First time I saw a remake done properly, I was queuing up in Game in Manchester city centre, holding a copy of Resident Evil for the GameCube. This was 2002, mind you, and I’m standing there thinking “bloody hell, why are they messing about with a perfectly good game?” The original PlayStation version had proper scared me senseless back in ’96 – tank controls, dodgy voice acting, the lot. But it worked, didn’t it? Still bought the thing though, because I’m weak when it comes to survival horror, and spent the entire weekend jumping out of my skin all over again. By Sunday evening, I had to grudgingly admit they’d actually made it better. Not just prettier – actually better. That became my benchmark for every remake since, and christ, most of them don’t even come close.
These days, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting another remake announcement. Every gaming event has someone wheeling out another childhood classic, promising to “reimagine it for modern audiences” or some such marketing bollocks. Each time, I get that familiar knot in my stomach – excitement mixed with dread, like watching your favourite football team take a penalty in extra time. Will they understand what made the original special? Or will they just chuck some fancy graphics on top and hope nobody notices they’ve gutted everything that actually mattered?
My spare room looks like a museum of gaming disappointment and occasional triumph. Got original copies sitting right next to their remakes – Zelda games spanning three decades, multiple versions of Final Fantasy VII, enough copies of various Resident Evil games to stock a small shop. The wife keeps asking why I need both versions of everything. “Historical comparison,” I tell her, which sounds better than “crippling obsession with gaming preservation.” She’s not buying it, but the room’s mine so the collection stays.
Thing is, we don’t actually want the games exactly as they were. We want them as we remember them being, which is completely different. Found this out the hard way when I fired up the original Resident Evil a few years back – not the remake, the proper 1996 version. Spent more time wrestling with those bloody tank controls than fighting zombies. My brain had conveniently forgotten all the frustrating bits, keeping only the good memories of creepy atmosphere and jump scares. The remake understood this perfectly – it played like I remembered the original playing, not how it actually played. Clever psychology, that.
Resident Evil 2 remake in 2019 was another masterclass in getting it right. The original was my favourite – spent an entire weekend at my mate Steve’s house playing it because my parents thought it was too violent for our household. We lived on beans on toast and cheap lager, taking turns with Leon and Claire, arguing about which campaign was better. When the remake came out twenty-one years later, it was like meeting an old friend who’d aged gracefully. Same bones, better skin. They even kept the wonderfully cheesy dialogue – whoever wrote “It’s me” in his own blood still makes me chuckle.
But then you get the remakes that completely miss the point. Won’t name names, but there was this platformer remake that added unnecessary mechanics and “streamlined” level design, completely destroying what made the original challenging and rewarding. Felt like someone had read about the game on Wikipedia rather than actually playing it. Took it back to CEX after two days and dug out my old Mega Drive instead.
Worst ones are remakes that misunderstand why certain technical limitations actually improved the original. Silent Hill HD Collection somehow made those games less scary by removing the fog that was originally there to hide the PlayStation’s rubbish draw distance. What started as technical necessity became atmospheric brilliance, and the remake completely ignored that. Sometimes the grain on old VHS tapes makes the horror film scarier, you know?
Price point’s another bloody nightmare with these remakes. Nearly spat out my tea when I saw £50 on a remake of something I’d bought for thirty quid twenty years ago. Part of me gets it – modern development costs more than it did in the PlayStation era. But the part that remembers saving up pocket money for weeks to buy a new game balks at paying full price for something I’ve already played. I’ve developed my own system: more new content and substantial improvements mean I’m more likely to pay premium prices. Link’s Awakening remake? Worth every penny for the art style alone. Others that felt like cash grabs? Hard pass.
The difference between remakes and remasters matters, even though publishers seem determined to confuse everyone. As I keep explaining to my nephew (who sighs dramatically every time): remasters are like cleaning up an old film – better picture and sound, same performance. Remakes are shooting the whole thing again with new actors. Both have their place, but I wish companies would be honest about which one they’re actually selling us.
Control updates are where remakes often do their best work. Going back to early 3D games can be brutal – camera controls mapped to face buttons, no analogue stick support, menus designed by someone who clearly hated gamers. Shadow of the Colossus remake nailed this balance, updating controls to modern standards while keeping the deliberate, weighty feel of the original. Remember struggling with Agro’s controls on PS2, accidentally riding that horse off cliffs while my flatmate Dave laughed himself stupid. The remake fixed those issues without making it feel generic.
Music’s another minefield. When certain remakes replace orchestrated soundtracks with MIDI versions to save money, fans rightly lose their minds. The music’s so important to these experiences that changing it feels like colourising Casablanca. Best approach I’ve seen is including both versions – let players choose between authenticity and enhancement. Dragon Quest VIII 3DS got this completely wrong, replacing beautiful orchestral music with synthesised versions that had none of the emotional impact. Still keep my PS2 copy mainly for the soundtrack.
My most personal remake experience was Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy. Original Crash was the first game I bought with my own money from my Saturday job at the local Tesco – £4.50 an hour, brutal shifts, but worth it for that orange marsupial. Playing the remake transported me back to my teenage bedroom, that horrible carpet that was somehow both orange and brown, smell of Pot Noodles drifting upstairs. But something felt wrong – jumping physics were slightly different. Turns out they’d rebuilt all three games using the third game’s engine, which meant the first game’s famously precise platforming now felt different. My muscle memory from 1996 kept making me miss jumps I could once do with my eyes closed. Strange feeling, being a stranger in a familiar place.
Sometimes the world changes so much that remakes feel completely different. Playing Final Fantasy VII Remake during lockdown, stuck indoors while the world went mad, gave the eco-terrorism storyline and corporate corruption themes a weight that seventeen-year-old me never appreciated. Back then I was just in it for the mental summon animations – Knights of Round was worth every tedious hour breeding those bloody Golden Chocobos. But the remake hit me differently at my age, enhanced by voice acting and character development that the original PlayStation simply couldn’t handle.
Having original developers involved makes a massive difference. When Bluepoint tackled Shadow of the Colossus, they worked closely with Team Ico’s Fumito Ueda. Result felt like the original vision finally realised rather than someone else’s interpretation. When remakes happen without original creator input, they often miss subtle design choices that made the originals work. Like covering a song without understanding why certain notes were chosen – you might hit the same keys, but the soul gets lost somewhere.
I’ve accepted that my judgment of remakes is hopelessly tangled up with personal circumstances during both the original and remake. Games I played during formative teenage years will always carry emotional baggage that colours my opinion. Dead Space hit differently at thirty-seven than System Shock 2 did at nineteen, even though they’re similar games. The Resident Evil 2 remake wasn’t just competing with the original game – it was competing with my memories of playing it during a specific weekend in 1998, with specific mates, eating specific takeaway, worrying about specific teenage problems. No wonder remakes have such a high bar to clear.
But there’s something magical about sharing these games across generations. Watching my nephew play Link’s Awakening remake, discovering the trading sequence and Wind Fish for the first time, connected us in ways that showing him the Game Boy original probably never would. The remake bridged that gap, letting him experience the story and puzzles that blew my mind as a kid, without the frustrations of ancient hardware. That’s worth something. Maybe everything.
So yeah, I’ll keep buying remakes – the good ones anyway – and comparing them to their predecessors with the obsessive attention to detail that makes people avoid gaming conversations with me at parties. I’ve learned to judge them not just against rose-tinted memories but on their own merits. And occasionally, just occasionally, I’ll find one that doesn’t just recapture the original’s magic – it finds new magic I never knew was there. Those moments make all the disappointments worthwhile. Well, most of them. I’m still bitter about that platformer remake. Some wounds never heal.
John grew up swapping floppy disks and reading Amiga Power cover to cover. Now an IT manager in Manchester, he writes about the glory days of British computer gaming—Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, and why the Amiga deserved more love than it ever got.
