Remakes are practically a motherlode cheat for studios, but they’re still divisive. Especially when the originals aren’t available on current-gen platforms, or when developers decide to spend resources updating ten-year-old titles with marginally better graphics. Cough, The Last of Us, cough. However, Mario and Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto is a staunch advocate for remakes, suggesting that they help shape future projects and bring classic titles to a whole new generation of gamers.
“Some people might say there are a lot of remakes, but after five years, a lot of people have outgrown games and stopped playing them,” Miyamoto said in an interview with Famitsu. “Young people today don’t have the opportunity to play games from ten years ago, so remaking them to be more playable and releasing them again is a good way to meet the demand. Letting people know the original games also leads to future developments, so we’ve been actively pursuing that recently.”
This philosophy doesn’t always hold true. Just look at the Dead Space remake, which underperformed by EA’s metrics, leading the series to be shelved. But typically, remakes are used to supplement releases and onboard new developers. Resident Evil is a prime example,...
