Soapbox features allow our writers to express their own opinions on hot 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 a sequel to an 80s classic? Remember what was exhausting for people who had little nostalgia during that decade? Maybe you don’t: last year has turned into a bit of beige mud, so we’re not even sure we remember our zip code, but it was a tough time. Some of us wanted new movies. Innovation. Creativity. Instead, we got it Ghostbusters (but women!), Blade Runner (but Deckard is already old!), and Prometheus (but the point of the Alien series!).
Still, okay, now we only get terrible remakes of live action Disney movies and ten thousand Marvel movies and TV shows that you have to watch if you want to have a chance to understand the nuances of the next. Sigh. If this is the grumpy old hill, I’m going to die, anyway. I want Hollywood to invest a billion dollars in something us.
All aboard the grumpy train, because we were heading to Complainsville, town: me.
Progress does not come by looking back and trying to recreate our childhood through murky pink species. God knows we would all rather go back to our relatively peaceful and simple childhoods, but they were peaceful and simple because we were children, and they didn’t realize that the world was still full of war, politics, and misery. Constantly reviving The Goonies it will not bring us back to our years of blinking.
Likewise, the constant mix of sequels, remakes, and ports from old games is, for my investment, a bit tiring. (I know I recently defended a sequel to Pullblox, but it contains crowds, okay?) A remake or sequel is usually an easy win for an editor: the code base, outline, and story already exist, from so that it is certainly easier to depend on something already done than to build something from scratch. Of course, there are expectations to be met, and rarely does a sequel or remake actually meet them; there’s always some artistic or mechanical choice that infuriates and disappoints fans, like the new Pokémon Diamond and Pearl chibis, but people buy the games anyway. So what does it matter?
I will get it really grumpy old man here, but sometimes I feel like the modern Nintendo is afraid of really big risks. Lately, at least in recent years, Nintendo’s new IP addresses (intellectual property, in short, new ideas, new series and, in general, completely new games) have revolved around showcasing their latest technologies or experiment with new technologies.
I could be wrong here, but me to think Ring Fit Adventure is Nintendo’s latest first-hand game that was actually completely new. Before, they were ARMS; before, 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 fun demonstration of technology for the HD rumor of Switch’s underutilization. All fantastic games, but just all the time (except Splatoon, which is already producing sequels) and most of them involve the Joy-Cons in a major way, proving what the Switch is capable of.
I know, I know. It’s boring to complain that Nintendo doesn’t give me what I want. I warned you that I was getting into my older, moodier states, and I promise I will praise some obscure DS game again in no time. But I do not to want to relive my childhood endlessly with remodeled remakes. I wish I could access games from my past without paying £ 100 for a boxless copy of a GameCube game on eBay. I want the technology to be designed to last longer than a single generation of console. I don’t want to be asked to upgrade and upgrade before I’m ready to continue.
More than anything, I want new experiences, risks, leaps of faith that at first seem terrifying, but in the end bear fruit. Nintendo fans (including me, hello) are remarkably hard to please, and there’s always the risk that a whole new series will attract anger like never before; at first Splatoon seemed weird, didn’t it? A Nintendo shooter? No, thank you, but we all know they will get it.
The moment a company goes from “throwing things on the wall and seeing what sticks” to “this gets stuck: we do it over and over again, now we know it will always stick,” is inevitable, because this is how companies work. They have investors and shareholders who like it and the risks don’t contribute money. Mario, Zelda and the like make a lot of money because they have proven to be lucrative; smaller games like Pikmin are set aside and occasionally jogged to please cult fans. It just makes sense.
Asking for new and risky things without having any idea what we really are to want, nor any guarantee that we would actually buy it, is akin to asking Google to invest millions in a new line of nuclear-powered tricycles or affordable trips to the moon. Sure, they have the money, the talent, and the connections to do it, but why will they step out of their comfort zone when the ride is good?
We now live in a world of extremes, where most things are judged by the masses as excellent or horrible, and everything left in the middle is resigned to the halls of the “meh” and forgotten forever. Why risk a “meh” when an “excellent” one can be assured? Even the worst Zelda main title will stop falling below 9/10 these days, and even if the test of time finally considers it a bit wrong, like Skyward Sword, it will still sell, because it’s a Zelda .
If the last few years are to pass, we can probably expect a new idea from Nintendo soon, maybe when all the Zelda / Mario birthday stuff runs out a bit. But until then, they are sequels and remakes, sequels and remakes, right down to the bank. I will still buy them. And so much so that I will. I’m a fool for Nintendo’s work and I’ll point out that none of these sequels or remakes are ever bad. They just aren’t us – and I don’t want to get caught up in a world where we get the same five games and movies, over and over again, in our lives as Ready Player One-flavored crane.
In the meantime, I’ll be looking for the Indies to fix the weird and wonderful thing and I hope someone deems it appropriate to give them a billion dollar budget someday. A girl can dream.