Adventure Gamers - Forums

Remakes in the Movie world are all the rage and have been for decades. In fact some of my favourite movies are remakes.

Heat
Scarface
The Thing (John Carpenter)
Maltese Falcon

However Remakes can also fail drastically.

Robocop
Total Recall
Psycho
Star Wars (Directors Cut)——-HAN SHOT FIRST

But when I sat down and thought about why the first list works for me, but the second list fails I realised that the answer was a large part internal. You see I had no attachment to the original Heat (LA Takedown) nor had I seen the originals of the other movies before seeing the ones listed.

Whereas the opposite was true with the others. I was a huge fan of the 80’s movies, because I grew up with them, that the remakes could never live up the hype and nostalgia in my mind.

So what does that mean for the recent trend in adventure game remakes.

Broken Sword Directors Cut
Various Kings Quest remakes
Monkey Island 1 and 2
Larry
Real Myst
Gabriel Knight
Grim Fandango

Who are they for?
Do they successfully target a younger newer audience?
Are they just trying to cash in on nostalgia?
Does releasing a remake test the market appetite for that brand?

I’m not sure I know the answer to those questions, but if you look at other sectors of the gaming industry. The PS4 and Xbone are awash with HD remakes at the moment. None of them have tinkered with the actual games and more or less just upspecced the graphics and added in DLC etc.

Nintendo are masters of the remake, but they still have the same issues with the older fans. They say your first Mario, Mario Kart and Zelda are the ones you love and the newer ones pass you by. I think that is totally true, the SNES trio of Super Mario World, Mario Kart and Zelda Link to the Past will forever be some of my favourite games, but ask my nephews and they will go say that Super Mario Galaxy or Mario Kart 8 were the best. Nintendo have managed to keep the games going every generation so far and sell the same game to a newer audience.

Adventure games need to find a way to do a Nintendo or to sell to an audience ignorant of the old games. Take the old characters and translate them for a new generation and ignore the hell out of us old curmodgeons who cant completely see past our rose coloured glasses to see you are not trying to ruin our classics.

My conclusion is that remakes should be designed for a new audience and not pitched at the fans of the original. I believe developers are in a no win situation. Do a shot for shot remake and fans of the old games wont see the point of it, and heaven forbid you change stuff and make Greedo shoot first and you risk a fan backlash.

If you just want to sell to the original audience then just make the old game run on modern hardware (like GOG does) and pack it full of nostalgia like commentary tracks, tales of the development, documentaries about the success of the old game, Interviews with developers etc.

Thoughts?

Well my first thought is that there is a major difference between movie remakes and game remakes.

When we are talking about game remakes, then the original is often in low-res graphics has a cumbersome interface or other problems, and there is a lot of room for different kind of improvements. This however is only rarely the case of movies, best case scenario the original might be black&white; and you can do it in colour, or you can now do a 3D remake, but even that is only minor improvements.

So movie remakes are almost always complete cash grabs, aimed exclusively at a younger audience that have never heard of the original, whereas game remakes at least has the potential to be more than that.

Apart from that, then I will have to give it some extra thought.

Best movie remakes are made of movies that had interesting concepts, but that failed to build on that. The Fly is a good example, as Cronenberg managed to turn 50’s cheesy horror film into something far more interesting, the same happened with Carpenters The Thing.

Games have yet to fully explore that. Remakes are often made of games that don’t necessarily need them, though I do think there is some cases where the remake is clear improvement over the original (I still think LSLR trumps the original).

Part of the problem is that games are still pretty new entertainment form. A lot of people still have vivid memories of even the oldest ones, where as a lot more time has passed in the land of moving pictures.

It would be really interesting seeing a classic adventure game being remade/sequelled in the same sense as nintendo are remaking/sequelling their games, that is, keeping the spirit and core concept, key characters and main setting, but completely rewriting the “levels” to fit new platforms and doing all assets anew from scratch. Obviously not for the current fans, but only as a way of reintroducing the brand to a new market.

Examples. THE DIG as a free roaming first person game á ethan carter or Day of the tentacle as a telltale-like-realtime-3d-samnmax series. Obviously these would both require huge changes to the script and puzzles, but who knows, maybe it would resonate a hundred times better with today’s audience and tech.

Not saying these are good ideas (or even remotely so), just saying it would be very, very interesting.

I think a core problem with such a scenario is that adventure games are SO reliant on ambiance and character magic, something which easily disappears when you do a remake… Whereas nintendo games rather rely on proven gameplay mechanics and don’t risk suffering the wrath of players who think mario and luigis character chemistry goes out the window every time they launch a new title.

Replace the voice actors of Manny and Glottis, and, well, every fan in the world is gonna hate you, no matter how big the upgrade.

Lucien21 - 18 October 2014 08:35 AM

But when I sat down and thought about why the first list works for me, but the second list fails I realised that the answer was a large part internal. You see I had no attachment to the original Heat (LA Takedown) nor had I seen the originals of the other movies before seeing the ones listed.

Whereas the opposite was true with the others. I was a huge fan of the 80’s movies, because I grew up with them, that the remakes could never live up the hype and nostalgia in my mind.

This is not necessarily true for me.

I can name movie remakes that are better than the original, where I saw the original first (True Lies > La Totale!, 2007 3:10 to Yuma > 1957 3:10 to Yuma *), and I can name movie remakes that are worse than the original, where I only saw the original afterwards (The Birdcage < La Cage aux Folles, 1993 The Body Snatchers < 1978 The Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

* Although in the case of 3:10 to Yuma, the difference between both movies is minimal, imo.

So basically, “it depends”.

Most of the time, though, the original is better, but not always. It often boils down to what they changed. If the remake is too close to the original, it’s really hard to actually be better (and it often amazes me how it can be a lot worse despite being near-identical), but when it’s a complete overhaul, then chances are better of actually improving the material. But it’s never a guarantee, and there are always exceptions.



As an aside: of course Han shot first!

Lucas may be claiming that Greedo always shot first, but that actually hurts Han’s character development later on. The movie (and character) works better if we get introduced to an unscrupulous rogue, rather than a self-defending lucky guy (lucky because Greedo misses at point blank range)!

Also, Lucas is a troll:

So what does that mean for the recent trend in adventure game remakes.

Broken Sword Directors Cut
Various Kings Quest remakes
Monkey Island 1 and 2
Larry
Real Myst
Gabriel Knight
Grim Fandango

Who are they for?

For both the fans of the original and a younger audience.

Do they successfully target a younger newer audience?

I don’t think they do. The gaming community has changed too much these past two decades, and these games have a really tough time of actually reaching the younger newer audience, instead being “stuck” with the nostalgia crowd.

Are they just trying to cash in on nostalgia?

I don’t think they are, because I don’t think that’s a viable strategy. I really do think they were aiming to reach a younger audience. I just think they all failed that mission…
Why that is, is a harder question to answer. It can’t just be our genre’s niche status…

Does releasing a remake test the market appetite for that brand?

Sure, it tests the market appetite for that brand, but I don’t think it does so very accurately, and there are risks involved. Delivering a sub-par remake may actually kill off the market appetite there was.
It might actually be better to just throw a small sample of a sequel (even if it’s only a teaser trailer) out there, to gauge the reaction it gets.

I mean, comparing to movies again, we wouldn’t have seen Tron: Legacy if Disney didn’t throw a fake trailer for TR2N out there a few years prior (the positive “oh, cool!” reactions it got convinced them to go ahead with the film).