Mastering Remasters

Every few years, a new form of media comes out for movies. It started with VHS, Laser Discs, DVDs and now Blu-rays and digital formats. Unless you are watching a George Lucas or Steven Spielberg movie, you are technically watching the same movie albeit with an increase in visual and audio quality. If you were a film buff, you would be happy to just throw away the old formats so that you could get the latest and best way to experience the movie you love.

For games, it’s different. Consoles have been using specially designed architectures and processors up until the latest generation of consoles and porting the code that was specifically targeted for those consoles might prove to be a challenge with each one being so wildly different from each other that it might even be impossible to get the game up and running at all without doing a lot of legwork to redo the underlying engine that runs the game.

Which is why one of the most common ways that developers might choose to allow new players to experience their games is through emulation. At times the most simplest of methods, just run an emulated version of the hardware on another hardware. Some companies choose this method to bring their library of games to the more modern consoles and it’s great when they support it properly with checks to see if the games run as faithfully as possible. However, this method always bumps up against purists as they can easily compare it to the original or their own memories and it’s easier to notice flaws when it’s similar.

Another method, which is more lucrative than emulation, is through HD remasters. The jump from standard definition to high definition televisions came with developers remastering older games so that players who are new to gaming get a chance to experience them. It takes more work than emulation, a ton more work than I can explain here, but it is probably the best way moving forward. As console developers are moving towards more widely used architectures, it is more likely that games can go beyond their console generations and wouldn’t be locked behind which hardware you own anymore.