Why does the gaming industry like to live in the past?

Close your eyes and step back to the beginning of the millennium. You sit in a room lit only by the flickering glow of a massive, heavy CRT television or monitor. You hold a controller in your hands or your fingers are hunched over the keyboard while the legendary sound of the first generation PlayStation or early PC classics echoes from the speakers. Back then, games weren't "services," didn't have battle passes, and didn't require a constant internet connection. They were worlds that we almost always fell in love with.

More than twenty years later, we see these same worlds on store shelves again. In dazzling 4K resolutions, with ray tracing support, and with a price tag that often stops at just under 80 euros. The gaming industry has discovered its new favorite formula for success: remakes and remasters. Is this the ultimate love letter to loyal fans or the laziest financial shortcut?

Safe landing during a creative and financial crisis

To understand why our screens are full of the past, we need to look into the wallets of the big publishers. Developing a modern, high-budget (AAA) game has become an unimaginably risky business. Projects cost hundreds of millions of dollars, development teams number hundreds of people, and production times have stretched to six, eight, or even more years. If a brand-new, untested game burns out upon release, it often means immediate closure and layoffs for the studio.

That's why nostalgia has become the most powerful shield. When a publisher decides to remake an old game like Resident Evil 4, Dead Space, Gothic 1 or Silent Hill 2, they're not investing in the unknown. They're investing in an existing audience. The market already knows these games, loves them and, most importantly, is still talking about them. The marketing is half done before day one of development. The risk is still there, but it's significantly lower.

When technology finally captures the imagination

However, it would be unfair to label the entire trend as simply exploiting human sentimentality. Remakes also have a deep artistic and technological justification. When we played our favorite games decades ago, our brains acted as a kind of filter due to technical limitations. Under the influence of our imagination, we ourselves transformed the blocky textures and fog on the screen into epic landscapes and living characters.

Modern tools such as Unreal Engine 5, today finally allows developers to build these worlds exactly as the authors imagined them in their minds at the time, but technology may not have allowed them to do so.

A prime example of this technological and emotional bridge is Gothic 1 Remake. Anyone who spent their childhood exploring an unforgiving mining colony beneath a magical barrier knows how groundbreaking the original Gothic was. It was raw, dark, full of unforgettable characters and a living environment that punished you for every mistake. But let's be honest. Playing the original today, with its archaic controls and outdated graphics engine, is a near-impossible feat for a modern gamer. The remake here acts as an archaeological rescue of cultural heritage. It allows older players to re-enter the camp that marked their youth, while offering a new generation a ticket to a world that would otherwise have been forgotten in the annals of history.

Gothic 1 Remake is a great example of how to properly approach a remake. The game is still relentless. This is not a game where you swing your sword headlong, where you run into the first opponent. You will very quickly realize that a normal rat can kill you in two hits. The developers could have eased this difficulty, but I'm glad they didn't, because that's part of the charm of the original game.

Separate the wheat from the chaff

Remastering and refreshing a game are two very different phenomena. When we talk about refreshing (remaster), the game remains exactly the same at its core, the developers just increase the resolution of the textures, adapt the performance to modern systems and improve the refresh rate of the images (The Last of Us Part I or past Tomb Raider collections). It is more of a cosmetic fix. Sometimes a “remaster” of a certain game is not even necessary, because with community fixes (mods) you can get a very similar effect without having to pay for the game again.

A remake means that the developer has gone to great lengths to rebuild the game from scratch, from the first line of code to the last polygon. The story and atmosphere remain faithful to the original, but the gameplay mechanics and visuals are set to modern standards (Gothic 1 Remake, Final Fantasy VII, etc.).

For example, Capcom hit the nail on the head twice with the remakes of Resident Evil 2 (2019) and Resident Evil 4 (2023). In RE2, they got rid of the fixed camera angles and clunky controls and transformed the game into a modern, extremely tense third-person horror game. In RE4, they kept the action-packed feel but added the ability to move while aiming and parrying with a knife.

Dead Space is another example of how to do a remake right. The main character Isaac Clarke has gone from being a silent hero to being much more talkative, and they've also gotten rid of loading screens for a much better experience. They've also added a whole new system that, for example, dynamically changes the sounds and attacks of monsters depending on how well you're doing.

Or Silent Hill 2, which was built from the ground up on the Unreal Engine 5 platform, allowing them to achieve a great visual experience, modernize the combat experience, expand the locations to explore, and deepen the psychological elements.

The Final Fantasy VII trilogy is considered by many, including me, to be the best remake of all time. When the first installment was announced, I was skeptical because they completely changed the combat style. We went from turn-based to real-time action. You get used to it quickly, but many people didn't expect Square Enix to tamper with the legendary story so much. Midway through the game, Cloud and friends begin to realize their fate from the original game and try to resist "fate." Purists may hate that the story has changed, but for me, the experiment was a success. I can't wait for the third and final installment.

GTA: The Definitive Edition and Warcraft III: Reforged are examples for me of what happens when a developer only thinks about profit. GTA was full of bugs when it was released, too many noticeable elements made with artificial intelligence, there was no feeling of the original atmosphere... Blizzard promised completely revamped animations, new voice roles, an updated campaign, but we got a half-baked product. They even dared to include in the terms of use that they own all modifications (mods) that players will create.

Childhood heroes must not mislead us

Despite the excitement of seeing our childhood heroes in photorealistic guises, a big question mark hangs over the industry. If studios are investing all their money, creative energy, and time into reviving the past, where are they? new ideas? Where are those bold, unique games that today's ten-year-olds will play with the same nostalgia in twenty years?

There is a serious danger that the gaming industry will fall into the same creative drought as Hollywood, dominated by endless sequels, prequels, and superhero remakes.

Remakes are not the evil of modern times. If developers do them right, we can get something original with a touch of the past. For smaller studios, this can be a very good way to get a financial injection, which gives them the impetus to develop a completely new franchise. At the moment, there are more successes than failures, and I hope that this will remain the case in the coming years.