The Future of Remakes

Author: Sandra Prior
Date: Jun 5, 2009 - 6:45:30 PM

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It takes a very specific kind of game to convince players to band together. For starters, it has to be original, and have some cult value. The games that get remade are inevitably the ones that started something new; the titles that every gamer of their era would know, if not actually have played, and know to be good if only by cultural osmosis. The most recent game to warrant the effort is the original Half-Life via the Black Mesa project (an attempt to outdo Valve's very half-hearted Half-Life remake, consisting of little more than the models and map data dumped into the new engine). It seemed a bit soon when the project was announced, but a billion delays later, who knows?

The second key factor is there has to be a genuine reason to put the work in. Remaking a game isn't that far removed from making a new one from scratch, except that most of the fun creative stuff has already been done, and you're not going to get much credit for it. If the original game is still perfectly playable and easily accessible, why not just play it? If you don't have anything to add, whether it's compatibility with modern systems, or something more cutting-edge, why bother?

Can it be Done?

Most important of all, the project has to be realistically doable. The more complex the core game is, the more systems that have to be implemented and important assets generated, scripts written, and consequently the less likely it is that you'll ever be finished. Retros are the most popular remakes, since the core mechanics can more easily be handled by a single programmer (the original probably was), possibly backed up with an artist and a musician to turn the old graphics into something stylish and new. Not needing a whole team, makes starting a remake project something that can be done on a whim, rather than requiring a huge time investment.

That's not to say it's necessarily easy; just more doable. Games like Tetris and Defender and Tempest make for good programming practice. Releasing a new version of Treasure Island Dizzy, crap though those games were (yes they were) is also far more likely to draw attention than some open source project about reticulating splines or controlling traffic lights. No nostalgia factor there, sadly.

Adventure games have become one of the most high-profile genres to be remade of late, thanks to a mix of the crappy state of most new adventure games to hit the shelves, and the availability of one tool in particular: Adventure Game Studio. This removes much of the pain of general adventure programming letting you focus on the game-specific scripting, with a massive community of developers ready to have you pick their brains.

Sierra's Quest series has received most of the love, with the anonymous team at IGDI producing comprehensive remakes of King's Quest 1 and 2, with Quest for Glory 2 on the way. Instead of simply updating the sound and art, both have been rewritten from scratch, adding extra puzzles and plot elements, redesigned maps, and full speech.

Another team. Infamous Adventures, kept closer to the original source, but otherwise gave the same treatment to King's Quest III, and is working on a similar project based on the ghastly Space Quest II. Infamous also remade Leisure Suit Lorry 2 with a point-and-click interface, replacing the original text parser.

What about the Rest?

The obvious question is what happened to Quest for Glory 7, Space Quest 2 and Larry 1? Sierra got there first. At the start of the 90s, it dug several of its most popular series out of the cupboard, most notably those three, and Police Quest. Each was given a complete overhaul to turn them into point-and-click games, using its SCI engine, given VGA graphics, extra jokes, and blessed with proper soundcard-powered music and whizz-bang effects.

For Larry, this was its second major upgrade. The original game was itself a remake (and to a large extent parody) of an earlier Sierra game, the 'erotic' text-based Softporn Adventure, widely regarded as being roughly as sexy as a wire pipe cleaner up the man tube.

The legality of remakes is pretty simple: a big red stop sign. In practice, it's up to individual developers - or to be more exact, publishers - whether or not they turn a blind eye. The older a game is, the more likely it is that nobody's going to wave a red flag. If they do, the remake creators have two choices: cease and desist as ordered; wasting all their work or release the game and face the possible penalties. The word for a license holder stopping a project is ‘Foxed’ named for Fox Interactive shutting down an Aliens mod for Doom.

Developers hoping to avoid this have only one real option - release the game and hope it spreads round the net fast enough to avoid any passing lawyers, while hiding behind pseudonyms and anonymous webpages.

While legally, and morally, a company is in the right to refuse permission to use its characters, it can come across as very petty. Selling a remake is a big no-no, both to the fans and the copyright laws, and the games chosen for remake are rarely likely to see another release.

Never Say Never

That said, you can never know for sure. Square shut down a Chrono Trigger remake back in 2004, when the 1995-era game was impossible to get hold of. Just last month, however, it announced its own commercial remake for the Nintendo DS, and if only 1 per cent of the fans slavering over the prospect actually buy it, that's roughly a squillion dollars in the bank right there. Similarly, Sierra released several classic adventure packs (albeit so badly that several of them failed to include the copy protection codes and at least one was borderline unplayable) that didn't sell many copies, but undoubtedly shifted more than if they'd had to compete with far superior free versions. In addition, even if a game never sells another copy, companies are increasingly aware of the marketing benefits of releasing old games for free to help boost a future sequel, or just grab a few column inches. Sierra with both Betrayal at Krondor and Red Boron, and if you want a copy of either Grand Theft Auto or GTA2, just head over to Rockstar's website.

One way to bypass this problem is not to remake the game as such, but to create a new utility to play its files.

The most famous of these is SCUMMVM, originally built with an eye on early Lucasarts titles, but now capable of handling a number of other developers' back catalogues as well. Exult does something similar for Ultima VII. The downside here is that players have to (ahem) acquire copies of said files from somewhere, leaving them available only to devoted fans who still have those original game discs and disks safely held in a padded envelope somewhere - or anyone who has access to the net and a P2P program.

The other, even safer way, is to work with the developers directly. Sadly, most designers don't count, thanks to not owning the rights to their own titles and franchises, although many (if not the majority) are happy to see their games alive and played rather than forgotten or stuffed away in some vault somewhere.

The most successful of these projects is The Ur-Quan Masters, which began with the open-sourced code for Star Control 2 on 3DO, and became a full remake project The Star Control name wasn't available, but everything else - alien names, graphics, sound and all assets - was made available. The developers are independent, but don't need to worry about being shut down by act of lawyer. Moreover, the original creators were able to use the attention drummed up to try and persuade Activision to commission a proper sequel (replacing the widely hated SC3). It didn't work out, but not every story has a happy ending.

The future of remakes is hazy at best. It's likely that as long as there are gamers, there'll be updates of the cast-iron classics, such as Tetris, Qix, Space Invaders and Q-Bert. However, the more advanced games get, the less likely it is that any home developers will be able to match, never mind improve upon the phenomenal production values of modern titles. It's one thing - and not a small one - to repaint 50 backgrounds and create sprites, but quite another to not only recreate a modern world, but surpass it.

In all likelihood, people won't. Unlike the original 2D games, locked to the exact pixels drawn by their artists, there's a lot that can be done to make even simple 3D shine that little more, whether it's replacing the textures (as seen in Deus Ex: Invisible War and System Shock 2) with something more detailed, or creating a new engine to parse the original files and add proper shading colored lighting or other such effects.

Other projects will continue on keeping the games playable in their original form, as seen with DOSBox (the heart of many classic games on Steam, and the forthcoming Good Old Games service). Graphics and sound have long since reached the point where if you want to play these games, the original appearance isn't going to cause much trouble. Good art direction trumps high technology every time.

In some ways, that's a sad state of affairs - but it's one with a positive side. With virtual machines and emulators and computers powerful enough to cater to older games' every whim, we're leaving the world where games can 'die'. They'll just no longer be easily available, which isn't the same thing as gone forever. So long as there are some fans still flying the flag for specific titles, the classics of today and yesteryear could potentially live on forever.

And if humanity ever creates some universe-spanning supercomputer with a million terabytes of data in an area the size of your fingernail, capable of rewriting the laws of physics itself with a simple flick of its electronic brain... you can almost guarantee that someone, somewhere, will have released a version of Dragon's Lair for it.

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