Kokoromi Collective

Sequel Prequel, Remake Demake

August 1st, 2008 by fish

The term demake is my only contribution to the english language. I coined it. Coined it hard. But what is a demake? And why should you care? A Demake is to a remake what  a prequelis to a sequel. Kinda.

To celebrate the announcement over a TIGSource of the Bootleg Demake Compo, i figured id take a shot at explaining what exactly constitutes a demake, and why the concept is so damn awesome. The TIGSource competition threw in bootlegs for legal reasons, but basically, a demake is a remake of a game, made to look, play and feel as if running on older-generation hardware.

(I want to demake Rez and call it Low-Rez. Who’s with me?)

EXAMPLE ONE: HALO ZERO

Halo Zero is a game that takes the escence of the Halo experience and ports it to 2D, SNES style. You run, you gun, you jump, you throw a grenade at a pack of grunts and you gun some more. It’s Halo alright. In my opinion, a good demake is a game that looks as if it actually precedes it’s inspiration in the series release timeline. Halo Zero could zery well have been the first in the franchise, of which Halo: Combat Evolved was the first to take it’s classic gameplay and port it to glorious, dazzling 3D! Kind of what the original 2D Duke Nukem games are to Duke Nukem 3D.

If Halo Zero had been made for TIGS’ bootleg demake compo, it could have been called Circle: Beginning and star a certain Mister Captain, a space marine in a blue armor who constantly throws red sticky grenades. No IP infringement lawsuit, no problem.

EXAMPLE TWO: MOCK UPS

One thing you can do is mock up a demake. Pixel artists at various pixel art communities get a huge kick out of making mock up demakes of recent popular games. In september of 2007, over at the Pixelation forums was held a little a gameboy demake party. Participants were invited to follow the strict gameboy limitations, such as not using tiles larger than 8×8, and only using the gameboy’s dazling 4-color palette. Altho they arent playable, and rather just really neat pieces of pixel art, it’s undeniably awesome to take a look all these games that never were. And wonder if they would have actually been any fun.

EXAMPLE THREE: CODENAME: GORDON

Codename: Gordon  is basically the exact same thing as halo zero but with headcrabs and a gravgun. And a crowbar. But C:G is a far more interesting example for two reasons. First, it was actually bundled with Half-Life 2, on launch, as part of a special STEAM offer. Quite possibly making it the first ever commercial demake. Next ever bundled demake could very well bethe 8-bit version of Katamari Damacy included in the PSP version of the game as an easter egg or bonus or something. I wouldnt know, PSP Katamari sucked.

And second, because of it’s use of HL2’s revolutionary gravity gun in a 2D platformer setting. The gravgun is my single favorite gun ever. When HL2 came out, i likened the impact and importance of the adition of the gravgun’s physics-based gameplay to that of the ability to look up in early FPSs. Basically, i think the gravgun is a huge fucking deal. We’ve seen it copied countless times already as magical powers shooting out of hands, or wands or whatever. It even kind of spawed my 2nd favorite gun ever, the portal gun. Codename: Gordon did a brilliant job of porting the basic idea of HL2’s gravgun to 2D. It worked very well, and featured a fairly fancy 2D physics engine.

Which brings me to why i love the idea of demakes. Seing something like HL2’s gravgun gameplay implemented so well in a 2D game made me wonder why that idea hadnt come up in some much older 2D game. Why did i never see a game like Codename: Gordon on my genesis, or maybe a early PS1 game? Im pretty sure you could make a game like C:G, with physics and all on a PS1. So why did nobody think about it? Why did we have to wait until Valve came around for that innovative bit of gameplay to be invented?

What that shows me is that true innovation, i mean, real fucking novel ideas, are rare. That most of the improvements made to games generations after generation are mostly cosmetic in nature. That the core idea (and the “innovation” that comes with it) could have, theoritically been done 10 years ago on PS1. And that perhaps, if we sit down and think for a moment, we can probably come up with those new ideas 10 years before everyone else. We can be ahead of our times! I could make a game tomorrow, a game with a very basic but novel idea, that you wont see again for 10 years until some crazy holodec-thing rips it off from me. My game will seem primitive and ugly compared to that crazy next-next-next-gen thing. It’ll look like a demake.

 OR: demakes are cool because they’re like looking at some weird piece of alternate history.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 10:08 am and is filed under demakes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.