We’re in an age of reboots, remasters, and legacy sequels and prequels across entertainment. At the box office, while this certainly doesn’t speak to the quality of storytelling or respect for the originals, live-action remakes of classics are running riot. Still, these are very different from what’s happening in gaming. While still subject to the trend of this age, there’s something about a game remaster that strikes differently, being much more user-friendly and honest than the antics of contemporary Hollywood – even if both are ultimately driven by cash cravings.
Easy to See the Trend in Action
There has been a vast collection of 90s classics come back in the form of remasters in recent years. Easily the most notable in terms of name recognition is the Tomb Raider Remastered collections. Coming out in very affordable three-game packages, the two releases sold very well. In fact, the announcement for the Tomb Raider franchise crossing the colossal milestone of 100 million copies sold came the same year as Tomb Raider I-III Remastered hit the shelves. You can also look to this year’s Oblivion Remastered blitzing to nine million players in just three months.
Throw in all of the much smaller classics from the 1980s and 1990s like Croc, Gex, and the Dragon Quest trilogy, as well as the Resident Evil series and much more recent The Last of Us duology, finding remaster success, and it’s clearly appeasing a strong contingent of gamers. Beyond direct remasters, we’ve also seen a resurgence in the deployment of retro aesthetics. The retro style certainly tickles nostalgia, but also works as a key selling point, particularly for fans of single-player games. It’s why the HD-2D aesthetic is doing so well right now.
An Appreciation of Gaming’s Forbears
It’s easy to wave away this trend as an obsession with nostalgia or people just wanting what came before. Looking at games, there’s a fundamental appeal to these older creations. The mechanics were more straightforward, and where they weren’t, they were very experimental. It’s more of an appreciation for that standard of entertainment. After all, it’s these games that paved the way for the much more complex releases today, and, more often than not, a focus on core gameplay over graphics enhanced the experience.
You can look across all forms of gaming, including video slots. The Rainbow Riches slot game continues to be a hit among online players. This is despite it being released back in 2009. It’s still very much the same game with its classic-style graphics, but its three core features – Road to Riches, Wishing Well, and Pots of Gold – avoid becoming outdated thanks to their straightforward nature. Looking at the myriad of slot features around today, Rainbow Riches can certainly be seen as a progenitor.
Another element that plays into this is how old games can get lost. Be it a classic PlayStation game or an older video slot, if it doesn’t update with modern hardware or the software operators deem it not popular enough to continue to support, it all gets lost. It’s because of this that second-hand games and especially the older consoles that still work sell for so much online. Gaming has advanced tremendously in a very short space of time as the Financial Times delves into, but that has inevitably left some classics locked to unreachable old tech.
With the vast majority of remastered games selling a fair bit below triple-A RRP and many adding serious quality-of-life improvements, it’d be fair to say the gaming remasters differ greatly from the cinematic remake trend. Instead, players get products that honour what came before while offering an experience that’s very different from modern mainstream gaming.