Why Video Game Developers Love Remakes

Hello, One Take Shrier here. Focus L because today we're going to be talking about remakes inspired by the new trailer of the Ocarina of Time remake. Why are they so common? Why are they so popular? And what are some of the reasons that you might not immediately think about for creating remakes? But first of all, two quick housekeeping notes or I guess frequently asked questions. First of all, you see that guitar in the background? A certain uh Kyle Bosman uh called me out for leaning that guitar against the wall. But I just would like to point out that there is actually a stand under there, Kyle. So, uh I expect an apology or else a defamation lawsuit will be headed your way. I am not some sort of barbarian who would lean his guitar against a wall. Second of all, a lot of people have asked in recent weeks and months about this thing, my hand brace. Um, and just so you know, it is actually a preventative brace. I wear it to prevent

potential carpal tunnel syndrome and pain with my wrist when I'm using my laptop trackpad. Nothing is wrong. Do not worry. My wrist is okay. All right, let's talk about remakes. So, this week we got a release date for the Ocarina of Time remake for Nintendo's Switch 2. It comes out on November 5th. Um, showing that even Nintendo is a little bit scared of GTA 6. They want a twoe buffer from GTA. Uh we saw new graphics of this what is essentially a onetoone remake of the N64 Ocarina of Time with shiny new graphics. Kind of resembles that um that party video of AAA Mario that you might have seen floating around the internet. um really a fantastic takedown of AAA tropes to the point where I suspect that was floating around a lot of gamedev studios and that there it's it's influenced a lot of people and it might lead to a question that I think people have been asking for a little while now

as we've seen more and more remakes come out which is that why are there so many of these things and I want to break down some of the reasons. We're going to start with some of the kind of more obvious reasons, the one that might be immediately apparent to you, and then we're going to get into some that might be a little bit less obvious, maybe you haven't thought of quite as uh immediately um in response to the question, why are there so many remakes? So, reason number one, risk mitigation. I think this is the most obvious one, which is that if you are a game company and you are deciding what new game to release or make, what what to spend the next x number of years of your studio's time and money on, a remake can be the least risky option. That's not to say that it's not risky, but it can be one of the least risky options. And that is for a couple of reasons, but the first and foremost of those reasons, I think, is that it's very clear what your game is going to be. For the most part, let's say like you're making an Ocarina of

Time remake, and you decide from the beginning, this is not going to have any major changes. It's going to be a one:one remake. A lot of the decisions that you would make in game development are already made for you. You know who your main character is. You know what your fundamental verbs, your actions that you can do in the game are. You know the structure and the rhythm of your story and of your gameplay. You know, you're going to be going to these temples and um collecting items in each one and fighting your way through monsters and solving puzzles. You don't have to worry about designing the puzzles. The puzzles already designed for you. Essentially, the entire game is designed for you, and you have to decide how far you're going to push the graphics, how you're going to optimize for those graphics, how much you can push and still hit 60 frames a second or whatever your target frame rate is. Um, you have to decide whether how much of the kind of old gameplay from 1998 you're going to modernize. In this case, they added a jump button. So, you still

have to make some decisions, but most of the decisions or a large chunk of the decisions are already made for you. Now, sometimes this can get people into trouble. um for the Knights of the Old Republic remake that was being developed by Aspire in Texas has since left that studio and been moved to Saber. Um one of the troubles, one of the problems that they ran into while working on that game was kind of a a let's say a a lack of clear communication or clear decisions as to how much of a remake it was going to be versus how much of a remaster was going it was going to be. um that was kind of an ongoing point of tension I would say at least between studio leadership and the people that they hired. Um and so that can cause you some problems if you if there isn't a clear vision up front of this is what this remake is going to look like. This is how far we're going to push things. But still a lot of the decisions have already been made for you. Um, and so it's less risky than a brand new

original game where you are just constantly making decisions about every little thing and you could really get lost along the way or you can run into a problem where some people at your game company think you're making one kind of game and other people think you're making something else entirely. A very very common problem. Another kind of part of risk mitigation is really reason number two, which is that you have a built-in audience for these games. Especially if you're remaking a game that is as beloved as Ocarina of Time, or if you're remaking really any game that appeals to millennial nostalgia. Millennials are the real the real target for a lot of these these remakes these days because they're all in their 30s or 40s and have disposable income. And you can you can smash them right in the uh right in the fields as a millennial might say with something like Ocarina of Time where as soon as the music plays as soon as Link marches on to uh as soon as Link riding Iona like reaches Hyrule Field and that music starts to play,

you're just smashed. You're just guaranteed to make any millennial who grew up with an N64 uh start just balling right then and there. So you have this built-in audience. Um much less of a risk there. you don't have to worry quite as much about telling your story, about reaching people, about explaining to people what your game is because they know what your game is. That said, it was interesting if you watch the footage that was played this week during the Ocarina of Time kind of reveal event, the Zelda 40th anniversary Nintendo Direct that they put on, um, it seemed targeted towards people who had never heard of Ocarina of Time before, which I thought was kind of interesting. So, they're also trying to appeal to newer folks, of course. really they want anyone in the world to play this game. But when you have that built-in audience, you're mitigating risk. You're also trying to reach new audiences. And I think that's a good uh example of reason number three of making a remake, which is you might be trying to reintroduce a franchise to the modern era by creating something that feels modern. Um, Final Fantasy might be a good example of this with the massive Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy. Um,

which is really calling it a remake does it a disservice. It's more just like three brand new AAA open world games wearing Final Fantasy 7's skin like it crawled into the skin of Final Fantasy 7. Um like uh like in Star Wars uh crawling into the uh what's his face? Han Solo crawling into a hot skin. Is that what it was? Whatever it is on the ice planet, you know, when he's wearing the skin then you know what I'm talking about. Um, so that's Final Fantasy 7, but also Final Fantasy 7 remake does the job of reintroducing new audiences to Final Fantasy as a brand, to Final Fantasy 7 as a brand. And I think that can be really helpful especially if you are trying to revitalize a franchise which is why a lot of the time in um we'll see something like uh a company try to create a remake or a remaster as a springboard for leading people into the next big entry in a franchise especially if it's a been a while since

we saw that franchise come out. Um, uh, for example, I mean, a good example might be Naughty Dog with The Last of Us creating kind of the the remakes or remasters of The Last of Us one and two leading up into the HBO show, which was kind of this this well-timed moment where they wanted people to see the show and then think, "Oh, I want to check out that game." Or play the game and then think, "Oh, I want to check out that show." Some kind of trans cross media, trans promotion, as you might call it. Um, number four, reason number four, uh, this is also a little bit obvious, but worth noting. getting off of old consoles or at least getting on new consoles. A lot of games that are remade are not PC games where they're potentially playable for all of time, but console games where they're a lot harder to get a hold of. If you're remaking, for example, Ocarina of Time, which is only on the N64 and 3DS, unless you emulate it on the Switch or another platform, um, that is a game that, uh, I think could use a modern update on new

consoles, or at least use a port of some sort, kind of a a natural port on new consoles. And so, helping get it off old consoles and on new ones, can reach new audiences, help with game preservation, etc., etc. But now I want to get into some of the reasons that you might not be as kind of familiar with or you might not they might not come to mind as as easily. Um and number five, this one I think might be one of the more important ones which is getting game developers who are working on the remake familiar with new tools and new pipelines. So okay, a pipeline in game development is essentially the chain that is used to start from uh a piece of paper and lead into a video game. And a pipeline can be you can use pipeline to describe the entire game development process. Essentially we're going from uh writing a few things on a whiteboard into creating a video game. But also specifically you can use it to describe different pieces of the game's creation. So for example, there is an art pipeline that you might use and that might start

with one place and then lead to a finished art product. So for example, a pipe a pipeline that might look like this. And keeping in mind that these can look very different depending on the project and the game studio and the tools you're using. And we'll get into why that matters in a second, but like here's a a sample like an example of a pipeline. You might start with um let's say I want to make a sword in my video game. I might start with a concept art that is like this is what I want the sword to look like. Um and maybe a little bit of writing that is like this is called the the Excalibur and you're going to use it to slay robots. Um our game is really unique. Uh so you you take that piece of concept art and then um you might even start with like a mood board before you have concept art. A mood board that just kind of sets the overall tone of art direction. and you take a concept art and then maybe you'll have someone make a a high polygon model of that concept art where they make a model that looks as vivid and as as lush as possible. Maybe it'll go into maybe then you'll have to do a low polygon model and then you'll you'll have to keep going these steps along the way

depending on what it is. Um a sword typically wouldn't need animation, but let's say that it it's a talking sword. Let's say it's a sword that can kind of bend and um turn into like a real life. Let's say it's like a Toy Story sword where like it comes to life where um where the play when the player isn't looking at it. That'd be kind of a fun game. Um and you want animation to it. So, you might have to uh take you might have to build what's called a well, you will have to build what's called a rig, which is essentially a tool that um or kind of a a a way I'm I'm going to butcher some of these terminology because I don't actually make video games. I just talk to people who make video games. So, bear with me for a second. But essentially a rig is is you're taking this sword and you are um making it so the different parts of the sword uh can be kind of like uh uh deformed in different ways so you can animate them. So a rig might be like kind of the skeleton of the sword and maybe you make it so the different handles of it can move around. Maybe you

add a little mouth uh in there so it can move up and down. It feels like a puppet. Anyway, point is that the pipeline of going from um kind of a drawing on a piece of paper into something that is actually implementable and can be used within a game is is a process and it it takes a bunch of steps. Um at a certain point you have to optimize and that uh that might be kind of a work in progress that you're that you're playing around with as you go and maybe later in development you realize that you have to do more optimization. You you're you have too many polygons in there and you got to figure out a way to um to make it all work. Anyway, point being, it can be a complicated process even for experienced game developers and it changes all the time. Um, if you go from using Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, the pipelines might look different. Unreal Engine 5 has this all this new suite of technology which can be used to really cool effects, but also requires you to spend a bunch of time to learn how it works and figure out how your game studios pipelines kind of mesh with that and work with that and figure

out how to adjust things to make it work. Um, for example, Unreal 5 has all this new technology called like um Nanite is one of them, which is a I believe a new way to uh uh like um uh let me make sure I have this right. It's it's basically like you a new way to create geometry. Um and uh it's got this whole thing where it like takes these 3D models and like creates clusters out of them. And um essentially it's this high power geometry system and like you might have to learn how that works and how it fits in with your pipelines and the way that you're used to doing work. Um, and by the way, I I say all this to just kind of illustrate how complicated game development is, even just on a micro bymicro basis and or a micro basis. And if you a step-by-step basis, and if you think about the kind of the first thing that I brought up, which is the decision-m and the vision and having to make all these just kind of big and small decisions every single day about the way that your game will work and how

so many different people in a game just need to be aligned and understanding what the game will be, which can be really difficult, especially when you're talking about some game concept that's never been invented before. um getting people figuring out pipelines at the same time as they're learning what the game even is and trying to create stuff for it can be really really tricky. And uh if you're wondering why games take so long these days, I mean that is one of the biggest reasons if not the biggest reasons. So let's say you're moving from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 or you're otherwise changing your pipelines in some way or you've just hired a bunch of new people and you have a lot of people to train. Um, making a remake can be a really good way to get people familiar with all of those tools and pipelines and the way that they can make games together and building team chemistry, learning how to communicate along the way, learning how this particular artist likes to be asked for an asset or how long it will take them to get you an asset. So then you can implement that into your level. um

learning how this programmer likes to be asked for this feature, learning how long it'll take to get this tool online or this tool working in the way it's supposed to, etc., etc. So, if you eliminate eliminate as many variables as possible by creating a remake, um that can help things go way more efficiently and help you build team chemistry and help things get much easier when you do decide to make your Magnum Opus, your $300 million epic IP that's going to change the world. If you made a couple of remakes first to learn how to do it, you will be much better situated to do that. Which leads us to uh reason number six, which is kind of related to reason number five, which is get developers familiar with tools and pipelines, which is learn a new piece of hardware, which can introduce its own complications and variables to all of this game development halaloo. By the way, uh there's a reason I just write books and and articles and not make games. And one of them is that uh my uh for my my pipeline for using uh Google Drive and

typing words onto a piece of paper is is a much easier pipeline. I have a pipeline for doing an interview and recording it and transcribing it and turning that into a story and it's much simpler. And I I like to do my work and tell my stories that way. Anyway, uh when you go from the PlayStation 4 to the PlayStation 5, you are introducing a whole new suite of variables into that equation. Some of them can be pretty good. Some of them can just add a lot of time to your schedule as you are learning what you can do with a PS5 that you couldn't do with a PS4. How memory is managed on the PS5 versus the PS4. How to take advantage of the solid state drive. Uh all these other variables, how that development environment works. Um uh often times upgrading to a new platform requires you to um to play around with new tools in some way or another, at least new forms of optimization. And that just can create new variables. And again, eliminating as many of these variables as possible by by working on a remake instead of a

brand new game or a brand new IP especially um can make things easier on everyone and set you up for success down the road. And ideally, if you're a game studio that um takes a long time to make games, if you can find something that you can make in maybe two years instead of seven years, or maybe you can have a chunk of the team working on something for two years while everybody else is working on something else. That can really make things easier on everyone. Which leads to reason number seven, which is that not uh giving part of your team something to do while you're trying to figure out what's next. So, for example, let's say I have just finished my um my brand new Zelda game. Zelda, we're talking about Zelda, so why not this? Um I don't actually know who is making the Ocarine of Time remake. I don't think they've announced it yet. But um let's say in this hypothetical situation where I have a big team of people that have just come off of um The

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom or whatever the next the last big Zelda game and um I don't need all of those hundreds if not thousands of people and artists and programmers and designers. I don't need all those people to immediately start working on what's next. In fact, it can be counterintuitive to have them. it can be counterproductive to have them working on what's next because there isn't enough work for all of them yet. If I'm going on to the next Zelda game, what I really want, what I ideally want is some time for a small group of people to sit down and iterate and talk and prototype and just come up with great ideas for what that next new game will be. Whereas if I have a hundred a team of hundreds of people sitting around and waiting for work to do, then I will feel a lot more pressure to just come up with really quick ideas and just have them working on something. Or even worse, and this has absolutely happened. I've heard about this happening many times. Um I will come up with things that I know aren't actually going to be in the game just to give that team work to do

because otherwise they're sitting on their thumbs and just costing the studio money doing nothing. um so that uh they could just be essentially given busy work that they're not going to do anything with at the end of the day. And that's just bad news for everybody. So ideally, I will have a new project for them to work on while the small core team of directors and maybe writers and a couple of designers can figure out what the next big project is. And so at some studios, Nintendo is a good example of this, but at some studios there are multiple projects in development. So, I might take those people and just have them work on something else that was already in production. But often times, if you're a single game studio or if you're a studio that just really doesn't have the the resources, the manpower to work on multiple games, then it might make a lot of sense for me to be like, "Well, we just finished this brand new Zelda game. This small team is going to work on ideas for the next one, while you guys can go right into production on a remake of of the last Zelda game of a Zelda game from 20 years ago." And that

can create a really healthy um just kind of efficient pipeline where by the time those people ideally are done with that remake, this new project I'm working on will be ready for production and they can all come over and start working right away. Or even we could have just kind of this gradual trickling down whereas people finish their work on the remake, they come over to the new project and start working on that. So that can be a really healthy way to get your to get work done and keep your studio running. And ideally, your remake will sell really well and make you a bunch of money so you don't feel as financially pressured to release your big new game fast and um as cheaply as possible. Um number seven, and this is one that I think people don't talk about quite as much. Um actually, sorry, this is number eight, right? Um I'll read them all at the end. Um this is this will be our final reason. There are other reasons, too, but these are just some of the ones I wanted to bring up today. Um, reason number eight, um, opportunity to execute on your vision

again. If you are a game developer and you are fortunate enough, um, to still be at the company that you were at when you made this original game and you are working on a remake of that game, you might think to yourself, hey, even though this game, even though Ocarina of Time is beloved by all of these people, I actually look at that old game and I see all the compromises I had to make along the way. So maybe or doing a remake is an opportunity to fix those compromises or do things a little bit differently or execute on my vision in a way that is a little bit clearer to what I originally intended. Now this is a little bit more rare because oftentimes people working on remakes are not the original creators of the game. But sometimes it happens and sometimes you see opportunities for the original creators of games to go and add readad cut content or do flesh out cut content or or add features that maybe they wish they had time to create in the original game. Um, in this Ocarina of Time remake, again, haven't talked to those people, so I can't speak to what they

had in mind. Although, in Nintendo's case, you do have a lot of the people who worked on the original now working on the Ocarina of Time remake. But um just this week they announced that there is going to be a jump button in this game which is something I'm not sure if that was part of their original vision. But it is really interesting to see because it is such a change from the context driven jumping of the original Ocarina of Time. And it makes me wonder I mean was that part of the original vision? I don't know. But doing a remake can be an opportunity to just kind of reimagine to execute on the vision you had back then. And sometimes I think a lot of fans out there will be like oh a lot of people can be purist about this sort of thing and be like I don't want this remake to change anything to touch anything. But occasionally you'll have game developers who feel like they want to and they want to execute on their vision their original vision in a way that is better than they did back in the day. Um, so yeah, so we have I mean risk mitigation, um, reaching a built-in audience, reaching new audiences, getting off of old consoles and on new

ones, getting developers familiar with tools and pipelines, learning a new piece of hardware, um, uh, uh, giving people something to do when they don't have anything to do at your studio, and an opportunity to execute on your old vision. So, those are just some of the reasons, some of the bigger ones I would say as to why we see so many remakes. But hopefully helps you understand why it just seems like every single year we're just getting a slew of remakes of old games. And it often feels like I don't know, companies have just run out of ideas or just cashing out on the old cashing in on the old stuff. And to some extent, I'm sure that's true. I mean, risk mitigation, sure, part of it is just kind of like knowing that I mean, I did say built an audience. That is certainly part of it. But there are also some legitimate reasons that hopefully um help you understand why this happens so often. All right. Um focus up l and I'll see you next time.