Ports & remakes are in our blood
It's nothing new, and it's probably not going anywhere
Without intention I ended up reading a lot about ports this week.
It started with a piece by
on how ports, remakes, remasters etc are mostly unique to our industry. With the exceptions of things like the remastered Star Wars Trilogy and Taylors version of her music, they tend to be the exception, rather than the rule in other entertainment sectors.
Then I picked up, and started reading Sid Meier’s Memoir!, which as you can guess from the title is all about Sid’s rise from the early days of computing, to his very successful career that we all know him for now.
As i’m reading through the early days of Sid and co’s adventures at MicroProse, one thing repeatedly kept coming up…
Many of MicroProse early games, continuously got ported, remade, and remastered, over and over again. It was basically forty, if not fifty percent of their business and they weren’t the only company doing it.
Why?
Well the early days of computers was filled with rapid development and release of new hardware. Most of our phones have more compute ability than all of the Atari’s, Apple’s, and Commodore’s of the time combined.
This resulted in a constant cycle of making a game, then if something more powerful came along, they either straight ported it, or expanded on it.
In the book Sid basically talks about how many of their games were just copies of existing games in a different setting, with some new features.
Their bread and butter to begin with, was not the Firaxis as we know it now, but flight simulation / arcade games. They made over ten different flight simulation games, but not all of them were unique. Some were the same game with a setting swap.
Whilst one game would be set in World War II over Germany, the next, with near identical features, would be set in the Persian Gulf, the next Vietnam.
They continued this practice for years, so much so Sid got extremely bored of making flight games in combat settings.
They did it so much, they caught the attention of the German Government, who had strict laws about what the youth could be subjected to, in light of the atrocities that had led to World War II and the holocaust.
Germany’s "Bundesprüfstelle für Jugendgefährdende Schriften" (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), created an index of games that could not be shown to youth, and in one year added all of MicroProse’s military based games to it.
But I digress…..
The industry was built on ports, remakes, remasters, and retellings.
Whilst plenty of fair criticism can be leveled at the big publishers in our industry remaking games, potentially due to a risk adverse attitude, we cannot escape that this has always been the way games have been.
I would even hazard a guess that this will continue for many years to come. The only thing that would slow down this behavior would be a homogeny in hardware and access, to which we aren’t quite there yet.
In fact, as time has gone on, we have even more reasons to remake a game.
Recent remakes like Silent Hill 2 and Dead rising, potentially represent a strategy to gauge interest in the IP as to inform future development.
The Final Fantasy 7 remakes, could be seen as taking advantage of newer technology to better execute on the original vision.
As time goes on there will be more things to remake, and whilst I understand certain criticisms, I think it’s useful to remember that there are plenty of legitimate reasons why games are remade or remastered, and its always been a part of the industries DNA.a
I'm very glad that there is an interest in remasters. It's a tiny help in stemming how quickly old games are abandoned and become inaccessible. Not nearly enough, though.
Oh I want a remake of FFV and a remaster of FFIX (my personal favorite). I like the idea of being able to play older games because not everyone had the opportunity to play them as an earlier incarnation. I wasnt a fan of the RE4 remake :/ I liked the original better but the Dead Space remake was great.
I like ports too and it's fun to see the same game available across platforms! :D