Rockstar and remasters: Friendship ended

 Now GTA VI is my best friend

I've said it before and I'm always one for repeating myself annoyingly; we live in the age of remasters and reboots; tis the god's honest truth. Everyone wants to slap their game back on the store shelves with a shiny lick of paint and ask for a repurchase, to the point where it's becoming something of a trending meme. In fact, I just read a reader's editorial wherein someone seemed to think that this adherence to 'game preservation' was holding back the progression of games as a medium and he had half of a point- although he seemed to fall into the trap that 'new means good' which so many do. Although by that very same merit, 'old' doesn't automatically mean 'good' either; and there have been a few remaster jobs that have me wondering 'Really? Is this worth it?'. (I mean come on: 'Stubbs the Zombie'? Even 'Destroy all Humans' is a questionable choice when you really think about it. The games were really 'of their time') But I don't think of this remaster trend is all bad, or even 'the lazy way out' as that Editorial concluded, I think it's an valuable experiment into preserving actual quality.

Which is to say, the remakes we've seen during this wave have been incredible, and some of the remasters aren't half bad either. Unlike with movies, when a game studio gets to work remaking a game from twenty years prior the results are almost always a totally transformed experience that brings the original to life in an unimaginable glowup. And a few of the older glow-ups do, very much, rewrite some properties that have a grow a little long-in-the-tooth so that they can dance the ball along with their contemporaries or sometimes even just stand toe-to-toe with the best of the day. Game preservation isn't some piddling lazy-boy project, and if you honestly think the solution is 'just buy the originals discs and get the old hardware to play it on', you're probably missing the point. Most game preservation supporters aren't hardcore purists with thousands to spend on broken down antiquated hardware just so that can run the original Mario in piss-poor resolution, they're just fans who want the ability to slap on their old games and play an old classic, but they can't due to the unique hardware evolutionary system of our particular industry. Remasters are an elegant solution to that conundrum. Or at least they're supposed to be.

Ideally, when everything goes to plan, all a remaster needs to do is revamp the visual fidelity of the game in question to meet the standards of the day. Or if that's not possible, at least be better than what was before. Sometimes that's a lot easier said than done, depending on the original software in the make-over seat, and a touch-up performance might bleed into a full blown remake. But it takes a special kind of screwy to embark on a full remake, in a new engine, and totally ruin the originals forever in a godawful cluster of a remake. XIII did just that, to the point where the remake is due for a remake sometime in the near future; no, I'm not making that up. And, even more famously, Grove Street Games did it with the 'Grand Theft Auto Trilogy Definitive Edition' collection. A true dumpster fire remake that burnt a legacy of three of the most influential games ever released and robbed the originals from digital store fronts forever more. (Unless you use the awful Rockstar Launcher. But if you do use that, what are you even doing?)

When all this went down and the collection dropped from such a height it smashed into a near unplayable mess that demanded several months of bug fixing, it really seemed like Rockstar Games were totally oblivious to the carnage. Fans raged, communities burned, pretty much the Act 3 world state of San Andreas played out across the Internet; and Rockstar just bragged about the sales figures in their earnings call. Grove Street Games name might be mud in the community after their botch hit job, but they were always kind of a running joke anyway. It seemed like, as has happened many times before, the money spoke louder than the protests and Rockstar were happy to just ignore the controversy as a minor blip on their sales figures. Mark one against the little guy. Except, according to an industry informant who has provided reliable leaks in the past; it would seem that this debacle actually did have a significant effect on the Rockstar marketing machine.

You see, even before this trilogy was a gamete scooped off the floor of a public port-a-potty, rumours were swirling about another potential Rockstar Remaster, to the tune of Red Dead Redemption! (Wait, back up for a second- what the hell was that analogy? What is wrong with me?) And after those remasters, a more dour prediction arose that Grove Street Games would next be aiming their dubious sights at a remaster of the beloved Grand Theft Auto IV. At that point most were just hoping that Rockstar would see their errors and get a better equipped internal team to handle such a task, but if we're to believe this leaker; the failure of the Definitive Trilogy might have axed these games entirely. Or at least, he seems to confirm that the bulk of Rockstar is refocused on Grand Theft Auto 6 and not, crucially, on the 'remake/remaster' grind.

Now that could mean that Rockstar are eyeing someone else to come in and mount these more difficult remasters, given how Grove Street Games couldn't even handle games that still run on modern hardware. (Imagine giving them an enigma like Red Dead Redemption which is so ramshackle that Rockstar don't even know how to port it to PC!) Or, it could mean that the utter fan rejection of the trilogy scared Rockstar brass so fully that they're looking totally into the future and not behind them. Which is great news! I think the last thing we needed was a Grove Street style hit-job on their classic cowboy shoot-em-up; but it's also a bit of a shame because... well... Red Dead Redemption is literally unplayable on anything other than it's base systems. Seriously, fans of that game could really do with a remake considering that RDR2 was a different and slower style of game altogether. There's a market there which Rockstar is effectively giving up on.

In a situation like this I think it's important to remember that the very art of remastering was not, in itself, the villain here. It was the half-arse job pulled by a team who bit off far more than they could chew and weren't vetted nearly enough. (Which they could have easily been, given that they had literally botched the Mobile ports of all those games to various degrees previously. Someone just needed to actually play those games and go "Oh god, these are terrible. Let's hire people with working eyes next time!") I don't think there needs to a split down the middle of 'either we focus on working on the future or securing the past', that seems like such a reductive all-or-nothing mentality that precludes dexterity and nuance. And anyway: "only a Sith deals in absolutes."

Still, if I were held at gunpoint and forced without any shades of grey or shadows of doubt to hide behind, to hop off the fence and choose a side: I would prefer that Rockstar focus on GTA 6 than on remastering their storied collection. For no other reason than the fact that this is Rockstar; the company who's wake invariably rewrites the book on open world games everytime they make a new one. Like James Cameron, they dive under the ocean to raise that bar. Right now Rockstar are literally the only big developer we can trust to deliver what they claim they can, and as sad as that is we all need that certainty right now. Maybe we'll get that RDR remake sometime down the line, heck, maybe to coincide with the release of Red Dead Redemption 3 to probably cap that budding trilogy off. As for the beloved GTA 4 remaster? Meh, I don't think anyone's losing sleep over missing out on that.