‘Demakes’ challenge the idea that bigger and faster is always better

After leading the team that created the first Xbox, in 2004 Microsoft’s Ed Fries stepped down from his role as vice-president of game publishing and took up an unusual hobby — creating a version of the cutting-edge Halo series for the Atari 2600, a 30-year-old console. He relished the challenge of making a recognisable Halo for a device that was — in technological terms — ancient, swapping high-definition graphics for 2D characters each composed of just a few pixels.

The result was Halo 2600, later acquired by the Smithsonian for an exhibition on gaming and art. In interviews, Fries compared the process of downgrading the game to adapting a novel into a haiku; finding creative liberation by working with tight, self-imposed constraints. Besides being a satisfying personal project and a pleasurable curio for Halo fans, his project challenged the accepted notion in gaming, and the wider world of technology, that bigger and faster is always better. Perhaps, he argued, the relentless expansion of video game complexity comes at the cost of taking pleasure in design, and even of genuine creativity itself.

In today’s terminology, Halo 2600 would be called a “demake”, an increasingly popular type of fan-made game. Unlike a remake, which enhances a game from an older platform to run on a more advanced one, demakes translate modern games to the standards of older hardware. They are thought experiments, counterfactual histories which imagine what contemporary classics might be like if they were conceived a few hardware generations earlier.

One of the primary engines for the rise of demakes is, unsurprisingly, nostalgia. Just as how in music and fashion guitar solos and trenchcoats come back on trend every decade or so, the draw of retro gaming is both seductive and lucrative. Older players are cosily reminded of the simpler time of their gaming childhood, while younger ones discover the creative innovation that went into designing games for more limited hardware. Both Nintendo and PlayStation have recently released successful “classic” versions of old consoles which come preloaded with vintage games.

While many gamers agree that the 2D aesthetics of pixel art feel timeless, today’s most popular demakes reference more recent history: the rough, wobbly 3D graphics pioneered on the original PlayStation. They mostly function as parodies, not playable releases but rather videos that mock up games in older graphical styles. Laugh at Geralt from The Witcher 3 taking a bath as a collection of textureless polygons, or witness how Resident Evil Village actually looks more frightening as a 20-year-old game, its crude graphics leaving more fear to the imagination. Even more amusing was the profoundly simplified version of Skyrim retrofitted to run on a mathematical calculator, or the demake of Wolfenstein 3D downgraded to run in “1-D”, showing only a single line of horizontal pixels and rendered utterly unplayable.

‘Minimal Mario’ is an exercise in reduction where the beloved plumber is shrunk to a single red pixel

Some demakes do result in playable games. There is D-Pad Hero, a NES-style remake of Guitar Hero which includes bleepy versions of Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley, and Gang Garrison 2, which squeezes shooter Team Fortress 2 into two dimensions (it also exemplifies the droll demaker tendency to swap titles of original games for their nearest synonyms to avoid copyright claims: see also Soundless Mountain II, a demake of Silent Hill II). Meanwhile Minimal Mario is an exercise in reduction where the beloved plumber is shrunk to a single red pixel — it’s credit to Nintendo’s iconic designs that the game is still immediately identifiable.

In China throughout the 2000s, a company named Shenzhen Nanjing Technology Co. specialised in demakes for the local Subor console (a clone of Nintendo’s Famicom, which was difficult to obtain). They released more than a hundred bootleg demakes, including a famously meticulous 2005 recreation of Final Fantasy VII which translated the game’s sprawling story on to a 2D plane and limited hardware. 

In certain cases demakes have inspired intriguing original titles. Demaker Toni Kortelahti used the wonkiness of retro graphics to create the psychedelic aesthetic of his game OK/NORMAL. Indie horror title Paratopic expertly employs PS1-style graphics for unsettling effect, conjuring a Lynchian nightmare of deserted highways and characters whose faces slip around as if unanchored to their heads.

Though some demakes are playable, they aren’t popular because of great gameplay. It’s rather the pleasure in seeing how demakers reinterpret beloved characters and adapt to technological limitations. Demakes are love letters to old games, both homages and distinctive products that demand precise study of the source material and artistic choices. These projects highlight the differences between each console, and their enduring potential. They question this relentless pursuit of the next big thing — how sustainable is our current path, and what objects of value are we leaving behind?