When the demo for the remake of Resident Evil 4 dropped in March, one presiding concern stood above all others: Would Leon say “Where’s everyone going? Bingo?”
The line comes early in the game, right after our coiffured all-American hero has seen his police escort burned alive. Leon is about to be butchered by pitchfork and chainsaw-wielding Spanish farmers, but then a tolling bell suddenly psychically summons them away. The line is amazingly stupid, and if he doesn’t say it, I thought after seeing news of the demo, I’m joining the mob outside the Capcom offices. (Reader, rest assured, the villagers attended bingo.)
The culture industry loves a remake; it also loves a reboot, a remaster, a sequel, a prequel, a multiverse, and a cinematic universe. In a recent long read for Vulture, writers Josef Adalian and Lane Brown warned that TV is headed into an era of “safe ideas,” comparing the times to come to the movie industry of the 2010s. Brand recognition and cultural stagnation await; Harry Potter and Twilight series are in the works. Other media also run the risk of falling into this same trap; that’s the danger with sure things.
Of course, there is nothing inherently debased about remakes. No remakes, no Scarface or True Grit; in a broad sense, Shakespeare made a career of it. It is a censorious and misguided impulse to claim that a remake undermines its subject. You might find it harder to convince someone to watch the original Wicker Man if they’ve just sat through Nick Cage hollering about bees (not me, that movie rocks), but in general, this logic is weird math. Where there was one, now there are two. A remake is just an interpretation—it should not replace the original.
But for video games, the math is often a subtraction. So far this year, studios have reimagined four classic games (to varying degrees of change) brilliantly: Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime, Dead Space, and, most recently, System Shock, possibly heralding a remake golden age.
Contrary to other artforms, there is a tendency in the games industry to talk about remakes as replacements. This is not to say that the history of film and literature isn’t also riddled with innumerable losses, great works burned up in disasters or walled off on obscure streaming platforms. But with video games, where old versions get swapped out for the new ones on platforms like Steam or the PlayStation Store, the replacement of the original work is particularly baked into the process. And a remake is not a replacement, no matter how superior.
Games are remade for the same cultural industrial reasons as anything else: Brand recognition sells. On top of that, gamers are nostalgic suckers, a susceptibility that derives from interactivity: Players visit game worlds in a way that makes them pine for those places like they pine for home. In fact, in a recent interview with Inverse, Square Enix developer Yoshinori Kitase noted that in Japanese this is called the “nostalgia filter”: the memory of something being more beautiful than it actually was.
In this vein, one type of remake is a simple “remaster,” like Metroid Prime, which sharpened the graphics to meet fans’ nostalgia-filtered memories. This kind of upgrade is often enough to impress punters: Bluepoint Studios beautified Demon’s Souls to such an extent that it supposedly put pressure on the graphics team working on Elden Ring.
But there are deeper ways a developer can remake a game. Mark Brown of The Game Maker’s Toolkit broke these down recently in a YouTube video about the Resident Evil 4 reboot titled “Why Capcom is the King of Remakes.” The first is “modernization,” adding newer gameplay concepts like fast travel and quicksave. The second is addressing criticism: The artist gets to go back and fix all the inevitable galling failures that make revisiting art so painful. (If only writers could do this with their pieces.) And the final is accessibility. Sometimes making goals easier or clearer; other times it means adding in options for disabled players. Brown argued that by accomplishing all three, Capcom made RE4 feel fresh to old fans and neophytes alike.
But crucially, Brown points out, the original Resident Evil 4 is still available. Not so for titles like Warcraft III: Reforged and the remake of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, both of which erased their previous iterations in favor of inferior remasters. This conundrum grows out of the public’s relationship with consumer technologies. Games are tied to the development of tech like processors and GPUs; this means that games are also tied to the false vision of technological progress as a straight line of continuous improvement rather than a chaotic series of hit-or-miss implementations. Video games often seem rooted in hype and obsoletion cycles, to be swept away like old iPhones or social media accounts. (In this sense, games mirror the lack of preservation that exists across the internet broadly.)
At the most obvious level, this loss is troubling for the history of the artform—and the history of technology, for that matter. Games, no matter how obscure or bad, are a record of human culture, whether that be the global origins of a specific chipset or the narrative patterns of the time period. You can tell a lot about an era from how people chose to play.
The less apparent baked-in assumption here is that games are consistently improving, rather than passing through different artistic styles and trends. This idea differs from the mindset of players who see the original as a sacred text, and get annoyed at the most minor changes in lore or voice actors. But we do not think literature improves like science, and advancements in CGI have not improved films. Watch Nosferatu (now being remade by Robert Eggers) and you’ll see F. W. Murnau did just fine adapting Bram Stoker’s Dracula before the advent of sound and color.
So artistic quality does not necessarily improve in lockstep with technology. But in games, there is a tendency to equate the new with better. Yet, playing these four recent remakes, I was shocked by how the things that had survived felt so good: Their “linear” worlds did not feel old-fashioned. They fomented a desire to play the reboot and the original—and a hope that I will always be able to do both.
