Dear Player: Remasters and Time-travel

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Some say this is a player's end-of-days in which our nostalgia-drenched and risk-averse media culture recycles old games to justify new machines. Maybe they’re right. Okay, maybe they’re ‘me’, but the ‘flowering’ of remasters in recent years has drawn a lot of comment, apocalyptic …and even utopian. HD conversions, and re-textured last-gen titles are returning both the old-masters and the recent classics to new audiences, but is this just the churning cauldron of capitalism capitalising on old gamers pining for their childhoods, or a sign of a maturing medium coming to embrace its history? Or is time all... circular?

Here I’m going to look at the idea of ‘return’, or ‘recurrence’ in games. To start getting a handle on why this is weird, let’s consider the resurrection of different games concerned with life after ‘death’. Can we discuss the remastering of Grim Fandango and The Last of Us in the same breath? These two games of un-death, have been brought back to life from different pasts – The Last of Us is hardly dead-enough to pluck nostalgic heart-strings, and State of Decay in 1080p doesn’t seem old enough to be a historical classic. Is there something about the themes and mechanics of games as a medium that predispose them to remastering?

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So why all the zombie-zombie games and what can remasters tell us about how we play? Robinson might be right, the art-form is changing. With streaming services (PlayStation Now), bundles and HD releases the prefix ‘retro’ is making less and less sense. With all of music history available to the mp3 generation, ‘retro-listening’ would be a weird turn of phrase – all media are beginning to exist in the present. Stewart Lee writes wittily about the availability of past media to the present, mocking the ability of the young to listen to music from any time without ANY context. With N64 hits coming to Xbox One, are we losing something special about the way we experienced them before? The interface, the rarity, the memory, the social history? Or are we gaining something NEW, learning to be less embarrassed by gaming history, willing to say low-poly games are aesthetically interesting and valid rather than obsolete instruments?

The amp didn’t stop us appreciating orchestras, nor does photography make painting look crude. Indeed, if Metallica can head an orchestra and Cindy Sherman can re-stage and photograph old master paintings then perhaps the opposite is true. Maybe old games in new graphical clothing indicate that we are starting to dialogue with the past in new and interesting ways.

First off, I’d argue that the economic incentives behind their development are plain, but not completely transparent. They’re a likely success for minimal expenditure, but not without the risk of controversy and long-term problems. When you resurrect a game, there are costs. If confidence is at the financial heart of the industry, it can be undermined by a reliance on ‘zombie’ zombie games. What happens when the best new releases are OLD releases? Do games have a future, and why should I keep up with them? Capital is sucked from innovation and the expansion of your market, and the hard-ware cycle behind big-budget game development gets called into question. Why buy new hardware to play old games? A very good question indeed.

And yet, many of us do just that.

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Interestingly, what’s often striking about a re-master is how close it cuts to the original – Grim Fandango HD gets some dynamic shadows, The Last of Us Remastered gets some slightly improved textures, but if we’re honest, we’d need a side-by-side comparison to spot the difference. Players seem to want something old but new, but not old and not new. Let me put it another way: Players want to experience the same feeling of newness they remember, not just repeat the combos they learned by heart nor scrap them altogether. Making the old ‘new’ is something different from just playing the old again, or even giving the new some retro-stylings. And who can blame them for wanting it? I’d lose my shit if I could play Morrowind again as if I’d never played it before.

What this desire insists on is, I argue, is a peculiar quality of time. Time’s not, not ‘really’, linear. Past things exist in the present, persist but in altered states. Old art can affect us deeply as if it were new, and both parties can change in the process when the past reaches in to the present. Didi-Huberman argues for an aesthetic time, what early-modernists might call the achronic or a-temporal, and what Kieth Moxey sees as part of the ‘heterochronicity’ of objects. The time of playing is always in a dynamic relationship with the life of the game. From scratches on the disk to the burial of cartridges in the desert, games have a material, and more crucially a ‘historical’, life, ones often baring traces of our own memories. Playing an excavated E.T. game gives us an odd feeling of the frustrations of a bygone age – retrospective and humourous, but also old and sand-blasted. Games set in the future, can terrify or amuse if we’ve lived past the date in Back To The Future’s Delorian dashboard. Controversies over Grand Theft Auto 2 at the time of its release are contexts we lack playing it in the present, and now, bizarrely, GTA 1 has a higher ESRB rating! What does this mean? It means there’s a disorientating uncanniness about old games, but also a strong cultural desire to return to them. In old games we have a uniquely interactive and physical means of ‘time-travel’, of dialogue with past designers, and they exert influence upon us. In a sense, Games are ‘players’ too, we talk to them and trade memories. But it’s not without cost.

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As Mary Ann Holly would argue, the bits that have changed or been lost by the object on the way through history can have an affective power of their own. Our first viewing of something ancient is a new moment that palimpsests onto past moments, but there are also the lost elements – the forgotten Easter eggs, the extinct platforms, the remaster’s edits, and awkward controls that don’t translate over time. Angry Nintendo Nerd might think of changing his name to Melancholy Nintendo Nerd. This ‘melancholy’ over what can’t be re-created/re-experienced might explain why the re-master-er often changes so little. Our quest to experience the old-as-new is motivated by a desire to elide what we lack. We avoid the disconcerting melancholy by the subtle-re-vamp: in a sense we can forget what we miss, and live the past again in the present.

Sublimation allows us to avoid an uncanny shock – re-packaged, old classics on next-gen consoles spook us less than the glitched sound-chip on a megadrive – but it can never get rid of it. PS4 and Xbox One have experienced endless controversies over the frame-rates of their ports, and to me this is more significant than mere whinging over 60fps. If new hardware struggles with an older PC game, what has happened to the future of games? When a 360 game actually plays slower on an Xbox One, time seems to go in reverse. The stutter of a frame-rate undermines both our immersion in the time of gameplay, AND our immersion in the time of memory. The illusion of making the past new is broken, the melancholy and frustration returns.

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But more ‘critical’ remasters can play with time in productive ways. Far Cry: Blood Dragon takes the player to retro-future, post-apocalyptic 2007. It’s the past seen through the present’s idea of a mock 80s future, and is as hilarious as that sounds. What’s more the game makes interesting light-hearted jibes at older gamers and the relationship between gaming and youth. Fourth-wall-breaking conversations argue for the health-benefits of gaming, while call-backs make clichés fun: “it’s time to teach [x] a lesson, permanently…again.” In playing with narrative time, it’s retro-futurist premise, AND the player’s awareness of our own memories of playing old-school games, Blood Dragon opens up ‘time’ for all of us to play with. Confident and humourous, it subtly synthesises a range of different temporal registers – ‘remastering’ Far Cry 3 as an 80s game with a self-awareness that let’s players construct new memories from the old. There is no melancholy here, just pure play. The history of games is itself made open-world, and it’s both hilarious and serious.

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We started by looking at what motivates a remaster, and considered why markets and audiences want to capture a particular quality of memory and time – to experience the past anew, rather than just repeat it – but isn’t this something essential to our relationship with all games? While Blood Dragon is exceptional in its transparency, it shows us what good re-masters can do, and further, what play might be pre-disposed towards allowing. Games are predicated on restarts, retries and respawns after all. What sparked my interest in ‘returns’ in gaming, was a very different kind of remaster: Journey.  Perhaps the most beautiful experience in gaming history, Journey, was recently remastered for the PS4, and made free to anyone who had already bought it. It’s a commodity, but it’s also, truly, a gift.

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It teaches the player a new language of co-operation. Restricting interactions to a single note forces certain pragmatic responses, but making that note a key gameplay mechanic also allows for an indescribable joy. Not only can you evolve a language to co-operate, your note enables your companion to fly, and vice versa. Talking to each other is the same activity as co-operating in a mechanical sense. Communication and co-operation are one, they are simultaneous. In glorious moments of synchronicity, two anonymous players become one. While the narrative is a linear and diachronic as possible, the time of play is perfectly synchronic, simultaneous. Everything flows, from sound to sand we slip and slide in union with our environment and our dance-partner. Why the remaster? Same reason as the original – complete the journey and return to where started. Like a drawing in the sand, we joyously erase what we make, rejoicing in the ephemeral but repeatable, infinitely the same and infinitely new. Games, Journey teaches us, can show us how to live with the paradoxes of time by making a virtue of recurrence - the timeless time of play.

Merlin Seller