In recent weeks and months leading up to this coming next-generation of consoles, I’ve seen an increase in an anti-remaster/remake sentiment for the new consoles. I’d have been right there with you, providing we hadn’t just gone through the current generation licking the walls of the previous generations like mildew for sustenance. The PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One have been in a dreadfully dire state of affairs long before they released, and for the Switch, before it was announced. Don’t misinterpret that as me stating there were no new games of interest, there were a few.

However, The Witcher 3, Super Mario Odyssey, Watch Dogs 2 (a personal favorite), God of War (2018), Breath of the Wild, and Bloodborne are a paltry sum. In the year 2000, there were nine games counted to be some of the greatest of all-time. 2001, there were a total of thirteen, including MGS 2, Grand Theft Auto III, Max Payne, Silent Hill 2, Halo, and ICO. If we go by Wikipedia’s soft-locked list of what are considered the best games of all-time, you can see a lull in releases starting in 2014. There is no mistaking it. The eight-generation of gaming, has been the one of The Remaster/Remake.

Why?

Well, there are several contributing factors, some of which are self-inflicted wounds by publishers and console manufacturers. There is, in one way or another, a lack of backward-compatibility. Sure, the PlayStation 5 is compatible with a majority of PlayStation 4 titles, but the most notable of which are remasters/remakes themselves. Meanwhile, the Xbox One, and now one would assume the Xbox Series X/S family of consoles too, offer a comprehensive list of Original Xbox and 360 titles. Though it is “only” 607 games in total, with a few notable standouts; it doesn’t light a fire in your underpants.

I’ve yet to find someone who’s clamoring for their disk copy of Duke Nukem Forever, Sonic Unleashed, Rockstar Table Tennis, Rumble Roses XX, Hydrophobia, or Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 to work. Of course, I’m cherry-picking to highlight that someone will want to play them at some point. The reason old fuddy-duddies like me yell about the importance of backward-compatibility is the history we’re losing as we creep ever-further away from the early to mid-2000s/PS2-era. Yes, it had a wealth of great games we talk about to this day, though the PS2 had 3,800+ games and the Xbox about 1000. They may have had only about 55 great games in their life-spans before the generation moved-on.

The point I’m trying to raise is, we understand our mistakes of gaming by seeing them first-hand. By having a lack of compatibility and a lack of a remaster, we are losing not only great games to faded memory. We also lose history of the ones that we’ll forget and be doomed to repeat the mistakes of, time and time again. We can all considerably praise the god of 2008 open-world crime sandboxes, and I’m not talking about Grand Theft Auto IV; I’m talking about Saints Row 2. That game is so great, I do/have owned several copies of the game and played them all to death, but that doesn’t excuse the out-dated respect grind to continue the plot. Looking back, it is a stupid decision.

Money, it’s a gas!

This one would plague the comments if it wasn’t at least mentioned. There is a strong belief in the community that every company is out to scrape every penny out of your pocket, and in some cases that is true. Profit is (of course) a factor. These are businesses, and some are more flagrant than others, but to continue, they need to make money. As bubble bursting as that may be, it is a simple fact. You can’t run on goodwill forever without there being some sense of revolt. As inflation grows, the cost of living skyrockets, and as wage stagnation is prolonged, there will be a desire to look elsewhere that will provide a better life for executives and developers.

However, let me point out the adverse argument to “remasters are just for profit.” The Sims. It released in 2000 and created a whole new breed of gamer, the “casual” bored housewife looking for an escapist fantasy into consumerism. Of course, more than the prototypical bored housewife would play it, but it did something new to the world that wasn’t being done too often back then, it was a game for adults as well as kids. If EA released The Sims with all its expansions for $30-$40 tomorrow, half the world would be in a Desperate Housewives-level conspiracy for murder on Bella Goth by Monday. EA would be rolling in it.

How Activision hasn’t fed Sony all the money to get a massive return on a remaster of Spider-Man 2 (for the PS2), I don’t understand. How Sega hasn’t been smart enough to re-release Jet Set Radio is beyond me, and why Nintendo doesn’t have Metroid Prime on the Switch is appalling. If EA really wants me to commit a crime so they can have all the money in the world, they need to release Burnout 3: Takedown. If Konami wants to get in my good books, they should be porting Metal Gear Solid 3 to PC. These are literal money printing machines waiting to be taken to the bathrooms by the school gym to have an awkward teenage fumble.

Those are just several examples of games that would probably result in great profit for a quick port or a gentle HD/4K remaster, but we don’t have them. By all means, Activision probably raked in a fair bit of money thanks to the glee following THPS 1 + 2‘s release, and rightfully so because I love it. All that said, that alone isn’t going to get anyone a four-star daydream or the time to think they will be buying themselves a football team. Say what you will about Activision/Blizzard, and I will; you can’t bankroll a lifestyle on that alone. Especially as Bobby Kotick is one of American’s most overpaid CEOs; Meanwhile, his staff have been forced to skip meals to pay rent.

Nostalgia, I hardly knew her!

Well, this one is obvious now. I’ve already spoken of THPS, several PS2 games, and that I would kill to get Burnout 3 on modern systems. We have been going through quite a bit of nostalgia of late, you might have noticed with Stranger Things, G.L.O.W, and the Ghostbusters all-female remake all representing the 80s like it was going out of fashion. Nostalgia is fueling a significant part of the gaming industry too, as we see hundreds and thousands of indie games attempting to be the next big 2D platformer. The trouble is, the next decade we’re going to suck all the life out of saw the beginning of the 3D platformer – we’re making a mistake!

Nostalgia will, of course, fuel some of the remasters you’ll see over the coming ninth generation of consoles. Though it is not only nostalgic remasters we’ll see, I’ll get to those in a minute. When we are re-releasing, remastering, or entirely remaking games, we’re going to have a small part of faded memories fueling why we want to buy and play them. I could say the name of several Simpsons games. There are several of us that will have fond foggy memories of The Simpsons Wrestling, The Simpsons Game, The Simpsons Hit and Run, and The Simpsons Road Rage, but only one of those turned out to be good.

The Final Fantasy series is banked on the fond memories of the good ones, but much like Doctor Who, there is a lot of old crap in there. Half of what fueled the excitement for WWE 2K Battlegrounds was nostalgia for something that only lived in foggy memory, a faded recollection of something I knew was still a bit crap. So going forward for the next several years, expect to relive the end of the PS1-era into the PS2/Xbox-era of gaming. I mean, we’ve still got the next section of Final Fantasy 7 to get through following PlayStation’s exclusive first-part from earlier this year.

Cross-generation Releases –

See, this is what mostly kicked off my anger on this one. An argument that we don’t need to start remastering PS4 games from the last year or two, but when did this cross-generational gap start? I’d say about 2018, not long after Phil Spencer gave a quick look at the Xbox Series X codename and teaser. It might feel like a decade ago, given that this year has dragged on like a tricky poo; however, this cross-generational gap has been longer than we’ve realized. Probably the most notable game to cross between the generations for eighth generation will be Marvel’s Spider-Man 2018 release and its upcoming sequel and remaster.

Though it is not the first cross-generational release, and of course, not the only one to happen. I love Dishonored, it is a bit copy-and-paste in places if you look at other games, but it proved to be something that was at least interesting as a concept. However, almost three years after its release, it was released on PS4 and Xbox One with a Definitive Edition remaster of the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC port with all the game’s DLC. That’s not the anomaly in the pile; it is, in fact, one of many I own and could name.

To only list games on PS3/Xbox 360 ported to PS4/Xbox One and later Nintendo Switch: Borderlands: The Handsome Collection, Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, Skyrim – Special Edition, Darksiders 1 and 2, Burnout Paradise, The Last of Us – Remastered, Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, Metro Redux, Injustice: Gods Among Us Ultimate Edition, and Dark Souls 1 and 2. That is a majority of the big releases from the late PS3/360-era, and I’ve opted not to include things like Far Cry 3, where they were meant to be exclusive in a bundle but were later opened up as a standalone release too. I’ll repeat myself, this has been the generation of the remaster/remake, and you and I let it happen with praise.

To complain about this now seems rather grandstand-y of those that were not only praising The Last of Us‘ remaster, but welcoming it with open arms. We’ve set a precedent, we’re going to have lots and lots of remasters or remakes in the coming years, and it is thanks to that. Complain as you will, but we doomed the eighth generation of gaming with nostalgia and a desire for slightly shinier console gaming. There is no telling if we’ve done the same for the ninth generation as well; only time will tell.