The original game in a long-running and (at one time) prestigious series was announced to be getting a remake in October 2025. I will not name the game or company, because I refuse to lend any positive press to said company for a variety of reasons (diving headfirst into AI slop, providing technology that is instrumental in facilitating a genocide, etc.) and , but you probably already know what I am talking about. The main thing I want to address is how the announcement has reignited a debate about the merits of remaking a game, and whether there is a “correct” way to do it. I’m personally pretty split on the very concept of remaking a video game. On one hand, it can serve as a chance for new generations of players to experience a more detailed and more readily accessible version of a classic, often with quality-of-life updates and new content. On the other hand, the practice could arguably be seen as lazy nostalgia pandering/exploitation that both takes resources away from potential new experiences and risks bastardizing the original work and potentially replacing it. I think both viewpoints are valid, and many remakes can fall on a spectrum anywhere between these extremes. My opinion veers towards the latter; I think that remakes are largely unnecessary and can be harmful to the greater industry when the market is inundated with them. And either way, I think this trend is symptomatic of larger preservation issues within the medium.

So what exactly should determine whether a game “deserves” a remake? Would keeping games available and playable for longer reduce the market for remakes? Is that a bad thing? And what kinds of remakes could be seen as the way to go?

For the purposes of this article, I’m using the general definition of a Remake as outlined in my previous article. This broad, overarching category includes both faithful recreations, drastic re-imaginings, and stuff in-between. The lines between these different types of products can get pretty blurry, but I’m basically referring to games that are meant to embody the spirit of an older title and present themselves as some kind of definitive version of that older game. So you may also find me using the word “remake” in a looser sense than usual. But I’m not referring to straight remasters, which generally aim to be faithful upscales of old games. Unless specifically referencing a remaster, I’m referring to games that are built from scratch but are intended to recreate an older title.

Recreating the Past vs. Remixing It

In general, I’m a proponent of creative freedom when remaking a video game. Ultimately, I’d rather just have new games instead of rehashes; but if a game is going to be remade, I’d rather the developers take risks, change things up, and be free to fix, update, and otherwise alter what didn’t work in the original. Many of the problems I have with remakes stems from their need to be a product filling two niches—it has to meet the modern quality standards of a “new” game that appeals to players who never touched the original, as well as the definitive version of an old game that appeals to fans of the original and recaptures what they loved about it. By having to split their priorities like this, many remakes are unable to fully excel at either goal. Changes to refine or streamline the game with modern design sensibilities can risk alienating those who love the original; on the flip-side, not doing enough to modernize it might make it unappealing to general audiences who are not already enamored with the game or franchise. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk, and many projects fail to cross it gracefully.

For such reasons, I think it’s incredibly important that a remake does not replace the original work. In an ideal world, I’d love for remakes to be more drastic re-imaginings, but also be available alongside the original versions by default. If you can include the original in the remake's package as a bonus, that's even better (so long as the original also remains available for purchase separately). And don’t make it a conditional unlock or something, like what the 2017 MediEvil remake did by locking a playable version of the PS1 original behind completion criteria. Make sure that anyone who buys the package can jump into either version at any point. Just straight up emulating the original would be fine, as would a faithful, straightforward remaster. Either way, I would just want the original content to be available alongside the new version in as pure a form as possible. The way I see it, this would be the best of both worlds: the diehard fans of the original get to have their preferred experience preserved and readily available, safe in the knowledge that nothing is trying to outright replace it. At the same time, we would all also get a new game that remixes and strives to improve upon the original experience, with the goal of making it the best overall game it can be in the modern context.

Bad or Mediocre Games Given a Second Chance

I think the ripest (and riskiest) category of games deserving of remakes/remasters are ones that never reached their full potential. Most publishers are unwilling to back anything that isn’t a safe bet, which is why we mostly get remakes of hits and classics. This concept of giving a flawed game a second chance has only just recently had a high-profile, real-world case study with the release of Yooka-Replaylee. Back in 2017, the highly-anticipated Yooka-Laylee—a spiritual successor to Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie series made by many of the same developers reunited at Playtonic—launched to middling reception. Some were more charmed than others, but the response from players and critics alike trended towards “underwhelming”. In a… ahem… *rare* instance of the stars aligning, Playtonic had the opportunity to basically take a second crack at the same game. This was an odd case, as Yooka-Laylee was a game of considerable clout for an indie production, but didn’t exactly have a sterling reputation. The studio took a risk on creating what is essentially a “director’s cut” edition of Yooka-Laylee, keeping what worked well but revisiting, streamlining, expanding, and refining pretty much every single aspect of the base game and applying lessons learned from similar titles released in the last decade or so. The result is a game that many people who have played both are describing as “everything the original should have been”; myself included. I’m not actually 100% certain about whether this better qualifies as a remake or remaster, but I think it fits the spirit of my argument either way, given how drastic and sweeping the changes are.

There are many, many games that failed to make a splash for a variety of reasons. Some dev teams had good ideas, but maybe just didn’t have the time, resources, experience, or technology to fully realize their visions. To me, it’s these types of games that hold the most potential for a remake that applies lessons learned to create the optimal version. How many movies have had Director’s Cuts that drastically improved upon flawed theatrical releases? Why shouldn’t video games be afforded more of those opportunities? Yes, there are hurdles to overcome. For one, it’s a significant financial risk to take a second crack at something considered a failure. Second, reassembling the same creative team may be challenging, sometimes even impossible if people have moved on to other companies and projects. But if the opportunity arises to do it and do it well, I think it could pay off as well as it seems to be for Playtonic.

Remakes and Remasters are a Symptom of Poor Preservation Policies

At their core, I think many of the problems of remakes could have been largely rendered moot if publishers were better about persevering their games and keeping them accessible. For the vast majority of old titles, I don’t want or need full remasters or remakes. I’m perfectly content playing the exact same versions, but on modern hardware, especially when the official emulators are able to increase the resolution and offer robust control remapping. The more standardized architecture of PCs and the bevy of workarounds and compatibility tools available makes them as a platform less susceptible to lost media than consoles—as long as publishers keep their games listed on storefronts, that is. But consoles still struggle with abandoned libraries when moving on to the next generation. In my own experience, having access to emulated versions of older games with upscaled resolution is more than enough for me in most cases. As an example, I’ve been enjoying some N64 and GameCube games I missed out on in their heyday on the respective Nintendo Switch Online apps. While I take issue with the fact that they are eternally locked behind a subscription, it is a step in the right direction that there is at least some kind of official avenue to access classic games. The problem is that many IP owners of older games have proven over and over that they can’t be trusted to properly preserve and provide access to their back catalog. A study from 2023 estimated that 87% of classic games released in the U.S. are currently completely unavailable.

One of the main reasons for that is—of course—capitalism. The pursuit of the bottom line actively de-incentivizes publishers from keeping their games available because:

  • There are ongoing maintenance costs associated with keeping games available on storefronts and optimized for modern platforms. No for-profit company is going to go out of their way to keep selling titles that are no longer profitable. As it's always been, purchasing a game grants a license to use it on the associated platform, with no built-in promise that the software will remain usable on subsequent devices, competitor's consoles, or generic PCs, meaning that many games get stranded on the original platform if the publisher does not have the desire or means to keep it available.
  • If the IP is popular enough, publishers will often take the opportunity to charge more for a remaster or remake than release a non-touched up version of the original title for a budget price or subscription fee. It’s more upfront work, but with a much bigger potential payoff.

And this is purely fiscal stuff. It doesn’t even touch on the myriad possible technical and legal hurdles of keeping games available and playable across generations:

  • Physical media tends to evolve with console generations. While Sony and Microsoft have historically used similarly-sized discs and have landed on Blu-Ray discs as their standard format for the last two generations (for the models that even have disc drives), older consoles have had an array of entirely different proprietary physical formats. Nintendo has flip-flopped between various cartridges and specialized discs. While direct successors have generally kept backwards compatibility with the previous iteration’s games, that doesn't apply when a generation of hardware changes the nature of its physical media. There was no way you were going to shove a Wii U disc into a Switch, for example.
  • Some consoles are notoriously difficult to emulate due to their unconventional architecture. The PlayStation 3 cell architecture, for example, is incredibly difficult to efficiently replicate on conventional hardware. There have been a few recent examples of PS3 emulation being possible on PS5 hardware—such as the remaster of Cloudberry Kingdom also including the PS3 version running on an emulator and a YouTuber getting PS3 emulation running on PS5 silicon—but things have been very quiet in regards to any kind of official options being worked on by Sony themselves. I think it’s safe to assume that official, wide support for PS3 emulation is not something we should expect any time soon.
  • Some games had very specific control schemes based around specialized hardware. Some very notable games tailored their experiences around extremely specialized controllers, such as the chunky, plastic instruments of rhythm games like Rock Band or the massive control panel of the mech-piloting simulator Steel Battalion. And games for consoles like the Nintendo Wii/Wii U or DS/3DS often relied on motion, pointer, or touch screen controls for core gameplay functions. Bringing these forward to more traditional consoles would require that the functionality of these control methods could be sufficiently recreated or remapped onto standard gamepads. As another example of this strangeness, Nintendo is bringing back Virtual Boy games on Nintendo Switch, but is also requiring players to pay for bulky plastic or cardboard headsets to replicate the original form factor and experience. The Nintendo Switch and Switch 2—accounting for their Joy-Cons and touch screens—can handle most of the same functionality as a Wii Remote, Wii U GamePad, or DS, but it’s not a perfect 1:1 translation that would allow for broad porting or emulation with minimal effort. It would vary from game to game, but some games might require retooling or reconfiguring control schemes. At minimum—if Nintendo were to release NSO Apps that provided access to DS or Wii games on Switch, for example—there likely need to be a range of preset layouts and/or flexible end user options to make titles comfortably playable. Some DS games extended the same viewport across both screens, for instance, which would be difficult to tussle with on a landscape screen. Many Wii games used both the infrared pointer and motion sensors at the same time, using the sensor bar to calibrate the gyroscope. This would require work-arounds when mapping to a Joy-Con that exclusively uses gyroscopes to handle pointer functionality. My point is that there just generally aren’t one-size-fits-all solutions to porting games that rely on unconventional control methods and preserving the same type of experience cleanly.
  • Even if a popular console has established emulators, not every game will run well on them. The quirks of individual titles can sometimes result in bizarre glitches and other unforeseen problems on emulators that otherwise work for 99% of the console’s other games. If these manufacturers were to keep official emulators available, there would inevitably be ongoing maintenance and optimization work required for fringe cases.
  • Sometimes the rights to a game or character are split between multiple parties or otherwise muddled, making it a logistical and financial challenge to acquire the proper approvals and licenses for a re-release. This is common in games featuring licensed characters and/or licensed music, which routinely get delisted from storefronts when those licenses expire. There are entire catalogs of Spider-Man and Transformers games, for example, that are no longer able to be purchased on any platform because the licenses were limited to a specific time frame. But it isn't always an insurmountable challenge, as we've seen with the licensing minefield that is GoldenEye 007 getting re-released on both Nintendo and Xbox platforms. In another strange case, Bandai-Namco is unable to release any games featuring Ms. Pac-Man without paying royalties due to the rights to the character being partially owned by AtGames. When Bandai-Namco recently re-released games that featured her, they opted to replace her with a new character called “Pac-Mom”. And none of the titles she headlines ever seem to get re-released at all these days. And in some cases, owning the franchise rights to an IP does not necessarily entitle the buyers to re-release or re-publish the original games. Legacy publishing agreements may still have an effect on where and how old games can be sold, which seems to be the main reason that the original Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot trilogies are not available in their original forms these days.
  • One commonly cited anecdotal point I’ve seen is that younger players are simply not interested in old games. I think this is a more nuanced problem than most people present it as. Today’s kids have no problem playing retro-coded/fugly-ass games like Minecraft, Lethal Company, or Roblox, so I don't think there's anything specifically about the retro look or feel of older games that is the problem. I think the problem is more a matter of exposure. I posit that many of these older IPs hold no real estate in young minds because they fell out of public relevance. And again, I think this is largely a symptom of poor preservation and availability. If these games had been kept easily available, I don’t think there would have been as severe a drop-off in popularity. Being able to load up an old classic on your modern console to introduce it to your kid would have been a lot more convenient than dusting off your PS1 or SNES and getting some third-party adapters to make them work on an HDTV. Older movies and TV shows can experience renewed popularity basically at random because the hardware required to experience them is so standardized and ubiquitous; physical media, online stores, and streaming services provide instant access to nearly everything, with most TVs and Blu-Ray players able to play basically any media (region-locking concerns aside). Video games—with their walled gardens, lack of forwards compatibility, and requirements for bespoke hardware—currently don’t get to enjoy that ease of access.
  • A HUGE issue with preserving many modern games is their online, multiplayer nature. Some games still have ample single player offerings even when the multiplayer aspects are shut down, but when the core experience of a game is heavily reliant on expensive server architecture and large player populations, there is simply no universal solution to keeping these experiences available when they are no longer profitable enough to justify further support. At end-of-life, streamlining and rolling things back into a peer-to-peer system that doesn’t require ongoing maintenance or handing tools over to the community to run on private servers might be possible for some games. But that’s far from guaranteed and depends on the nature of the game and the whims of the publisher/licensor; it generally does not carry any kind of financial incentive, so when it happens, it's often done out of good will or because fans took it into their own hands and the publisher didn't care enough to halt it. This is simply a big problem that there just isn’t an easy solution for.

Re-releases can be a good thing in my eyes—assuming they are priced reasonably, that is. However, re-releasing an old game for a newer platform (other than PC) only temporarily staves off the challenges of preservation instead of solving them—not to mention the fact that players generally have to re-purchase the newer version for full price. And when the next generation console is released, there’s no guarantee that the re-released game you bought for the previous console will be playable on it. In my pipe dream emulation utopia, this is what I would propose to alleviate those issues:

  • Buying a game means you own that game on that family of platforms, forever. I would want all of the major console manufacturers to work under the promise that all future generations of the console would allow you to bring your library forward with you in some way, some form. This would entirely alleviate the problem of needing to re-release titles piecemeal across console generations, as they would simply stay available indefinitely. In a further idealized fantasyland, I'd also advocate for releasing games from the shackles of their original platforms once the console generation is over, creating PC ports and/or making the ROMs available for use on whatever emulation device you want. There would a balance to strike to prevent rampant piracy and sharing, but people are generally willing to pay for official services if those services are more convenient than piracy and are fairly priced.
  • They would need to fulfill that promise by ensuring proper backwards compatibility and/or standardized emulation that works on each new console. In this idealized scenario, ensuring the entire back catalog is usable should be a prerequisite to releasing a new console; no back-compat, no purchase. It would just be thought of as one of the required steps in releasing a new console; releasing a console without that capability should be stigmatized, as unthinkable as releasing a console without internet connectivity. It’s pretty damn inexcusable that my PS5 cannot natively play PS1-PS3 games. Why can’t I just pop my old disc in and have the optimized version ready to play? Even if I have to separately download a compatible version, why can’t the old disc act as my license to do so? Most modern game discs are basically physical license keys anyway.
    • The big caveat to this is that everything seems to be trending towards purely digital media. If this continues, the next generation of consoles may not have disc drives of any kind, so I don’t know of any elegant solutions to satisfy players with large physical libraries. Providing optional disc drive attachments even if the console doesn't come with one would probably be the only solution as a stopgap during this apparent ongoing transition to digital-only. But I don’t think there’s any one perfect solution to that problem.
  • Whenever licensing and publishing logistics allow, any game released for a console would need to be available for digital purchase and download indefinitely. When a game is released, it goes on the servers and has a page on the storefront forevermore, staying there long after the physical media is out of print. I also think we need more progressive and reasonable licensing arrangements for games. Movies and TV shows rarely utilize licensed materials with expiration dates; more often than not, when filmmakers purchase the rights to use music or characters in a film, it covers all sales and releases of the movie in perpetuity. But in contrast, games often get delisted because things like music or character licenses tend to have a set time period, after which the product can no longer be sold without acquiring a new license. I don’t know why this is the case or whose fault it is, but something here has to change to stop games from getting killed off.
  • In general, I think we need to re-frame how we think about game releases. Using movies as an analogy, I think we should begin thinking of the original run of a game on its target hardware as the game’s “theatrical run”, and the wider availability after the fact as the “home media/streaming” release. The original run would be where the bulk of the profits are made, with the wider release serving to keep the game accessible and in the zeitgeist, with a bonus to the rights holders coming in the form of a trickle of additional profit.

I’m honestly not sure whether all of this—if it were put into practice— would be more or less profitable for the publishers and manufacturers. On one hand, they would not be able to so easily sell us remasters and remakes for premium prices. Keeping the games we already bought available to us would mean they couldn’t get us to double dip. On the other hand, keeping the door open on purchasing old titles indefinitely might create a continuous drip feed of income. Say, for instance, that a younger player plays a new Ratchet & Clank game for the first time and becomes interested in experiencing the full saga. If all of those older titles were immediately accessible (and I don’t mean through fucking streaming the PS3 versions with a subscription), you’d have a new audience buying up all of the old games. It might not be as lucrative as drip-fed remasters and remakes, but it’s also not nothing. But pure profit is not the point anyway; the point is to re-establish trust with the user base and make good on a promise of a continuous library. We already see something like this on PC storefronts like Steam. If a game hasn’t been delisted due to server shutdowns or license expiration, I can still generally buy and play older games on my Steam devices. I don’t need a remake of Dead Space 2—a game from the 360/PS3 era—because that game still holds up incredibly well and is easily purchasable; I enjoyed the whole thing on my Steam Deck. It’s the Walled Garden console ecosystem that resets every couple of generations that seems to be the main obstacle to better preservation. The more these walls come down, the better off I think the players and larger industry will be.

So When Should a Game Get a Remake?

The short answer is: [Shrugs shoulders and makes “I dunno” sound]

In general, I think a remake should have more pressure placed upon it to justify its existence. As I touched on before, I think remakes better serve as chances to remix and refine, not to replace. Having a remake serve as the sole way to keep an old title available is a pretty piss-poor reason to make one, in my opinion, because it’s a failure on their part if I can’t just buy the original right now. If the older versions were still accessible as direct comparisons, it would really force any potential remakes to think outside the box and do everything they could to sell the idea that this is a fundamentally different and/or better experience all around (or, ya’ know, just encourage them to make new games instead of reheating leftovers). Just marketing it as a prettier version of what you’ve already played likely wouldn’t be enough, which would incentivize more drastic improvements and differences. A decent real world example I would point to as a solid remake is the 2023 version of Resident Evil 4. It's a fantastic remake that basically perfects and fully realizes the premise of the original and isn't shy about making sensible changes that mostly improve the overall experience. Plus, the original is still widely available for those who prefer it or for fans of the new version who are curious about the game’s roots.

Going back to the comparison to movies, let me ask you this: how often do you see true shot-for-shot remakes of classic films get made? Barring possible examples of remakes of foreign films, the only one I can think of is the 1998 Psycho, and its existence was just as baffling then as it is now. It’s a basically a weird hobby project for adult theater kids, and arguably does nothing to justify its existence because it mimics the original film down to the same script, blocking, runtime, editing, and camera shots, with only a few very minor differences aside from the fact that it’s in color. There’s a reason this type of remake just doesn’t happen in Hollywood: it’s pointless and hollow. Now, imagine that the 1998 version completely replaced the original, and Alfred Hitchcock’s version was forever vaulted, never to be distributed through legal means again. That would be entirely unacceptable, wouldn’t it? A groundbreaking piece of film history would be washed away like the chocolate syrup that they used for blood in the shower scene—replaced with a version that is a slavish recreation, but fundamentally different in many ways. If this is unacceptable in Hollywood, why are we letting it happen to video games?

I can easily rent or stream either version of Psycho on pretty much any device with a screen within seconds. But if I want an official means to buy Crash Bandicoot 2, the only avenue available is to purchase the N. Sane Trilogy. This remake is largely pretty faithful, but fundamentally different. The graphical fidelity is increased, and there are some quality of life improvements, but it’s a different beast from the original in terms of overall experience and vibes. I personally find the new art style to be pretty ugly at times, with overly realistic textures mixed in with cartoony designs in a haphazard manner. And each version of the game is the result of a very specific technological context and artistic vision; there just isn’t a way to fully replicate that 100%. Increased fidelity unavoidably closes the gap between graphical presentation and imagination: the more literal and detailed a design is, the less the player's imagination has to fill in the gaps and extrapolate. I think this is a big reason that different people might respond very differently to remakes with increased detail and fidelity; when an object or character becomes more detailed, it may clash with the mental image a person had extrapolated from the lower-detail variant. To me, the graphical update in the N. Sane Trilogy is like the fact that the 1998 Psycho is in color: yeah, it’s implementing new technology that wasn’t available during the original’s time, but that doesn’t make it objectively better. Just like black and white film, chunky, wobbly PS1 models are representative of the time and are a style in their own right that many people might prefer over the HD variants for any number of reasons. And even if we did all agree that the new version looked better in every single way, having the originals around would still be valuable purely from a historical perspective, showing how far the technology has progressed. It’s baffling to me that this trend of remakes outright replacing the original doesn’t receive more push back. I think we should all be a lot angrier about that than we are, because influential works of art are getting painted over and many of us are told to just shut up and accept it. And if you’re hung up on whether Crash Bandicoot 2 qualifies as art or not, then you can get the fuck off of this blog, quite frankly. I’m so sick of debate about whether video games can be called a form of art spewing from the mouths of pretentious blowhards getting rehashed. Yes, games are art, and they deserve to be respected and preserved like any other medium.

If my naively optimistic, idealized preservation utopia ever—against all odds—actually became reality, I think the gaming landscape would be fundamentally different and pretty much universally better. While the financial incentive probably isn’t juicy enough to convince rights holders, publishers, and console manufacturers to invest in laying the groundwork that they already should have been laying for decades, I’d see any small steps towards better preservation and accessibility as a win. If we had better access to comprehensive back catalogs, then I think we’d probably see a lot more new games and far fewer remakes. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to you to decide for yourself, but I’d personally love it.