Dear Player: Re-re-mastering
The bandicoot's masquerade.
At E3 2017 Sony presented a new project, a new/old project, the re-remastering of Shadow of the Colossus. Ueda's classic was originally released for the PS2 in 2006, but was then given an HD remaster for PS3 in 2011 - but in 2018 we will experience a new uncanny frontier - an old canonical heavy-weight fully re-made with a fresh engine, assets and interface. At the time of writing, the highest grossing console exclusive is not a new Halo or CoD, but Crash Bandicoot, the N-sane Trilogy remake of the original punishing PS1 platformers. This follows hot on the heels of WipeOut: The Omega Collection, and like the forecast Shadow of the Colossus, both are much more than HD-texture face-lifts, they are full audio-visual re-casting of the source material. To say that nostalgia is strong in the current field of games would be an understatement - touching as it does everything from resurgent 8-bit aesthetics, to Sonic Mania, to Bethesda's rebuilding of Morrowind for ESO and the forthcoming release of the SNES Classic Edition - and I've written about the kind of contradictions and affect we experience when it comes to this impossible will to travel back in time. However, Sony's recent turn indicates a dramatic shift, from re-masters so subtle that difference is actively negated to a new strategy of radical corrective surgery - what does this mean for the way we receive games, and what might it indicate for the future of the past?
“Crash now looks like a dream, or the pre-rendered , impossibly silken ‘idea’ of a game from a movie.”
A nostalgic ecosystem
Some resurrections attempt a pixel-perfect simulacrum, others try to re-imagine what the old felt like when new.
Rime ticks all the boxes, but somehow falls between them
Before diving in to the dreamstate of re-remastering, a word on novelty and the 'new.' Part of the problem here is a bigger anxiety concerning 'originality' in a medium predicated on iteration, incremental improvement and technological development. What makes something 'new'? Should we look to the past or the future? What are the merits of a JRPG's theme-and-variation based on strict structural conventions versus the experimental conventions and 'avant-garde' aesthetics of the Western Indie scene? Alongside re-remastering, as a development, we have games in the Western context which are hitting walls in critical reception because they are deemed to be too derivative. 'Originality,' in the matrix of videogame value varies hugely with cultural context - It's why both a new Final Fantasy and Jonathan Blow title can find critical acclaim for innovation in their respective fields, and a hybrid game like Rime falls through the cracks. Rime's critical reception might be explained as a perceived transgression of temporal and cultural boundaries. As a modern Western take on an Ico/Journey that iterates around an established theme like a Japanese title, but which also courts aspects of novelty in aesthetics and mechanics like The Witness. It falls between two contexts and interestingly comes across as 'shouting a lot but saying little' - there's a friction involved in reading the game, an affective contradiction, a second order desire to love this game met with an odd, mute emptiness. 'Wanting' to love a game is something many players wrestle with, and in part this is a problem of translation, of memory, expectation and materiality. And to me it appears intimately related to our notions of newness, nostalgia and the uncanny encounter with a remaster. Let's return to the question:
“What does this mean for the way we receive games, and what might it indicate for the future of the past?”
Apparently even gravity changes over time.
In the short term this qualitative and quantitative intensification of re-mastering, which I began by outlining, may indicate a turn in Sony's business strategy. Pax PS4ia might be a period of complacency for the leading console manufacturer, but they are far from alone. While we can barely move for the wealth of 'new' 8-bit, 16-bit and low-poly aesthetics burgeoning in the medium, the content - the level designs, difficulty arcs, game mechanics and dynamics of old games are also being appropriated, whole, by remasters built on the ruins of the past. Indeed, the practice of console remastering is at least a couple of generations old at this point, and that's worth a moment of reflection: nostalgia is itself historied and some remasters are themselves antiques. Time runs in weird convoluted loops, especially in medium archaeology, and remastering is both a tricky exchange between different cultures from different places and more than that. An individual's memory changes over time, contexts are lost, and whole new audiences are given remastered works as fresh commodities to consume. While a sequel to a major franchise minimises risk for a publisher, playing with long-dead IP can be a bit of a dark art, with unintended consequences. A lot of sediment and stratigraphy has built up in the intervening time, and the sense of time passed and context lost is palpable. For Walter Benjamin, this might be the 'aura', for Jacque Derrida it is the 'idiom' - the time travel promise of nostalgia never works, we can't experience 'newness' twice.
Bare blueprints: a design document released by David Siller in 2015
Resurrecting specific games from past generations creates friction and loss - a troublesome translation between times. Players are repeatedly reporting how frustrating Crash's mechanics are, both underneath the cosmetic surgery and sometimes because of it. Yes the slow, tactical pace and the pressure to repeat check-pointed-gated sequences were always there, and we all knew from the beginning that motorcyclists only ever get anywhere in life if they come in First, but part of the remastering has involved changing and softening collision boxes, and blurring the edges of platforms with shader effects. The glossy coat of paint has concretely changed the substance of the work. The rose-tinted glasses are getting in the way, and minute adjustments are the focus of critical fervour - just how fast does a bandicoot fall? These disjunctions reveal something of the mute materiality of the game - like the grain of a photograph, the facture of a painting, or the normally invisible foundations of a building.
The high-definition lets the cracks show, but it also adds its own fractures - as a punishing game, Crash is now literally harder than you remember it. For all the critical acclaim of recent Souls-ean games, this return is met with ambivalence. The games of the 90s were predicated on eking out hours of play in an environment of lower consumer budgets and fewer releases, but like the re-hashing of coin-gobbling arcade games before them, the frustration their remasters elicit is divorced from its original context. 'Difficulty' itself is part of the material remainder, the 'idiom,' the bare fabric that stares at us mutely as a piece of semi-functional history-turned-anachronism. These elements of disjunct are 'Things', exposed breakages, mismatches and temporal knots.
Crash has gained polys but I swear he's lost weight.
“Resurrecting specific games from past generations creates friction and loss - a troublesome translation between times.”
Who knows what the future-of-the-past holds, but whatever it may be, developers will seek new aesthetic solutions to the frustrations and frictions of bringing the new to the old. I'm already dreaming of a near future where 32-bit retro aesthetics are all the rage: the question is not 'when?,' but 'in what form?,' and 'with what material digital disruptions?' Crash now looks like a dream, or the pre-rendered , impossibly silken 'idea' of a game from a movie. While I watch all my missed wumpa fruit boxes smash my bandicoot into the ground, he also looks for all the world like a comical Angel of History - a farcical/melancholy figure of our times.
Dr Merlin Seller