Soapbox features allow our individual writers to express their own views on current topics, opinions that are not necessarily the voice of the site. After defending a March 31 defense yesterday, Kate decides to tackle another hot topic: why is Nintendo so focused on remaking old games?
Remember a few years ago when every movie was a remake or sequel of an 80s classic? Remember how exhausting that was for people who had little nostalgia for that decade? Maybe not – over the past year, time has turned a bit into a beige sludge, so we’re not even sure we remember our zip code any more, but it was a rough time. Some of us wanted new movies. Innovation. Creativity. Instead, we have Ghostbusters (but women!), Blade Runner (but Deckard is old!), and Prometheus (but it completely misses the point of the Alien series!).
But it’s okay – now we’re just getting horrible live-action remakes of Disney movies and ten thousand Marvel movies and TV shows that you have to keep up with if you want to understand the nuances of the next. SighIf this is the grumpy old man’s hill that I’m going to die on, so be it. I want Hollywood to invest a billion dollars in something new
All aboard the grumpy train, because we’re going to Complainsville, population: me.
Progress is not made by looking back and trying to mimic our childhood through cloudy pink colored specifications. God knows we all would rather return to our relatively peaceful, uncomplicated childhood, but they were peaceful and uncomplicated because we were children and didn’t realize the world was still full of war, politics, and misery. Constantly reliving The Goonies doesn’t take us back to our blinkered years.
Likewise, the constant flow of sequels, remakes, and gates from old games gets, for my money, a bit tiresome. (I know I’ve been advocating for a Pullblox sequel recently, but I have tons of it, okay?) A remake or sequel is usually an easy win for a publisher: the code base, outline, and story already exist, so it undoubtedly it is easier to trust something already made than to build something from scratch. Of course there are expectations to be met, and rarely does a sequel or remake live up to it – there is always an artistic or mechanical choice that enrages and disappoints the fans, like the new Pokémon Diamond and Pearl chibis, but people will buy the games anyway , so who cares?
I’m going to get it really grumpy old man here, but sometimes I feel like the modern Nintendo is afraid of the really big risks. Lately – at least in recent years – Nintendo’s new IPs (intellectual property – in short, new ideas, new series, and generally just totally new games) have been about showcasing their latest technology, or experimenting with new technology.
I could be wrong here, but I. to think Ring Fit Adventure is Nintendo’s last first-party game that was actually completely new. Before that it was ARMS; before that, Splatoon. There’s also Nintendo Labo, if you want to expand the definition of “game,” and 1-2-Switch, which was little more than a nice tech demo for Switch’s underused HD rumble. All great games, but hardly any all-timers (except for Splatoon, which is already releasing sequels) and most of them involve the Joy-Cons in a big way, showing what the Switch is capable of.
I know. It’s boring to complain that Nintendo isn’t giving me what I want. I warned you that I was falling into my crankiest old man status, and I promise you that in no time I will be praising another obscure DS game. But not me want to endlessly relive my youth with polished remakes. I would rather have access to the games of my past without paying £ 100 for a boxless copy of a GameCube game on eBay. I want technology to be designed to last longer than a single console generation. I don’t want to be prompted to upgrade and upgrade and upgrade until I’m ready to proceed.
Above all, I want new experiences, risks, leaps of faith that seem terrifying at first, but ultimately pay off. Nintendo fans (myself included, hi) are notoriously hard to please, and there’s always the risk that an entirely new series will incite anger like never before – Splatoon seemed weird at first, didn’t it? A shooter from Nintendo? No thanks, but we all know they will make it.
The moment when a company moves from ‘throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks’ to’ this sticks’ – let’s do it over and over again, now we know it always sticks’ is inevitable, because that’s how it works businesses. They have investors and shareholders to please, and risk doesn’t make the money. Mario, Zelda and the like get the big bucks because they have proven to be lucrative; smaller games like Pikmin are suspended and occasionally trot to please the cult followers. It just makes sense.
Asking for new, risky things without any idea of what we actually are want, nor any guarantee that we would actually buy it, is like asking Google to invest millions in a new line of nuclear powered tricycles, or affordable moon travel. Sure, they have the money, the talent, and the connections to do it, but why step outside their comfort zone when things are going well?
We now live in a world of extremes, where most things are judged by the masses as excellent or terrible, and everything in between is deposited in the halls of “meh” and forgotten forever. Why risk a “meh” when you can insure an “excellent”? Even the worst mainline Zelda title won’t sink below a 9/10 these days, and even if the ravages of time eventually find it a bit of a dud – like Skyward Sword – it will still sell, being a Zelda.
If anything is to come in the past few years, we can probably expect a new Nintendo idea soon, perhaps when all of the Zelda / Mario anniversary stuff has ebbed away a bit. But until then, it’s sequels and remakes, sequels and remakes, all the way to the couch. I will still buy them. Of course I will. I’m a sucker for Nintendo’s work and I’ll point out that none of these sequels or remakes ever are badThey just aren’t new – and I don’t want to be stuck in a world where we keep getting the same five games and movies in our lives as one Ready Player One-flavored porridge.
In the meantime, I will look to India to find my solution to the weird and wonderful, and I hope someone sees it necessary to give them a billion dollar budget someday. A girl can dream.