This week, a takeover by our friends at Pushing Buttons, the Guardian’s pre-eminent weekly gaming newsletter. Keith Stuart writes about the sudden deluge of remastered games flooding the market and what all this monetised nostalgia means for the future of gaming – Gwilym
The past is a big deal in the video games industry right now. Hardly a month goes by when we’re not being tempted by a new retro mini console, whether that’s a cutesy Nintendo or a demure ZX Spectrum (a new version of which is arriving in November, complete with rubbery keys and 48 legendary games). And this year’s release schedule is absolutely crammed with remasters of classic titles. In April, the video game news site Kotaku listed 30 old timers being exhumed and revived for 2024, including The Last of Us Part II , Tomb Raider 1-3 and Star Wars: Dark Forces. Thirty! And the article missed a few! October alone will see updated versions of horror adventures Until Dawn, Silent Hill 2 and Clock Tower, as well as Lego Harry Potter. Earlier this week, Sony held a livestream of upcoming PlayStation 5 releases and one of the most popular reveals was Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered, an overhauled collection of two admittedly wonderful action role-playing titles from the turn of the century, designed by the creative team who would go on to make the Uncharted series.
In many ways, what we’re seeing here is exactly what’s going on in the music and film industries, where staple albums and movies can be endlessly repackaged with glossy new art cards and mysteriously unearthed demos and deleted scenes, and silly fools like me will buy them. I now have Jaws in at least six different versions, and I dread to think how much Prince has cost me in the last five years. With games, I suppose the other thing we’re getting is access. Unless you have a giant games room where you can keep all your old machines plugged in and functioning, it’s more convenient to get your old favourites on your latest machine – and that way they’re also visually updated so they look how your rose-tinted memory recalls them, rather than the savagely glitchy low-resolution reality.
Right now, I’m not sure we can really blame the games business for falling back on its own past glories, though. As we’ve been seeing from the many hundreds of layoffs throughout the industry over the past year, making games is an increasingly expensive and risky endeavour. Development budgets for the larger titles are now estimated to be between $200m and $500m, and those that come with longterm online multiplayer modes also require ongoing maintenance and extra content for several years. Sony’s recent disastrous launch of the “hero shooter” game Concord, which was in development for eight years but was withdrawn from sale after two low-selling weeks, is a horror story the rest of the industry will look at with their jaws – and wallets – on the floor. We’re in a period of huge uncertainty where previously reliable genres such as open-world adventures and online shooters are overcrowded. Gamers want something new but nobody knows what that is, and nobody seems keen on the idea of sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into finding out.
So now we’re in a period of heavily monetised nostalgia, and so far it’s working. I can’t wait to play the new versions of Silent Hill 2 and Legacy of Kain, and I’m far from alone. But I hope that the message the games industry takes from this is not “people just want old things”, but “people sure do like weird stuff”. Because that’s what a lot of this year’s remastered games were: weird and offbeat and janky and difficult. It’s fascinating to me that some of the most celebrated titles of recent times – Baldur’s Gate 3, Dragon’s Dogma 2, the Dark Souls series, Dredge, Cult of the Lamb, Vampire Survivors – have been strange, complicated, hard and often really, really odd. There’s a connection here that will perhaps help the mainstream games industry clamber out of its creative trough. Weird ideas hang around; we can never quite dispel them. Big games have become too fixated on providing an airbrushed version of the hero’s journey – the good, true protagonist overcoming obstacles to defeat the evil monster. Video games are not Hollywood – we’re here for experience more than emotional identification. We want to have strange new feelings.
The recently released independent game UFO 50 is a collection of, yes, 50 retro-ish games designed to resemble the entire back catalogue of a fictitious development studio, from the 1980s to the early modern era. All the games are new but they look old – and play like new. Confused? Don’t worry. When describing the game on its Steam page, developer Mossmouth stated, “We carefully chose what elements to modernise. Every game shares a unique 32-color palette and we took great efforts to make them look and sound like actual 8-bit titles from the 80s. On the other hand, it was important to us that UFO 50 was fun and surprising for modern players, so we chose not to limit ourselves to the genres and design conventions of the past.”
This feels like a really good blueprint for the rest of the industry to consider: games that look to the classics for inspiration, because those games were great, but then figure out how to completely update them for new audiences in surprising ways. I feel like this is what the film industry has done over the past five years with all its elevated horror movies, such as Midsommar and Us, which have effectively hoovered up tropes and ideas from 1970s supernatural and folk horror flicks and re-tuned them for the modern ear. Games publishers need to slow down on the remasters; instead, they should grab ideas from old games and then repurpose them into fresh concepts and structures. The past is a foreign country – you don’t have to annex it, just bring back a few souvenirs.
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