Why Don’t Other Companies Do That? (Part 1)
I am sure to have made the observation in conversation before; it’s a bizarre thing that videogame publishers didn’t realize people like playing old games. It truly is odd to me that only relatively recently have we seen the big names behind big franchises stumble upon a truth that seemingly only really Sega had (and even they aren’t great at this), but now we can’t seem to go more than a month or two without seeing an old game re-released, remastered or remade for modern consoles. If you’ve been playing videogames from a little while that might not seem all too unusual, but from older fans this just didn’t happen as often as it does today—unless the game’s title included Sonic or Street Fighter; Sega has always been a company that’s happy to revisit the past, and Capcom have been treating Street Fighter for anaemia since SF2. But for some reason it was still a rare thing to see older games revived on newer consoles.
Movies, of course, you needed to jump from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray, books have reprint after reprint, comics come out it special editions and collected volumes, and don’t even get me started on music—games, not so much.
There were some notable exceptions of course. The best was probably the release of the older Final Fantasy titles on the original Playstation, especially for PAL-territory fans, because, inexplicably, Squaresoft hadn’t released a single Final Fantasy game in the PAL regions before Sony’s first foray into gaming (no, Mystic Quest doesn’t count); as though people in Europe or Australia just wouldn’t see the appeal in story driven fantasy games. I’m telling you, the bizarre ideas people have.
Then something happened; Nintendo got this weird idea into their heads that people might be willing to pay money to play old games, even ones that they previously owned. It was called the Virtua Console, a digital shop for Nintendo Wii owners to purchase roms of classic games from the NES all the way to the N64. There were even some games from non-Nintendo machines, although just what you could get was dependent upon what region your account was set to (you can see a full list of the games that were available here courtesy of Nintendo Life).
Skipping ahead to today, and now we’ve got compilations of this and remasters of that—it has undeniably become easier to play older games without any legally grey areas to think about. This has been both good and bad. We’ve had games that never even made it to some countries on their original platforms finally arrive, like Chrono Cross on the Switch. And we had some collections handled absolutely masterfully, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga collection with its high quality game box and manual scans, or the Atari 50th Anniversary collection, which is a gaggle of games and an entertaining history lesson rolled into one. But you also have the lazy release. Some companies see the them simply as a chance to sell you the same game a few years later, and perhaps the best example of that is The Last of Us; a PS3 game that was released and then re-released as a special edition, then remastered for the PS4 and is now getting a remake for the PS5. Yes, a game that has already seen three releases in the last 10 years is going to get a fourth.
So with good and bad, what do I think is the best example of return to classic games? That has to be the Evercade. And in the next part, I’m going to go through a company that I think could learn from the Evercade and maybe should consider trying something similar.
*Keep an eye out for the second part of this article, where I look at Sega and how they can learn from Blaze and their Evercade.
Playing videogames, writing about videogames, considering videogames—that about sums it up. Videogames are the one hobby that I’ve kept since I was only little, zapping ducks on the NES or knocking out MR. X. And when I’m not enjoying classics from the bit generation of games or checking out those earliest of polygons, I’ probably playing something from today’s age of modern gaming: if I’m not complaining about it.
Something I’m doing at the moment? Playing through the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster collection, and all the other mainline Final Fantasy games up 12 on the Switch.
