mix of liberties and intentions. Yasuhiro Ampo, codirector of the newer Resident Evil 2 (2019) as well as the even newer Resident Evil 4 (2023), says, “We were motivated by the challenge of taking what made that experience fun and remaking it with a modern design philosophy and the latest technology.” He adds: “Audiences expect changes that carry more value than just better graphics while also not wanting changes to the core parts of the experience they enjoyed.” Historically, Resident Evil has been a series full of iconic monsters and extravagant set pieces and unforgettable one-liners. The remakes have increasingly changed a lot about the originals mechanically while otherwise faithfully re-creating a lot of the classic scenes and preserving the tried-and-true spirit of soapy action-horror schlock. Ampo says he’d ideally want to travel the world and personally survey fans about their experiences with Resident Evil, but even then, he says there’s an art to reconciling those old experiences with new conventions. “Not just doing what people say,” Ampo explains, “but discerning and pinpointing the needs behind why they say what they do. I think that’s the biggest challenge.”
The newer Resident Evil 2 also clarified the kind of classics most likely to benefit from a remake: dramatic titles with cinematic aspirations exceeding the capabilities of older hardware, especially games from the formative decade of 3D gaming on consoles. This isn’t always the case; Nintendo recently and rather successfully remade both The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and Super Mario RPG for the Switch. But Final Fantasy VII, Resident Evil 1-4, Dead Space, The Last of Us, Demon’s Souls, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, and Lollipop Chainsaw are mostly mature titles from the Xbox 360 and the first three generations of the PlayStation.
Remakes are nostalgia grabs, yes, and a wide variety of industries know that well. But video game remakes in particular also happen to be work-arounds for a medium that struggles to preserve older works. The journalist Stephen Totilo, who has covered video games for nearly two decades and now publishes the independent newsletter Game File, sees some problems as inherent to games as software itself. “Video games risk disappearance more so than other forms of entertainment,” Totilo says, either due to rights disputes or code rot. Take Silent Hill 2, a hugely influential title and yet a game that’s effectively been discontinued on newer hardware since the maligned Silent Hill HD Collection in 2012 for the Xbox 360. The only thing keeping the series alive, in a commercial sense, is the aforementioned Bloober Team remake. Even on PC, a platform without the backward compatibility issues that plague consoles, old games (even bestselling classics) eventually disappear. “There is no formalized system,” Totilo says, “for how the old games remain playable, accessible, and relevant.”
The original Resident Evil has only recently resurfaced on Sony’s games subscription service, PlayStation Plus, after decades of displacement by the much more widely available remake. Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, the producer at Capcom who led development for the remake of Resident Evil 4, wasn’t especially concerned about the persistence of the earlier games. “For players that have played both [old and new versions], and for us,” Hirabayashi says, “no matter what happens, the games will always live on in our hearts.”
Many of the developers whom I interviewed pushed back against the common assumption that remakes come at the expense of brand-new titles or new series entries. Square Enix and Capcom both continue to produce new mainline entries in Final Fantasy and Resident Evil, respectively. Atlus is reportedly targeting a 2025 launch for Persona 6, and Naughty Dog is reportedly developing a brand-new single-player title apart from The Last of Us and Uncharted. In fact, Hirabayashi describes a sort of synergy between remakes and sequels in a long-running series such as Resident Evil. “The recent mainline entries are in a position to open a new path,” Hirabayashi says, “and the remakes are in a position to stay close to players who have been with the series up until now.” The remake of Resident Evil 4 was a hit, but then so too was Resident Evil Village, released just a couple of years earlier.
Last year, the Game Awards nominated six titles for Game of the Year. The top honor ultimately went to Larian Studios’ turn-based fantasy role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3.
In the month before the ceremony, there was lots of knotty discourse about the nomination of the Resident Evil 4 remake. There would’ve been something inherently anticlimactic or otherwise unsatisfying, some argued, about a Game of the Year win for Resident Evil 4—a new game, technically, but really, on some level, an old game that already had its time in the spotlight. (The honor also eluded Resident Evil 2 at the Game Awards in 2019 and Final Fantasy VII Remake in 2020.)
Remakes have become an odd time-warping aspect of video games’ legacies. A couple of weeks ago, I was struck by a bit of dissent from the popular video game critic Yahtzee Croshaw in his otherwise favorable review of Persona 3 Reload, the recent remake of Persona 3 Portable. Yahtzee was articulating some discomfort with the impulse to modernize old games in order to bring them in line with current conventions. “It’s erasing history for the sake of homogeneity,” Yahtzee argued. “There’s a unique value to watching the process by which a concept finds its groove.” I don’t fully agree with the complaint in this particular case, as Atlus ported Persona 3 Portable to multiple platforms last year before releasing Reload, thus ensuring—at least for now—that you can play both the older and newer versions. But of course I understand what he’s identifying in the long run, especially when I think instead about Resident Evil. The original game is great but rough, and the remake is vital in its own right. But the original Resident Evil is a great game nevertheless, and an important one. It should live on in our game libraries, too.
So much of the ambiguity about the purpose and worthiness of remakes, remasters, and other rereleases stems from the old existential question about video games: Are we talking about art or software? Among developers, Totilo identifies “a tendency to constantly iterate, because that’s what good game development is.” He points to a recent interview with Matthew Gallant, a longtime developer at Naughty Dog and the director of The Last of Us Part 1 as well as The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered. There was some consternation that the remaster of Part 2 was only a few years removed from the original release, within the same console generation; Gallant was expressing some frustration with this outlook on remasters. His goal, as director of the remaster, was to offer “the best experience with all the hardware features”—spatial audio, haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, and so on—“on a PS5 native version of the game,” and the fussing about Part 2’s age was all beside the point. Gallant was talking about a remaster of a sequel, to be clear, but he might as well also be talking about remakes as yet another means of defying obsolescence. Here’s the new and improved version. Why cling to an outdated release? Why not remake the remake of the original Resident Evil at this point? The game is old, we’ve come so far, and clearly there’s no riper time than right now.
