Why Some Games Shouldn't Be Remade — No Matter the Demand

May 23, 2025

We live in the age of the glow-up. Everything from low-poly PlayStation classics to beloved pixel-art RPGs seems to be one publisher pitch deck away from a lavish remake. And on paper, it makes sense. Better tech, bigger budgets, clearer soundtracks, and facial animations that actually move. Who wouldn't want a more modern take on the games we loved?

Remakes promise more than just graphical fidelity—they hint at redemption. At giving a cult hit its due, or letting a younger generation experience a legend without squinting through jagged textures and tank controls. There's a kind of poetic justice to it. A chance to right wrongs, fix flaws, patch in polish where memory once filled the gaps.

But here's the thing: not every game wants to be remade.

Some games shouldn't be.

And I don't mean in the "they're sacred and untouchable" kind of way—though we'll go there too. I mean that certain titles are so baked into the quirks, limitations, and vibes of their time that trying to remold them breaks something essential. A texture. A weird rhythm. A feeling.

Because a game isn't just its plot or mechanics or engine. A game is a moment. A spark in a bottle. It's context and curiosity and sometimes even confusion. And sometimes, chasing a cleaner, smoother, glossier version actually warps what made it stick in our hearts in the first place.

Remakes can impress. But they can also overwrite.

So let's talk about it. Let's get a little sentimental, a little spicy, and a little honest about why some games need to be left exactly as they were—warts, weirdness, wonder, and all.

The Nostalgia Engine Runs on Imperfection

Here's a truth developers often forget when they greenlight a remake: nostalgia isn't about polish. It's about place.

When we think back to games like Silent Hill 2, Chrono Trigger, or EarthBound, we're not just remembering story beats or boss fights. We're remembering where we were. Who we were. What that CRT glow felt like at midnight, flickering softly as the rest of the house slept. How the awkward translation actually made it weirder and better. How the silence in certain scenes spoke louder than any orchestrated score ever could.

The magic isn't in the textures. It's in the mood. In the haze of memory. In the friction between what the game tried to be and what our imaginations helped it become.

Take Final Fantasy VII. The original was jagged, clunky, often ridiculous—and utterly unforgettable. It threw together eco-terrorism, slapstick cross-dressing, and cosmic tragedy without blinking. It had heart, even when its polygons didn't have fingers. The Remake is sleek and stylish, no doubt. A technical marvel. But it's a different beast entirely. The pacing, the tone, the sheer oddness of the original got paved over in favor of something more modern and digestible.

And while the new trilogy is clearly made with love—and deserves praise on its own terms—it doesn't replace the original. It reframes it.

And sometimes, reframing changes the picture too much. What you gain in clarity, you can lose in soul.

When Awkwardness Is the Charm

Not all games age "well"—and that's okay. Some titles age like cult films: they get better because of their quirks. The stilted animations, the baffling UI, the pacing that makes you wonder if your console froze—they're part of the texture, not errors to erase.

Consider Deadly Premonition, a low-budget survival horror trip that feels like it was pieced together mid-fever dream—with duct tape and divine nonsense. The driving? Atrocious. Like steering a boat through glue. The combat? Straight out of a scrapped PS2 demo. But the atmosphere? Untouchable.

Technically? It's a disaster. Tonally? Pure brilliance.

It doesn't just survive its weirdness—it thrives in it. The offbeat rhythm, the eerie, stilted townsfolk, the sudden whiplash from gruesome murder to mystical coffee readings—it’s all part of the strange, hypnotic charm.

Now imagine a full-budget remake that fixes everything: a new engine, reworked dialogue, modern combat design. You'd end up with something technically sound, sure. But also… sterile. You'd lose what made it legendary. It was the strangeness that made it sing.

Remakes often try to sand off the weird edges. They fill in the blanks with exposition, "fix" clunky controls, smooth over silence with cinematic music. But sometimes silence matters. Sometimes confusion is part of the experience. The tension of not knowing why something is the way it is creates a kind of low-key magic.

Rough design isn't always a flaw. Sometimes it's the soul. The awkwardness, the unpredictability, the "was this intentional?" moments—that's what makes a game feel alive.

Pixel Dust and Memory Cards: Hardware Was Part of the Story

Let's get real: some games are married to the tech that birthed them. The cartridge hum. The whir of a disc drive spinning up like a jet engine. The load screen chug that gave you just enough time to breathe—or panic. The stiff analog stick that somehow made Tony Hawk's Pro Skater feel just right, like you were grinding the edge of physics on a plastic deck.

You can't fully remake GoldenEye 007 because half of that experience was the N64 controller. The weird three-pronged grip that made you feel like you were operating alien tech. The four-player split screen where half the game was arguing about screen-cheating (they always were, and so were you). The low framerate wasn't a bug—it was part of the challenge. It was the intensity.

Modern remakes might add dual-stick aiming, higher resolutions, online matchmaking, and achievements—but it's not the same vibe. Not really. Because GoldenEye wasn't just a shooter. It was a social experiment in the living room chaos economy of 1997.

Same goes for Resident Evil 1. The fixed camera angles and tank controls weren't just limitations—they were design. They forced you to confront fear blindly. You'd hear something snarl offscreen and have to move forward anyway. That helplessness, that spatial disorientation—it was the point.

Yes, the GameCube remake is beautiful. One of the best reimaginings out there. But it's just that—a reimagining. A new flavor, not a new coat of paint. The original is grimier, stiffer, weirder. And scarier because of it.

Sometimes, the hardware is the horror. The fear wasn't just in the mansion or the monsters. It was in your hands—fumbling with a controller that didn't care if you were ready.

The Voice Acting Was Bad (And That's Why It Was Good)

Gaming's early 3D era brought us many gifts: fog, polygons, tank controls—and some truly questionable voice acting.

Lines were delivered like the actor just read them off a napkin. Emotional cues were missed by miles. Accents drifted in and out like passing storms. And yet… we loved it. Not ironically. Not mockingly. We genuinely loved it.

And listen—I'm not saying bad voice work is automatically endearing. Some of it was straight-up hard to sit through. But there's a kind of honest camp that bloomed before games got too self-aware. Before every protagonist had to sound like a Marvel quip machine or a gravel-throated antihero in 4K.

Remember Castlevania: Symphony of the Night? That infamous "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!" line? It's pure melodrama. Theater-kid Shakespeare by way of a haunted B-movie. And it's perfect. That line is burned into gaming's cultural memory not in spite of its corniness but because of it.

If you remade that game today, some exec would probably want to "fix" the writing. Make it more grounded, more naturalistic. Give Dracula a tragic backstory monologue. And sure, you'd get something technically better. Something polished and respectable.

But emotionally? You'd lose the vibe. The bombast. The joy of hearing a vampire lord spit existential philosophy like he's in a high school drama club.

There's beauty in bombast. There's charm in cheesiness. Not everything needs to be smoothed out or made "cinematic." Some lines should echo like they're bouncing off the walls of a poorly rendered castle hallway.

Don't clean it up too much. You'll scrub away the soul.

Fan Remakes Know What Official Ones Forget

Here's a twist: some of the best "remakes" aren't from studios at all. They're from fans. From bedroom coders, pixel artists, music remixers, and diehards who taught themselves engines just to bring one old title back to life.

Projects like AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake) or the tragically shut-down Chrono Resurrection understand something most publishers miss: fans aren't trying to modernize. They're trying to preserve. They're not chasing trends or quarterly targets—they're chasing a feeling.

Fan remakes are often pixel-perfect not because they're stuck in the past, but because they respect the past. They don't rush to update mechanics or rewrite lore. They keep the odd pacing, the awkward menus, the way the music loops a beat too soon. They honor the emotional rhythm of the original. They know the difference between enhancement and erasure.

Big-budget remakes sometimes want to impress new players. Fan remakes just want to say: "Remember this? Wasn't it special?"

And that's a whole different kind of magic. It's not about scale. It's about sincerity. It's about recreating the experience—not reimagining it from scratch.

Fans remake games with the kind of reverence you can't manufacture. And maybe that's why their versions feel more right, even when they're technically less refined. Because they remember not just how the game played, but how it felt.

When a Game is a Time Capsule, Let It Be One

Some games are more than games. They're artifacts. Capsules of a mood, a cultural beat, a design philosophy that doesn't exist anymore—and maybe never will again. They don't just show us how we played; they show us what mattered at the time. What felt urgent. What we found funny, or scary, or worth saving to a memory card.

You wouldn't repaint the Mona Lisa with brighter colors. You wouldn't add jump cuts to Citizen Kane to "match modern pacing." So why remake ICO with better lighting, smoother animations, and tighter controls if it alters the pacing, the softness, the dreamlike haze that defined it? That slowness wasn't a bug—it was the poetry.

EarthBound, with its anti-design menus, janky hitboxes, and fourth-wall-breaking weirdness, shouldn't be streamlined. That game is a scrapbook. A surreal playground of '90s vibes, suburban ennui, and childhood melancholy wrapped in neon and nonsense. You remake it and… what, add a crafting system? Skill trees? Quest markers? Don't. Please don't. That game wasn't meant to be "efficient." It was meant to wander.

Preservation isn't just about keeping code alive. It's about protecting the texture of an era—the awkward timing, the strange silences, the odd choices that only make sense if you were there. It's about remembering what it felt like to play before tutorials, before minimaps, before everything was optimized.

Sometimes, a game should stay blurry. That blur isn't a flaw. It's part of the memory. Part of the dream.

The Fear of Missing Out Drives the Wrong Remakes

Let's be blunt: not every remake comes from love. Some come from fear.

Fear that players won't "get" the original. Fear of looking outdated or unmarketable. Fear of missing out on a hot trend, a nostalgia wave, a streamer-fueled sales bump. And when fear drives the creative process, you don't get tributes—you get compromises.

We've seen studios go full nostalgia-cash-in mode (Warcraft III: Reforged, anyone?). The result is often a Frankenstein's monster—part reboot, part live-service experiment, part damage control. These remakes aren't trying to celebrate what made the original beloved. They're trying to replace it with something safer. Trendier. Easier to monetize.

That's not reverence. That's replacement.

And it rarely works. Because players feel the difference. They know when a remake was made to be sold, not remembered. And while games like Resident Evil 2 prove you can do it right—with care, clarity, and a deep understanding of what to update and what to preserve—those are the exceptions. Not the rule.

There's a reason so many fans still reach for the originals. Even with the low-res textures. Even with the stiff animations. Even with the awkward menus. There's a vibe you can't fake. A pulse you can't replicate with modern shaders and motion capture.

You can't remake sincerity. You can only repackage it—and hope nobody notices the difference.

Let the Weird Ones Breathe

There's this old quote from film critic Pauline Kael: "Great movies are rarely perfect movies." The same goes for games. Maybe even more so.

The titles we carry with us—the ones we still talk about decades later—aren't perfect. They're messy. They're flawed. They're human. And that humanity comes through in their rough edges, their strange decisions, their half-baked systems that somehow still work because they had soul.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do is leave them alone. Let them breathe. Let them stand as they were, warts and wonder intact. Don't repaint them. Don't rebuild them from scratch. Just let them sit in the hall of memory, weird and wonderful and exactly how they should be.

This isn't to say all remakes are bad. Some are beautiful reinterpretations. Some rescue forgotten gems from the sands of obsolete hardware. Some introduce new generations to stories that deserve to be heard again, in fresh voices.

But we should be careful not to remake everything just because we can. Nostalgia isn't just about replaying old games with modern flair—it's about remembering what made them feel important in the first place.

Not everything broken needs fixing. Not everything old needs updating.

Sometimes, the best version of a game is the one that already exists—imperfect, impossible to reproduce, and irreplaceably real.