In Defense of Remasters

Last week, I wrote about the phenomenon of video game remakes and the differences between remakes and remasters. The conclusion I came to is that remakes are never a necessity, but they can be a good idea. What about remasters? Are they just as dubious of an endeavor? Not so, I believe. There are very few cases in which I think a remaster of a game is actually a bad thing in concept. That is not to say there are no bad remasters; they are regrettably abundant in this industry (although perhaps not quite as much as in others, like the music industry, but I digress). The Silent Hill HD Collection is an infamous example. In remastering two seminal survival horror classics, the studio responsible made a number of baffling mistakes that resulted in a truly terrible product that is without much debate the worst way of playing both games included. I choose not to mention their name because these issues are likely not the fault of the developers, but rather the fault of producers who provided them with insufficient time and resources. Regardless, it stands as a landmark of bad video game restoration. But for the sake of argument, lets assume that these botch jobs are out of the question. In a world with only nominally good remasters, what is their worth?

This is already a challenging argument because there’s little consensus of what a good remaster is. For some, the original game should be preserved exactly as it originally was, warts and all. This is, frankly, not a remaster at all, so to this crowd, there are no good remasters. Last week, I used Marvel vs Capcom 2 as a point of reference for discussing how preserving a game requires weighing the pros and cons of glitches and how they influence the game. This time, I’m going to focus more on visuals, and my point of reference will be Metal Gear Solid. If you’ll refer to the previous article, you’ll see that I ran down some of the usual shortcomings of PlayStation games that were due to the rudimentary 3D rendering capabilities of the day. Metal Gear Solid is no exception. All of the hallmarks of PS1-era 3D gaming are present. And in the most recent release, as packaged in Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1, they’re present yet again. That’s because this version is not a remaster, nor is it even a port. It’s just a straight emulation of the original PS1 version, down to the resolution, frame rate, and rendering, even introducing some new glitches that weren’t in the original that are typical of PS1 emulation. Notably, Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3 were given a much more generous treatment, in large part because they’re based on Bluepoint’s previous remasters of the same games. But Metal Gear Solid, the original, enjoyed no such embellishment.

To some people, this is a good thing. This is preservation, they say, and if you don’t like it, you just don’t like Metal Gear Solid. But even putting aside the new (admittedly minor) glitches, is this the treatment the game deserves? And if this is the way the game should be played, what exactly is the point of even including it in the collection to begin with? Let’s get some outside perspective. Here’s a hypothetical scenario for you: consider Zhang Yimou’s seminal martial arts film Hero. There is a Blu-ray of Hero available, but it’s famously not very good. So imagine, then, that Hero was getting a brand new, Ultra HD Blu-ray release. You would, reasonably, be excited. I know I would be. But then imagine that this new Ultra HD Blu-ray was actually just the same transfer as the old one, just encoded in slightly higher quality on a new disk. Was that worth getting excited over? Some people will say “Why are you upset? It’s the same movie. Don’t you like the movie?” And sure, I do like the movie, but I was hoping for it to get the treatment it deserves, and this is certainly not that. In fact, this entire endeavor is pointless at best and deeply cynical at worst. While this scenario may sound farfetched, it really isn’t. A number of classic martial arts films were released on Blu-ray under Vivendi’s Dragon Dynasty label that were, at best, marginally better than the existing DVDs. People were not happy about those, and people were not happy about the treatment of Metal Gear Solid for similar reasons.

But, as I established last week, video games and films are not directly comparable. This is still true. So let’s look at another hypothetical example: Bloodborne, a game that has inspired more fervor for a remaster than any other in recent memory. At present, it has been released exclusively for PlayStation 4, and while it is playable through backwards compatibility on PlayStation 5, that will provide no alleviation for its inconsistent frame pacing and fixed 1080p resolution. It’s easy to see why a remaster is so hotly demanded. So then, if a remaster were released for PlayStation 5 and Windows, imagine if they decided to preserve the game exactly as it was out of respect for the artistic intention of the original. Locked to 1080p, capped at 30 FPS with hitching in all the same places, no adjustments to the divisive post-processing effects. Just the exact same experience as on PlayStation 4. Sure, this could reach new audiences. But would they be happy with it? Would anybody? Bloodborne will forever be a classic game in spite of its limitations, but just about everyone recognizes those limitations as holding the game back. A remaster of the game would not need to be bound in the same way.

That is also the case for Metal Gear Solid. We should not look at games of the past as quaint curios whose technical problems are simply quirks while we look at the games of today as being unfairly saddled by technical limitation, because these limitations are so often the same. In much the same way that Bloodborne could be improved without fundamentally changing the nature of the game, Metal Gear Solid could be remastered to bring out its best side (through emulation, we can actually approximate how it would look remastered, albeit with some issues that are typical of emulation). We don’t know why it wasn’t. Perhaps there were difficulties behind the scenes, like the source code being unavailable or impossible to maintain. Or perhaps they just thought emulating the game was good enough. Whatever the reason, Metal Gear Solid still deserves better.

The other major argument against remasters is that they’re either a sign of a lack of originality or they’re cynical cash grabs. I find this argument bizarre as it seems to suggest that the past is best left unexamined. If anything, rather than the remaster being indicative of low creativity on the part of the developer, it would be indicative of limited creativity on the part of the critic, being unable to entertain the idea of there being value in something from the past, let alone the possibility that others might find any value. These remasters are important for how they preserve the games of the past and make them readily available on the hardware of today.

Hardware is the caveat, of course. Many have argued that old games are best experienced on their original hardware. In some senses, I agree. Neither a meticulous remaster nor perfect emulation can quite capture the feeling of original hardware. But it’s not feasible for everyone who wants to play older games to do so. As a consequence, preservation needs to accommodate modern hardware, and in doing so, the game must change. On a technical level, it is simply not realistic to expect the exact same experience across vastly different platforms. So changes must be made. Because of this, it only seems right to go a step further than preservation into restoration, as discussed above.

At this time, I like to think of John Cage’s famous experimental composition 4’33”. For the uninitiated, this is a piece in which the musicians are instructed not to play their instruments for the duration of the performance. There have been many perspectives on this piece, ranging from it being an elaborate prank to being an expression of Zen Buddhist principles. The perspective I am most drawn to, and the one most germane to this topic, is that it is about the nature of music and performance. We often like to think that there is an ideal version of any given piece of music, and that any deviations from that ideal in performance, the imperfections and inconsistencies, are unfortunate consequences of human fallibility. 4’33” has no ideal, other than perhaps total silence. The imperfections and inconsistencies are the performance. Consequently, no two performances are the same. But then, that’s always the case. In a roundabout way, video games are not so different. The rendering peculiarities of Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation are an irrevocable part of the experience. But the experience cannot be recreated flawlessly. We should then embrace the fact that a remaster might be different from what we’re familiar with. We should still be willing to criticize poor work, but dogmatic adherence to the past is as regressive as it is foolish.