The first time I encountered a remake of a game I loved, I was standing in a GameStop in 2002, staring at a copy of Resident Evil for GameCube. My initial reaction wasn’t excitement—it was skepticism. “Why mess with perfection?” I remember thinking, like the opinionated twenty-something I was. The original PlayStation version had defined survival horror for me, tank controls and all. I bought it anyway, of course (who was I kidding?), and spent that entire weekend with the blinds drawn, scaring the absolute hell out of myself all over again. By Sunday night, I had to admit: they’d actually improved on the original. The remake respected what made the source material work while fixing what didn’t—and that’s become my gold standard for judging every remake since.
Fast forward to today, and remakes are big business. Every E3 or State of Play seems to announce another childhood classic getting the modern treatment, and each time, I feel that same mixture of excitement and dread. Will they get it? Will they understand what made the original special, or will they just slap on prettier graphics and call it a day? It’s like when someone covers your favorite song—sometimes you get Johnny Cash doing “Hurt,” and sometimes you get Limp Bizkit doing “Behind Blue Eyes.” Same concept, wildly different results.
My gaming closet is a timeline of this obsession—I’ve kept original copies alongside their remade counterparts, like some weird museum of gaming evolution. The SNES Zelda sits next to the Switch Link’s Awakening. PS1 Final Fantasy VII beside the PS4 Remake. Original Xbox Halo next to the Master Chief Collection. My wife thinks it’s clutter; I tell her it’s “historical documentation.” That argument hasn’t won me any shelf space in the living room, but the basement gaming den remains my domain of comparative analysis.
The best remakes understand that nostalgia is a tricky beast. We don’t actually want exactly what we played twenty years ago—we want what we remember playing, and those are very different things. I learned this lesson the hard way when I fired up the original Resident Evil (no remake) a few years back, excited to relive those memories, only to find myself fighting the controls more than the zombies. My brain had edited out all the frustrations and limitations, preserving only the atmosphere and tension. The remake understood this psychological trick—it plays like I remember the original playing, not how it actually played.
The Resident Evil 2 remake from 2019 took this philosophy to new heights. The original was my favorite in the series—I bunked at Tom’s house for an entire weekend in high school just to play through it because my parents thought it was too violent. We subsisted on microwave burritos and Mountain Dew, taking turns navigating Leon and Claire through the zombie-infested police station. When I played the remake twenty years later, it was a masterclass in modernization. The over-the-shoulder camera and updated controls made it feel contemporary, but the level design, puzzle pacing, and atmosphere were spiritually identical to the original. They even kept the cheesy dialogue! The guy who wrote “It’s me” in his own blood still makes me laugh.
Contrast that with some remakes that just miss the point entirely. I won’t name names, but there was a certain mascot platformer remake that added unnecessary mechanics and “streamlined” level design that completely undercut what made the original challenging and rewarding. It felt like someone had read a Wikipedia summary of the game rather than actually playing it. I returned it after two days and dug my old console out of the closet instead.
The worst offenders are remakes that misunderstand the technical limitations that defined the original’s aesthetic. Silent Hill HD Collection somehow made those games less scary by removing the fog that had originally been used to disguise draw distance limitations. What was atmospheric necessity became a creative choice that the remake ignored, and the games suffered for it. Sometimes the grain on VHS adds to the horror movie experience, you know?
Price point is another contentious issue with remakes. I nearly choked when I saw a $60 tag on a remake of a game I bought for $40 twenty years ago. Part of me understands—modern development costs are astronomical compared to the PS1 era. But another part—the part that remembers saving up allowance for weeks to buy a new SNES cartridge—balks at paying full price for a game I’ve already played, albeit in a different form. I’ve developed a personal calculus: the more new content and substantial improvements, the more willing I am to pay premium prices. The Link’s Awakening remake? Worth every penny for the art direction alone. But I’ve passed on others that seemed like minimal effort cash grabs.
The remake versus remaster distinction is important but often misunderstood—even by publishers who slap these labels on boxes. As I explain to my nephew Jake (who rolls his eyes every time I start one of these lectures): a remaster is like restoring an old movie, cleaning up the visuals and sound but leaving the performance intact. A remake is like shooting the movie again with new actors and modern techniques. Both have their place, but I wish companies would be more honest about which one they’re selling us.
Control scheme modernization is where remakes often make their biggest improvements. Going back to games from the early 3D era can be brutal—camera controls mapped to face buttons, no analog stick support, menus designed by apparent sadists. The Shadow of the Colossus remake nailed this balance, updating the controls to contemporary standards while preserving the weight and deliberate pace of the original gameplay. I remember struggling with the PS2 version’s horse controls back in 2005, accidentally riding Agro off cliffs repeatedly while my roommate Dave laughed himself stupid on the couch. The remake fixed those issues without making the game feel homogenized.
Soundtrack reorchestration is another double-edged sword in remakes. When Final Fantasy VIII’s remake released with MIDI versions of some tracks rather than the orchestrated originals, the fan outcry was immediate and justified. The music is so integral to these experiences that changing it feels like colorizing Casablanca. The best approach I’ve seen is including both versions, letting players choose between authenticity and enhancement. The Dragon Quest VIII 3DS remake got this wrong, replacing the orchestrated soundtrack with synthesized versions that lacked the emotional impact of the originals. I actually kept my PS2 copy primarily for the music, even after buying the remake.
My most personal remake experience was with Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy. The original Crash was the first game I bought with my own money from my first job at the local grocery store (bagging, $5.15 an hour, brutal weekend shifts). Playing the remake, I was transported back to my parents’ basement, that weird carpet that was somehow both orange and brown, the smell of Pizza Rolls cooking upstairs. But something felt off—the jumping physics were slightly different. Turns out, all three games in the trilogy were rebuilt using the third game’s engine, which meant the first game’s famously precise platforming sections now had a slightly different feel. My muscle memory from 1996 kept making me miss jumps I could once make blindfolded. I had to consciously relearn a game that had once been second nature—a strange feeling of being a stranger in a familiar place.
Sometimes the context around a game changes so dramatically that a remake feels like an entirely new experience. Playing the Final Fantasy VII Remake in 2020, a global pandemic unfolding outside my window, gave the eco-terrorism storyline and themes of corporate exploitation a resonance that teenage me never fully appreciated in 1997. I was just in it for the cool summon animations back then (Knights of the Round Table was worth every second of breeding those damn Golden Chocobos). But the remake came to me at a point in life where its themes hit differently, enhanced by voice acting and character development that technology simply couldn’t support in the PS1 era.
The involvement of original developers can make or break a remake’s authenticity. When Bluepoint Games tackled Shadow of the Colossus, they consulted extensively with Team Ico’s Fumito Ueda. The result felt like a true vision realized rather than an interpretation. Conversely, when remakes happen without original creator input, they often miss subtle design intentions that made the originals work. It’s like covering a song without understanding why certain notes were chosen in the first place—you might hit all the same keys, but the emotion gets lost.
I’ve come to accept that my evaluation of remakes is inextricably tied to my life circumstances during both the original and the remake. The games I played during formative teenage years will always carry emotional weight that colors my judgment. Dead Space hit me differently at 37 than System Shock 2 did at 19, though they’re similar games in many ways. The remake of Resident Evil 2 wasn’t just competing with the original game—it was competing with my memories of playing the original during a specific weekend in 1998, with specific friends, with specific pizza toppings, with specific life concerns. No wonder remakes have such a high bar to clear.
For all my critical analysis, though, there’s something magical about sharing these games across generations. Watching Jake play the Link’s Awakening remake, discovering the trading sequence and the Wind Fish for the first time, connected us in a way that introducing him to 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 that come with dated hardware. That’s worth something. Maybe everything.
So yeah, I’ll keep buying remakes—the good ones, anyway—and I’ll keep comparing them to their predecessors with the obsessive attention to detail that makes my friends avoid bringing up the topic at parties. I’ve learned to temper my expectations, to judge remakes not just against rose-colored memories but on their own merits. And occasionally, just occasionally, I’ll find one that doesn’t just recapture the magic of the original—it finds new magic I never knew was there. Those moments make all the disappointments worthwhile. Well, most of them anyway. I’m still bitter about that mascot platformer. Some wounds never heal.
