Remakes, remasters, and countless other flavors of nostalgia bait have, in recent years, become filler on a novelty-starved entertainment menu—alluring to the senses but rarely surprising or challenging. But they’re as close as you can get these days to guaranteed money, so companies are going all in on them. Is that good for the future of the medium or preservation of its actual past? Probably not! All that in mind, I’m surprised to find the series producer of Sonic The Hedgehog—a series whose whole appeal, for a time, was nostalgia—in my corner on this one.
Speaking to Automaton, Takashi Iizuka explained why his corner of Sega isn’t going ham on remakes and remasters.
“We hear all sorts of requests from the fan community for remakes and remasters, such as people asking us to port Sonic Unleashed,” he said. “But our resources are limited. … Rather than using those limited resources to make remakes and remasters, we have a stronger desire to provide fans with new games and deliver new surprises.”
He also noted that in this era of ballooning budgets, remakes demand nearly as much from developers as new games.
“With remakes and remasters, you’re essentially providing the same experience again,” he said. “But these days, remaking an old game requires about as many resources as creating a new title. You have to remake all the graphics, and you can’t simply release the gameplay as it was back then because many things are deemed rough by modern standards.”
Sonic has toed an interesting line here, taking big (and oftentimes only partially successful) swings with 3D entries like Sonic Frontiers and, less recently, the reviled Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) while never straying too far from its 2D roots by releasing smaller games like Sonic Mania. Sonic X Shadow Generations recently pulled all these threads together, including both 3D and 2.5D levels and functioning as both a remaster of one game (Sonic Generations) and the debut of what is unequivocally the best Sonic game of modern times (Shadow Generations).
The road to arrive at this point has been bumpy, but if we keep getting games as good as Shadow Generations out of the deal, I say let Sonic Team cook. However, Iizuka doesn’t plan to leave fans of the classics entirely in the lurch.
“For now, I have a stronger desire to focus on new titles,” he said. “That said, we do hear players’ concerns about certain games being unplayable, so I’d like to ask you to please wait a little longer.”
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Luke Plunkett
