This week, a takeover by our friends at Pushing Buttons, The Guardian’s leading weekly gaming newsletter. Keith Stuart writes about the sudden flood of remastered games flooding the market and what all this monetized nostalgia means for the future of gaming. Gwilym
The past is a big problem in the video game industry right now. Barely a month goes by without us being tempted by a new retro mini console, whether it’s a cute Nintendo or a demure ZX Spectrum (whose new version is coming in November, complete with rubber keys and 48 legendary games). And this year’s release calendar is absolutely packed with remasters of classic titles. In April, video game news site Kotaku listed 30 veterans being exhumed and revived by 2024, including The Last of Us Part II, Tomb Raider 1-3, and Star Wars: Dark Forces. Thirty! And the article was missing some! In October alone we will see updated versions of the 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, a revised collection of two certainly wonderful action role-playing titles. from the beginning of the century. , designed by the creative team that would later make the Uncharted series.
In many ways, what we’re seeing here is exactly what’s happening in the music and film industries, where basic albums and movies can be endlessly repackaged with shiny new art cards and mysteriously unearthed demos and deleted scenes, and fools like me will do it. buy them. I now own Jaws in at least six different versions and it scares me to think how much Prince has cost me in the last five years. With games, I guess the other thing we get is access. Unless you have a giant arcade where you can keep all your older machines plugged in and running, it’s more convenient to have your old favorites on your newer machine, and that way they’ll also be visually updated to look like your rosy one. memory remembers them, rather than wildly flawed low-resolution reality.
At this point, I’m not sure we can really blame the gaming business for returning to its own past glories. As we’ve seen from the hundreds of layoffs across the industry over the past year, creating games is an increasingly expensive and risky endeavor. Development budgets for the largest titles are now estimated at between $200 and $500 million, and those that come with long-term online multiplayer modes also require ongoing maintenance and additional content for several years. Sony’s recent disastrous release of the “hero shooter” game Concord, which was in development for eight years but was pulled from sale after two weeks of poor sales, is a horror story for the rest of the world. industry will look with their jaws and wallets. – on the ground. We’re in a period of great uncertainty where once-reliable genres like open-world adventures and online shooters are saturated. Gamers want something new, but no one knows what it is and no one seems interested in the idea of investing hundreds of millions of dollars to find out.
We are now in a period of heavily monetized nostalgia and so far it is working. I can’t wait to play the remakes of Silent Hill 2 and Legacy of Kain, and I’m not alone. But I hope the message the games industry takes away from this isn’t “people just want old stuff,” but “people sure like weird stuff.” Because that’s what a lot of this year’s remastered games were: weird, offbeat, wacky, and difficult. It’s fascinating to me that some of the most famous 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, difficult, and often , very, very strange. Here’s a connection that might help the mainstream games industry break out of its creative deadlock. Strange ideas are floating around; We will never be able to completely dispel them. Big games have become too obsessed with offering a doctored version of the hero’s journey: the good, true protagonist overcoming obstacles to defeat the evil monster. Video games are not Hollywood: we are here to experience more than to identify emotionally. We want to have new and strange feelings.
The recently released indie game UFO 50 is a collection of, yes, 50 retro games designed to look like a fictional development studio’s entire back catalogue, from the 1980s to the early modern era. All games are new but look old and play like new. Confused? Don’t worry. Describing the game on its Steam page, developer Mossmouth stated: “We carefully chose which elements to modernize. Each game shares a unique palette of 32 colors and we put a lot of effort into making them look and sound like real 8-bit titles from the ’80s. On the other hand, it was important to us that UFO 50 be fun and surprising for modern gamers, so we decided not to limit ourselves to the genres and design conventions of the past.”
This seems like a really good plan 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 in the last five years with all of their elevated horror films, like Midsommar and Us, which have effectively sucked in tropes and ideas from 70s supernatural and folk horror films and made them redesigned for The Modern Ear. Game publishers need to slow down the pace of remasters; instead, they should take ideas from old games and then repurpose them into new concepts and structures. The past is a foreign country: it is not necessary to annex it, it is enough to bring some memories.
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