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Games are very tech driven. Like specifically with your example of Resident Evil Remake, there are things in I think RE2 Remake that they wanted to do in RE2 but I think they were too limited by technology to accomplish. Disc capacity, RAM capacity, that sort of thing.

In some ways it's comparable to having a different medium entirely. Think of it like the difference between silent movies and "talkies", except that's happened 4+ times.

Now these are not remakes, but they are all Indiana Jones games. And you get what I mean, right? Mechanics get less oblique. Graphics get more expressive. Music becomes more evocative. You go from something that's almost totally incomprehensible to something that is basically the real Indiana Jones.

You also go from a game that basically uses a single button to a game that uses many buttons to a game that uses buttons and sticks, and finally buttons, sticks, triggers, and haptics. It is a significantly bigger shift than you get in film, where to some degree, a photograph is still a photograph.

More than most entertainment industries, video games have been revolutionized over, and over, and over, and over again.

It's also like... I think a lot about the PS1 and the Dualshock divide, right. Once Sony released the Dualshock, a lot of games were simply better with analog, to the point where some games re-released to add analog controls. Great sea changes like that have been common.

And this also happened a lot with the shift from silent film to talkies! A lot of silent films got remade to give characters actual spoken dialog once the technology allowed for it. It's just the tech for viewing films hasn't evolved in such a way to necessitate large quantities of remakes (even though we've also gotten plenty there, as well). Instead, studios can just re-scan the negatives and pull a new, native 4K image out of something they've already finished.

Games can't really do that, not to the same degree.

Whereas you can probably watch a movie made in 1987 on a 4K TV and get a better experience at home than you probably could at the theater in 1987, an NES game is always kind of going to look and sound like an NES game. And preservationists are fighting harder than ever to make sure games are presented in their original formats, warts and all, as accurately as possible.

Imagine if the only format Escape From New York released on was VHS. Didn't matter if it came out on DVD, Blu-ray, whatever. It was always VHS quality.

That's sort of what people want from retro games. And "retro" is a moving target continually encompassing larger and larger volumes of material.

And that's not even touching on the fact that a lot of old game developers were not very preservation focused. So a lot of that old code is simply gone forever, lost to the ages, and a modern developer might find it more pertinent to just remake the product from scratch. Especially when you consider that even if the code survives, it might be 30 year old machine code for a CPU that hasn't been manufactured since the Reagan administration.

And then there's the whole tangle of emulation, which may be too advanced for some users, may require extra hardware power the user doesn't have access to, and may not even run games correctly compared to real actual hardware. Things are getting better on that front all the time, but there are still thousands of games that are in danger of becoming inaccessible by time and hardware. That, too, is less true of movies, where as long as you have a screen that displays moving pictures, you can probably watch a movie on it.

There's just a lot more going on with games than there are with movies.

I do think there's a great value in keeping legacy versions of games alive and functional even in the face of remakes, though. Being able to play the original RE4 and then swap over to RE4 Remake is great. Making sure both things are distinct products but are still obviously connected is good, too.

I also sometimes find myself gripped by the perverse desire to see some movies remastered in the same way games get changed by tech. Mostly, movies from the mid-to-late 90's, during the first waves of the CGI takeover. I often wonder why they can't just replace the old terrible looking CGI with new, better CGI. I'm not asking for a George Lucas treatment, but I mean just... upgrade the textures. Improve the lighting. Use better hair simulations.

Like, the 1995 Jumanji movie, right. These CGI monkeys look awful, and they're even worse when you see them in motion. So don't change the shots, but just put better CGI in that doesn't look so old and distracting. Better motion blur, better lighting, better hair, but still the same shot. Just give them a Version 2.0 pass. Exact same movie, frame for frame, add nothing, subtract nothing, but the CGI characters look more like they belong in that world. That's all.

or the concept of a pride flag is considered to be inappropriate for 13 year olds.

happy pride 2026. here's a pride flag for when corporate interests of a site run by dogshit transphobes, handwringing pearlclutchers, and "powerless" "allies" tell you that pride and your gender is no one else's fucking business:

my daughter cannot, through action or inaction, harm a human or allow a human to come to harm

a daughter at rest or in constant motion remains at rest or in constant motion unless acted upon by another force

daughters are never created or destroyed, only transformed

always treat every daughter as loaded, even if you know she isn't

7. You can fold my daughter through any two points.

10. When two or more daughters are offered for a phenomenon, the simplest daughter is preferable.

11. Any sufficiently advanced daughter is indistinguishable from magic.

12. Without a clear indicator of intent, it is utterly impossible to parody my daughter without someone mistaking it for the genuine article.