Reimagining Old Memories: Re-releases to Remakes in the Contemporary Video Gaming Space

Abstract

Video games, a natively digital media form, has now established itself as the world’s largest entertainment industry. Its meteoric rise in the media landscape owes its success towards benefiting from synergies with the rapid evolution in digital technologies over the past decades. Such accelerated development has led to numerous waves of innovation in video game products, highlighting the new from the old in the medium: the new often represents and showcases advancements in representational and computational capability, fidelity and complexity. A complementary result is accelerated obsolescence: old games are superseded by newer titles, or retired by their producers without replacements. Against this backdrop, video game titles which have found success can find their legacy inherited. Past titles spawn derivatives and successors, possibly even being revived themselves as re-releases in the future. Re-releases, either a re-offering of a previous work as-is; with modifications; or radically reimagined as remakes, are a fundamental consequence of media commodities which emerges to revitalise and capitalise on media’s heritage. Commercial video games adopted re-releases into itself shortly after its commodification, with now decades of history of producing re-releases. In recent years, re-releases in games embarked on an exceptional trajectory, becoming increasingly celebrated and achieving mass popularity competitive with new ”AAA” (blockbuster-scale) original works. Their popularity is largely propelled by remasters and remakes which feature significant renewals and upgrades. With increasing investment into remasters and remakes, with key examples being nominated to and winning video game awards, they have become a significant force in the contemporary video gaming space. Calling for a renewed academic focus towards of video game re-releases for games and media studies away from just preservation, this thesis turns to gaming cultures to explore the enabling conditions, mechanisms and strategies in which video game re-releases and remakes have established their present significance. Video game re-releases are reconfiguring video game consumption and production, as more and more gamers are drawn towards playing re-releases. Through a mixture of historical and documentary research, guided by personal experiences as a gamer who plays re-releases, the evolution of video game re-releases and remakes and their influences are investigated at different scales, circumscribed by relationships concerning the re-release: on how re-releases descend from its previous releases and their originals; on how re-releases integrate with the series/franchises they may belong to; on how re-releases compete with and stimulate other re-releases in the common marketplace. Examinations into these increasing contexts of scale collectively compose a picture of how re-releases and remakes are actively reconfiguring the state of the video game industry and gaming cultures. As they establish pathways to become self-reinforcing and promoting their growth as a key category in the contemporary commercial video games market, re-releases and remakes are positioned to have important implications for both the past and future directions of video games and digital media.

Date of Award	9 Dec 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Damien CHARRIERAS (Supervisor)