What's the Deal With Video Game Remakes Anyway?

11 Jun, 2026

I really like it when video game companies re-release their old games. Did you know that you can buy and play the original 1984 Hydlide for PC-88 on PC¹ and Switch? I think that's neat. Outside of Japan, we really only know Hydlide as that odd 1989 game on the NES that plays a knockoff of the Indiana Jones theme endlessly and sucked in comparison to stuff like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy. We received the game completely devoid of the context that it was one of the first action RPGs ever (alongside Tower of Druaga and Dragon Slayer as its contemporaries, both also in 1984), and was massively influential to the development of video games in Japan.

(Image credit D4Enterprise/Steam)

Hydlide is an interesting game to go back to because it's very simplistic and unrefined, a raw expression of the ambition in creating the world's first "Active Role Playing Game", as the game's box prescribes itself. The game isn't difficult to pick up, switching to attack mode and damaging enemies by walking into them is fairly intuitive if a bit archaic feeling. However, progress oftentimes relies on completing specific, obtuse actions in order to get everything you need to complete the game. If you want to get an idea of what it was like without playing it yourself (or even if you have played it), I highly recommend this video by Basement Brothers on YouTube, breaking down the game, its basic history, and various ports.

So, if Hydlide is so outdated by the stuff that came after it, you might wonder why it hasn't been remade yet. Well, the Famicom/NES version, Hydlide Special², is kind of a remake, updating the original by backporting the music and the magic system from Hydlide II: Shine of Darkness. However, in 1995, a remake for the Sega Saturn titled Virtual Hydlide was released with cutting-edge 3D graphics, third person gameplay, and a randomized world so you'd never experience the same thing each time you play. Oh, yeah, it looks like this, by the way:

(Image credit Time Extension)

...yeah, that's a Real Human Person portraying the player character "Jim". Hey, incorporating graphics digitized from photographs and using full motion video cutscenes was the trendy thing to do at the time, this technique was featured heavily in games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, and Night Trap. Virtual Hydlide is just bringing Hydlide up to those modern trends and standards! ...Standards which, obviously, continued to evolve; and trends which fell out of style pretty quickly as eyes turned towards proper 3D models.

Anyway, Nintendo recently announced a new game called Star Fox, in Nintendo's own words, it's a "cinematic take on the Star Fox 64 story", or in other words, a remake of Star Fox 64, which is itself kind of a remake of the original Star Fox (1993) on Super Nintendo. Oh yeah, and Star Fox Zero on Wii U was itself a "reimagining" of Star Fox 64, and then let's not forget Star Fox 64 3D on the 3DS.

(What? Image credit Nintendo/WCCF Tech)

Yeah, I dunno either. There's an interesting phenomenon where sometimes the people working for legacy game companies don't seem to understand that people still want to play old video games. Famously, when GOG was trying to re-release the original Resident Evil trilogy, it was difficult for them to convince Capcom that people still wanted to play these games. The leadership at Capcom considered the remakes to be the 'superior experience': why play those crummy old games when you can play our much shinier, fancier, newer games?³ Given Fox McCloud just appeared as a principal character in the The Super Mario Galaxy Movie movie (I haven't seen it, if you want my opinion), and the fact that Star Fox as a series historically hasn't sold the way a lot other Nintendo franchises have, I guess they really feel the need to try to get people in the door with the original story of the franchise. They could just make something new and tell people to play Star Fox 64 on Nintendo Classics if they really want to know how it all began, but that would be too much of a risk, I guess.

And then, not long after that, Nintendo announced a remake of Ocarina of Time. Huh, yeah. What was for a long time the highest rated video game ever is now being remade, too. It makes sense from a business perspective, putting it out alongside another Nintendo 64 remake is smart, as many people have a lot of nostalgia attached to both games, and given how the development cycles for both The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom were easily over a decade⁴, Nintendo really needs something that can be completed in a shorter amount of time. Doing a remake is an easy win for that, considering so much of the work is already done to begin with.

(Oh, so we're doing this now, huh? Image credit Nintendo/Forbes)

But inevitably, both in this case and with Star Fox (2026), the conversation comes around to the question: Are these remakes even necessary? Do we really need a remake of two of the best games of all time? These games are extremely important to the history of Nintendo and video gaming at large. Anyone who wants to really delve into video gaming history ought to play those games the way they were originally presented. They're perfect, timeless pieces of art, like Shakespeare! It's disrespectful to that history and prestige to say that they're no longer up to modern standards by remaking them!

Eh... it's kind of funny, actually. I initially started writing this article to complain about remakes when Star Fox (2026) got announced, but, thinking about it, I like remakes a lot, actually. There is that cynical business element to them I don't like, but I have to admit, looking back at my history of playing games, I quite enjoy a good remake. Sometimes more than the original!

I only really got into Ocarina of Time from playing the 3DS remaster Ocarina of Time 3D. I bounced off of Resident Evil 4 (2005) pretty much as soon as I realized I had to actually care about managing Ashley's healthbar as well as my own, but later played through the remake with my girlfriend (and now editor :3) January and had a great time with it. I bought the System Shock remake by Nightdive Studios on a whim, and enjoying that led to me pre-ordering the System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster. Now, I'm sitting here alongside the people who played these games back in the nineties before I was even born, wondering where the hell System Shock 3 is, as well as intending to play the original System Shock (or rather, the "original" Enhanced Edition by Nightdive), which I'll get around to someday I swear.

Video games exist in a weird space in the history of artistic mediums. No matter how old a book gets, you can still read it, unless it's literally so old that it's written with an archaic version of the language nobody can understand anymore. However, the hardware needed to play video games stops being produced and commercially sold in a relatively extremely short amount of time, technology marches forward and stuff gets left behind. Similar technological advancements have occurred within film and music, but their respective industries have been far more proactive about bringing legacy content forward. The idea that you couldn't listen to a popular band from 60's on a streaming service and instead had to hunt down an original vinyl record would be unfathomable⁵, but that's essentially what companies expect you to do if you want to legally play an old video game.

(Let's face it, you're never going to be able to play Spacewar! on its original hardware. Image credit Wikipedia)

So, theoretically, a remake becomes "necessary" when an older game becomes no longer commercially available. Except no remake is actually ever truly "necessary" in that sense, because companies can and oftentimes do just bring back old games as they were originally presented (besides, if you really care about experiencing old games in their original formats, you're going to find a way to do it regardless of what these companies do or don't do). There is another sense where a remake could become "necessary" in that it doesn't adhere to modern game design and so is considered too difficult for modern audiences to get into. Still, evaluating this is highly subjective, there is genuinely no way to determine what games need remakes beyond people's opinions. No, at this day and age, it's impossible to say that any remake is "necessary".

The line between ports, remasters, and remakes are all really fuzzy anyway. I mean, going back to the Hydlide example, that game originally released on the PC-88, but there were a bunch of different kinds of home computers at the time, and so Hydlide received a bunch of conversions in order to cater to that diverse market. These versions each added their own unique changes, improvements, upgrades, downgrades, et cetera, et cetera. What really makes something a port as opposed to a remake if you need to rebuild it entirely in order to get it onto a new piece of hardware to begin with?

For an example you're probably a lot more familiar with, take Super Mario All-Stars on the Super Nintendo, which is a port/remake of the Super Mario Bros. trilogy-with-an-asterisk⁶ from NES/FC, but presented with entirely new graphics. From the perspective at that time, of course you'd want to explore what these games could look like if they were made in 16-bits! Why would anyone want the original versions with outdated graphics on their fancy powerful new system?

(Whoa! Nice graphics! Image credit infinityretro.com)

So, who's to say that's not also what they're doing with Ocarina of Time and Star Fox now? Putting aside the cynical business decisions, and the wonkiness with Star Fox as a series in general, it is kinda just fun to see what these games could look like on the newest hardware with all the newest graphical capabilities. Hell, fans do this so often themselves it's become a meme to make fun of it.

We've all played the original versions already, and anyone who hasn't can go back to them at any time. Just like how Shakespeare stories have been retold countless times, we can retell Ocarina of Time again, it's not that big a deal. Years later, we might look back on these new remakes the way we do Virtual Hydlide, and see it as a way of understanding the trends and quirky sensibilities of this era. New history is created, just as history was when the original game was released. Even if they end up being bad, I'm really looking forward to seeing how Ocarina of Time (2026) compares to Ocarina of Time (1998) and Ocarina of Time 3D (2011).

I like old video games a lot, I like when old video games are re-released in their original form, and I like when old video games are remade. I get why people say "I've already played this before, give me something new!" but if we really do value old video games, then we value getting new people into experiencing old video games, and remakes are another way of doing that. There's probably thousands of new Nintendo fans who will be experiencing it this way for the first time, and who might go on to try the original game later.

Sure, it sucks when remakes are bad, but as long as preservation efforts keep up, older games will never truly be lost. Remakes exist because they're fun, so let's have some fun with it.

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