Abstract
As previous generations of players have aged and new generations with new tastes and expectations have emerged, the game industry has increasingly turned to high-profile remasters and remakes to re-valorize old software for new market conditions. To date, scholars and journalists have viewed this development almost entirely through an authenticity-focused lens inherited from preservation discourses, which has led many to dismiss rerelease efforts as simultaneously derivative and ahistorical. But this focus on authenticity has obscured the complex cultural and economic processes which give rise to rereleased games and the heterogeneity of the adaptive strategies that the industry has produced to appeal to varied consumer groups. This paper argues that we should instead view remastering and remaking as sub-practices of what I call temporalization, which, like the more familiar practice of localization, should be viewed as a creatively challenging and politically underdetermined cultural force which demands analysis on its own terms.
Everything old about video games is rapidly becoming new again. Aging gamers are waxing nostalgic for the games of their youth while new gamers are encountering older franchises for the first time, and the game industry has taken notice. High profile remakes of venerable titles like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy VII, Shadow of the Colossus, Pokemon Silver/Pokemon Gold, and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening flood digital and retail storefronts. Numerous smaller companies are releasing more humble re-releases of older titles like Planescape: Torment and Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior on sites like Gog.com. Nintendo, ever the market leader in exploiting old intellectual property, has sold well over ten million NES Classic and SNES Classic consoles stocked with beloved titles from yesteryear to players and collectors keen to own a tangible facsimile of the little gray boxes of their youth (Stevens, 2018). And players have reacted to the rerelease frenzy with remarkable enthusiasm: at a combined ten million units sold (as of 2018), Nintendo's Classic consoles fall somewhere just beneath Sega's Master System and above such game historical mainstays as the Sega Saturn, Mattel Intellivision, and NEC TurboGrafx-16. 1 In 2020, rereleases made up four of the year's top twenty best-selling games and three of the top ten best-seller slots for 2021. 2 Studios like M2, Bluepoint Games, and Nightdive Studios that would once have been labeled mere “port-houses” have achieved a level of professional and subcultural visibility once reserved for major development studios (See Dring, 2022; Nickel, 2021). Put bluntly: rereleases are rapidly becoming a major cultural and economic force.
Despite the evident popularity of game rereleases among consumers, however, pundits and scholars of games have reacted to the rerelease flood with overwhelming scorn. While the specific concerns vary from critic to critic, the widespread condemnation of the game industry's proclivity for rerelease almost always begins from a rhetorical collapse of the dizzyingly diverse set of practices contained within the fuzzy term “rerelease” (Grabarczyk and Aarseth, 2019) into a single authentic/inauthentic binary: authentic innovation vs. inauthentic replication, authentic historical recreation vs. inauthentic revisionism, and authentic fan labor vs. inauthentic corporate exploitation. But these binaries obscure the remarkable variety of forms that rerelease can take. Is it fair, for instance, to use “port” and “rerelease” interchangeably? What about remaster and remake? Clone and conversion? Major and minor aesthetic differences abound even within these categories. Compare the minimal changes Bluepoint introduced to its full remake of Shadow of the Colossus compared with the wholesale re-imagining that Square-Enix brought to Final Fantasy VII: Remake. Does it really make sense to paint video game rereleases with such a broad brush? Can we even really get to the political and cultural implications of rereleases without developing a more precise understanding of their many forms and functions?
This article proposes a new way of thinking about rereleases not through the reductive lens of the authentic/inauthentic binary, but as a complex web of practices and priorities that I am calling temporalization. Temporalization is, put simply, the adaptation of a work across time. Like localization, temporalization redefines the cultural and technical changes a game undergoes away from the realm of authenticity—in which change is an inauthentic imposition upon a sacred original—and toward that of what Edwards (2016) has called culturalization, that is, aesthetic change that “helps gamers to engage with the game's content at a much deeper, more meaningful level … [and that] ensures that gamers will not be disengaged from the game by a piece of content that is considered incongruent or even offensive” (p. 98). Temporalization, like culturalization, ultimately aims to make an older, competitively unviable game viable, legible, and meaningful to a new audience by altering the game experience to provide a new value statement for contemporary players. But the myriad potential value propositions any given rerelease might promise to consumers and the cultural strategies by which a game company might execute on those propositions are simply too multitudinous to be captured by binaries. Scholars and game journalists are right in asserting that game rerelease practices carry real social, cultural, historical, and economic repercussions, but by painting with such a broad critical brush they eliminate any meaningful debate about what separates better temporalization strategies from worse ones. If big-budget remakes threaten to paper over the medium's history, then what temporalization strategies might developers devise that could position a remake as a means of augmenting an original rather than supplanting it? If the concern is that remakes and remasters acculturate players to the digital equivalent of re-heated slop, then how might games be temporalized into something new, creative, and worthy of the resources expended? If game studies lacks the analytical tools to differentiate and evaluate rereleases—as it currently does—we cannot even begin to pose the right questions, let alone begin to answer them.
Since so little work on temporalization (by any name) has been done, this paper begins by defining temporalization in greater detail and outlining its utility for scholars of game studies. From that initial outline, I provide an operationalized methodology for analyzing the game industry's temporalization strategies by adapting several concepts from the oft-overlooked field of adaptation studies, which, since the 2000s, has tended to see textual changes as value propositions rather than inauthentic deviations. I then use this broad conceptual framework to taxonomize the ways—or channels—in which a game object can be temporalized in order to give future scholarship on temporalization a consistent descriptive language. I conclude by outlining several avenues for future temporalization research focusing on the political and critical implications of studying game rereleases.
What Is Temporalization? Definitions and Literature Review
Temporalization is any labor that goes into aligning an older game's historical source context with a newer market context. In the same way that localization work typically exceeds simple textual translation to include cultural translation of everything from scripts to in-game music to marketing materials (Consalvo, 2016; Edwards, 2016), temporalization can affect any aspect of a game. This ranges from the largely technical (e.g., altering a game's code to support a new target platform) to the largely discursive (e.g., radically altering a game's social meaning through marketing or PR) depending upon the temporalizing firm's perception of both the game's original context and its target market. Often these changes include, at minimum, a change of platform, graphical tweaks or upgrades, and updated controls—all changes designed to make the old game new again by bringing its aesthetic and phenomenological characteristics into alignment with today's norms. In the big-budget triple-A space, these changes are typically accompanied by ad campaigns intended to revitalize the game in question and make it a matter of cultural import again as well. As Polygon's Christopher Plante (2018) pointed out concerning the Shadow of the Colossus remake: If given a choice between the original and the remake, I can’t imagine that a young person, unfamiliar with or simply uninterested in game history, would choose the comparatively blurry classic. Ultimately, the reboot will, without question, expand the game's audience, if for no other reason than Sony has pushed 70 million PS4 s into homes and offices across the world, and this is the company's big exclusive game of the season.
Temporalization, then, is at base a set of primarily commercial strategies dedicated to mediating the old rather than inventing the new in a way that poses interesting questions to the field of game studies. Game studies has, since the mid-2000s, developed a sophisticated set of theoretical concerns about the afterlives of old game software (Guins, 2014) thanks, in large part, to the industry's monomaniacal focus on the future and with “newness,” as in the marketing around “next-gen” consoles. It behooves us, before moving on, to briefly summarize the game studies literature in order to demarcate what the field has to offer the study of temporalization practices and what temporalization, in turn, can reveal about the field's present blind spots. In particular, I must address three broad currents in and around game studies: labor, nostalgia, and transmedia franchises.
Game studies has, in recent years, produced a literature devoted to the empirical understanding of the massive amounts of human labor underpinning the game industry. Early studies in this vein tended to favor the big, visible creative jobs likeliest to curry legitimacy for industry and academe alike, and therefore focused primarily on game development and sale (Dyer-Witheford & De Peuter, 2009; McAllister, 2004; O'Donnell, 2014). However, historiographical advancements in the field of game history (Nooney, 2020; Suominen, 2017) and labor disputes upending established industry practice have recently provoked more research into workers operating below the line. This literature has investigated community management (Kerr & Kelleher, 2015), localization (Carlson & Corliss, 2011; Consalvo, 2016), quality assurance (Bulut, 2015), industrial and graphic design (Guins, 2020), goldfarming (Chew, 2022) and fan labor (Kücklich, 2005; Postigo, 2007), to name only a few. These ethnographic accounts not only bring to light the labor of the industry's often lowest-paid and least visible workers, they also show how these overlooked laborers have influenced the design and cultural status of games themselves. Localization, for instance, does not simply involve the straightforward translation of a game's text, but, in many cases, an almost total re-imagining of a game's presentation and touchstones. 4 Temporalization, I argue, should be seen as one more domain of creative labor obscured to date by its rhetorical transformation into mere “copying” rather than original creation.
In the past twenty years scholars have also developed a sophisticated set of analyses concerning the role that nostalgia plays in game design and culture, particularly as it relates to so-called retro or classic gaming (Swalwell, 2016). Nostalgia has long informed gaming culture's relationship with retro games, 5 and is generally held to be central to both the marketability and player experience of older titles (Robinson & Bowman, 2022; Suominen, 2008; Taylor & Whalen, 2008). Fan communities around retro gaming typically characterize their informal labor through an appeal to one or another “correct” form of nostalgia, which in turn informs what elements of gaming history those communities deem essential to the “proper” experience of an older title (Heineman, 2014; Hörtnagl, 2016). The labeling of correct and incorrect necessarily introduces political and social questions of power and preference, which has led game scholars (Garda, 2013; Gaughen, 2014; Makai, 2018; Williams & Tobin, 2022) to turn in great number to Svetlana Boym's (2001) The Future of Nostalgia to differentiate between what Boym calls “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgia. For Boym, the impulse to return to or to recreate a kind of prelapsarian past makes up “restorative” nostalgia, which seeks always to create “total reconstructions of monuments of the past” (p. 41). Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, accepts the past as past and instead engages with feelings of loss, imperfection, and wistfulness in order to come to terms with the past's ultimate inaccessibility (Makai, 2018). This distinction, I believe, will have real use for future research into temporalization practices, but only on a case-by-case basis for the simple reason that nostalgia can only ever describe one element of many that characterize game temporalization. As Kristian Redhead Ahm (2021) has recently noted in his study of retrogamers’ motivations, nostalgia is unstable, with retrogamers moving between Boym's categories over time. Furthermore, the market realities of temporalized games are such that they need to appeal to newcomers as much as longt-time fans, meaning that nostalgia is, at least as a rule of thumb, only ever partially highlighted in the design and marketing of temporalized games. To focus on nostalgia risks overlooking the often shockingly unsentimental approach that temporalized games can take.
Finally, the substantial literature on transmedia franchises is quite helpful for identifying the economic logic undergirding temporalization's market realities. Popularized by media and fan scholar Henry Jenkins, “transmedia storytelling” refers to any story that “unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” (Jenkins, 2006, pp. 97–98) such as the sprawling Harry Potter and Star Wars extended universes. Successful transmedia franchises tend to be lucrative in that they can target different audiences through different platforms who can then be brought into the wider ambit of the franchise's hyperdiegetic world, wherein “reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption” (p. 98). The wider distribution of a transmedia franchise then ensures maximum exposure to the franchise by marking everything branded by a franchise as belonging to some higher-order experience and then retaining that franchise's consumers by building loyalty (Bolin, 2007; Lemke, 2009). The key to this process is striking a delicate balance between new and old by remediating existing properties into new stories. Remediation, in Bolter and Grusin's (2000) famous formulation, is the repurposing of old media forms in the new, which in the transmedia context has taken the form of hypermediated—that is, visibly fragmented—media properties rendered “transparent” via the use of familiar franchise indicators and signs “in a process of honorific remediation” (p. 68). All of these carry an obvious bearing on the economic and cultural logics of re-released games, which often belong to major franchises and thus must be kept available in order to maximize consumer access to the franchise.
However, there are two major limitations to transmedia theory's application to the issues at hand. First, for every major franchise rerelease there is at least one relatively obscure game being ported to newer platforms. For games like Arcade Archive release of The Astyanax for the Nintendo Switch, we cannot look to tie-ins in movies or film, but only between multiple video game platforms. This gets to the crux of the difficulty: many re-releases are contained within one medium (video games) but across multiple platforms. Thus, the appropriate descriptor for these games is not transmedia, but adaptation, which will be the subject of the next section. And adaptation, as Espen Aarseth and others have argued (Sánchez-Mesa Martínez et al., 2016), represents a “black hole” (p. 13) for transmedia theory, neither a clear instance of transmedia franchising but clearly related to it. I thus recommend that game studies scholars turn instead for inspiration to the field of adaptation studies.
Temporalization, Adaptation, and Value
In a criminally under-cited piece, Latour and Lowe (2011) have argued that the fixation on the original/reproduction binary has too long obscured a more fundamental question: is a reproduction “well or badly reproduced?” (p. 4, emphasis in original). This may not strike many as a particularly innovative question—surely the best copy is simply the copy which hews most closely to the original. But Latour and Lowe suggest a radical alternative: the well-reproduced copy does not slavishly replicate some mythical original experience, 6 but inspires further play and further creativity. They argue that a good copy enhances the originality of the original while also encouraging further adaptation. A “badly reproduced original risks disappearing” into its own redundancy while “a well accounted for original may continue to enhance its originality” and thereby “to trigger new copies” (p. 4). That is, the good copy invites engagement, mutation, and innovation by prizing difference as much as repetition.
So how might we theorize an alternate evaluative criterion for temporalization that can account for good copying? The first step is thinking of temporalized games as adaptations. All temporalized games are, after all, always already adaptations. Even in the simplest porting efforts developers do not simply lift a game up and drop it into a new box; they must expend real creative effort to render a game technicially and creatively suitable to a new platform. Miguel Angel Horna, founder of Spanish port house Blitworks, made this very clear in a lengthy interview with GameDeveloper. Even after getting the game running and optimized on a new platform, Blitworks still has numerous creative design decisions to make, including “controls that need to be tweaked … UIs that have to be adapted to the screen size, resolution and input methods …Text and localizations have to be revised and updated to the platform naming conventions … each platform has its own checklist of certification requirements” (Wawro, 2014).
The creative labor demanded by temporalization is nowhere clearer than in the example of The Sims for the Playstation 2. The Sims is in many ways the consummate PC game. It lacks the clear goal structure that defines most console games as well as the graphical spectacle associated with console and dispenses with narrative almost entirely. On top of that, The Sims was built from the ground up for mouse and keyboard play. So in adapting the game to consoles, Perry (2004) and his team at EA re-imagined The Sims in console terms through five major changes: 1. The hybrid 2D/3D Sims had to be updated to full 3D; 2. The mouse and keyboard interface had to be completely re-designed for console controllers; 3. A level-based, goal-oriented career mode was added to suit console player expectations; 4. Some game content was locked behind a progress system to add further milestones to player progression; and 5. A two-player mode was added to suit the multiplayer focus of console gaming. These changes worked marvelously; The Sims for Playstation 2 managed to beat out the platform's juggernaut, Grand Theft Auto 3, for the top-selling spot in the US in 2003 (Perry, 2004).
Adaptation studies can help us further explain how and why people make and consume temporalized games. Adaptation studies typically advocates for the examination of adaptations as a form of expression based explicitly on the remediation of prior texts. 7 Where game studies’ discourses around rerelease tend to be chained to the ballast of authenticity, adaptation studies scholars advocate thinking of difference as uniqueness or expression unto itself. If people buy and enjoy adaptations, it is typically not because a given adaptation is identical to some original, but rather because it introduces an element of difference (Hutcheon, 2013; Klein & Palmer, 2016). When millions of moviegoers turn out to see the newest Marvel or Harry Potter movie, we can bet that many of them do so not in spite of but because of their intimate knowledge of the textual works upon which these films are based. 8 Likewise, we can assume that the buyers for the Nintendo Switch's often obscure Arcade Archives series, which contains games like UPL's little-known 1983 shooter NOVA2001 for a stately $8, purchase these games not to experience them for the first time but to re-experience them again in a new form. If we further assume that the kinds of players willing to spend money on rereleases likely also know how to download and operate a free arcade emulator like MAME, the significance of the value-add represented by these rereleases become even more pronounced.
The key to understanding both the market strategies behind game rereleases and consumer response to them resides in this mysterious added value, which adaptation scholar Corrigan (2015) has termed adaptive value. Corrigan defines adaptive value as that which “makes an adaptation significant and important” which can be identified by asking “why does a particular adaptation matter?” (p. 53). Attempting to answer Corrigan's question quickly reveals how multivalent the term “value” can be. Film adaptations of Shakespeare, for instance, might not produce the same economic value as a new Batman, but different observers might feel that it produces social value (to parents looking for pedagogical tools), cultural value (introducing complex language or history into contemporary discourse), or aesthetic value (by introducing formal innovations in or new interpretations of older plays). Adaptive value is never produced in a vacuum, either, but always through a process of interpretation and negotiation, particularly in relation to changing social norms.
The significance and the complexity of temporalization both stem directly from the almost infinite number of potential value propositions with which an old game might be technically or discursively imbued. Even a cursory glance at the temporalization strategies currently dominating the marketplace reveals innumerable options, each carrying their own cultural and social meanings. So how might scholars move beyond the authenticity binary while preserving the authenticity discourse's focus on analysis and critique? I find that a good place to start is what I call the “temporalization heuristic.” The heuristic consists of three analytical movements:
Identify the value propositions embedded in the temporalized game's design by asking what updates were made to the game object and why. Identify the player group being targeted for the new game. Is it nostalgics who played the original game? New players? A different audience altogether? Analyze the way that that value proposition is communicated to players. This can happen through marketing, through design, or through word-of-mouth.
This heuristic is designed to be analytically underdetermined; it should only guide us to the loci where value propositions are formulated, contested, and negotiated, not provide a positivist description of how temporalization works.
Channels and Strategies of Temporalization
Having established what temporalization is, we can finally return to this paper's central argument: that temporalization refers to a multitudinous set of practices whose dissimilarity has largely been flattened by a reductive focus on authenticity. Since a full taxonomy of these practices is infeasible, the remainder of this paper will focus on developing sketches of several prominent strategies of industry temporalization by looking at three high-profile examples: Final Fantasy VII: Remake, Mega Man Legacy Collection, and the Yakuza Kiwami and Yakuza Remastered titles. I selected each of these titles for its significance to contemporary gaming, its representativeness of a common market strategy, and its fruitful contrast with the other two titles. In each case, I approach the title using the temporalization heuristic to draw out the adaptive value proposition being made as well as a handful of the aesthetic, cultural, and political ramifications of those propositions.
While a full taxonomy of temporalizational
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strategies and terms is impossible to provide, it does behoove me to briefly lay out what I think of as the “channels” of temporalization, that is, the elements of a game that might be changed during the temporalization process. There are seven primary channels of temporalization:
Environmental: Any technical changes made to make a game at least minimally functional on new hardware. The specific technical strategy may vary from code alteration (porting) to full re-writing (remaking) to the inclusion of a translation layer (emulation). Apparently simple technical changes can have significant ramifications, including the addition of new game-breaking glitches or the elimination of old ones.
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Diegetic: Any changes made to the sensible qualities of the game world, primarily graphics and audio. Typical diegetic changes include remastered textures, upscaled models, and occasionally full redesign of a games audiovisual presentation (in full remakes). Extradiegetic: Changes made to possible in-game actions and behaviors. This may include upgraded AI, altered game feel, new character abilities, altered difficulty or additional difficulty settings, etc. Narrative: Any change to the game narrative or script. These can range from macro-scale changes like the total “retcon” in Final Fantasy VII: Remake to relatively minor adjustments to single words or lines, such as the removal of transphobic dialogue from Grand Theft Auto V Remaster.
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Interfacial: Changes made to the interface between game and player. This may encompass literal user interface redesigns, changes to input or output devices, the inclusion of save states, and/or other non-diegetic quality of life changes that impact the game's experience. Paratextual: Paratextual changes happen around the game itself and refer to any material included with but outside of the gameplay experience itself. This may be physical (like the boxes, manuals, and cartridges included in rereleases by Limited Run Games or the physical components of an NES Classic) or virtual (like the inclusion of video clips and concept art with Digital Eclipse's classic Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits). Cultural: Cultural temporalization is difficult to define, but loosely refers to any discursive changes made to a game's cultural status or social meaning. Cultural changes are typically found in marketing materials, most of which attempt to recast old software as “timeless” (as per the Ocarina of Time remake), to make older software “canonical” (greatest hits collections or Golden Oldies), or otherwise contextualize the older software's cultural value in the present.
Most temporalizations feature changes to more than one of these channels, with full remakes almost always incorporating significant alterations to all seven.
Final Fantasy VII: Remake—The Spectacular Mode
Final Fantasy VII: Remake, Square-Enix's 2020 reimagining of the 1997 classic JRPG, has always been about spectacle. Announced on-stage at the publisher's big E3 event and picked up immediately and voraciously by the gaming press, Remake immediately set out to wow with a launch trailer packed full of next-gen particle effects, photorealistic character models, and hyperdense futuristic environments. Square-Enix proudly and loudly touted the relative celebrity of the game's trio of major creatives: Yoshinori Kitase signed on as producer, Kazushige Nojima as lead writer, and the ever-contentious Tetsuya Nomura as director. Indeed, this same trio had been slated to work on a full-scale remake of Final Fantasy VII since the Playstation 2 era, but Kitase revealed in a 2015 Famitsu article that the team ultimately decided that the Playstation 2 and even the Playstation 3 were simply too underpowered to present players with a high-resolution world with “the same feeling of density of the original” (Romano, 2020). The marketing around Remake is likewise massive and spectacular, including TV spots on major channels, Remake-themed giveaway contests adorning millions of ramen packets, and even a 3D billboard, all of which came from a marketing budget as high as $140 million. 12
Final Fantasy VII: Remake thus perfectly fits the mold of what I think of as “spectacular” temporalization. At its most basic, the spectacular remake sets out to create a new triple-A game out of old material, with all the emphasis on marketing and production value that attends triple-A development. Remake is, in typically Debordian fashion, capital accumulated to the point that it becomes an image (Debord, 2014, strophe 34), an image in which millions of human-hours are deliberately and visibly transformed into a media artifact capable of commanding the attention of “the masses” (Gurevitch, 2015). Thus, Remake offers the masses value in the form of a revitalized technical spectacle that is agnostic to player interest in Final Fantasy VII as a game or a franchise. Anybody can pop Remake into their Playstation 4—or even better, the even further upgraded Final Fantasy VII: Remake: Intergrade for Playstation 5—and ogle the game's bewildering visual density.
But the spectacular mode does not simply offer the masses a shiny new “next-gen” experience: it opens up the cultural space in which Final Fantasy VII again becomes an event. As Debord also pointed out, the spectacle is not simply an immaterial commodity; it is a special kind of commodity which mediates social relations through a kind of parodic “means of unification” (Debord, 2014, strophe 3–4). And Remake provides a very powerful unifying device for fans and for Square-Enix alike. On the fan and player side, Remake opens up a new temporal event in which a much-beloved game becomes unknown and thereby fresh again. The game's first trailer promises that even long-term fans may be surprised by the game's narrative openness: “The reunion at hand may bring joy. It may bring fear. But let us embrace whatever it brings, for they are coming back” (Square Enix, 2015). These narrative twists radically re-write the official canon of Final Fantasy VII, 13 inviting long-time fans to speculate on what other changes the game's upcoming episodic sequels might include, thus rewarding prior knowledge in a way that suggests that Remake actually supplements the original experience rather than supplanting it. Newcomers, meanwhile, can jump on board without any prior knowledge at all. Square-Enix, meanwhile, can leverage this cultural event space to produce multiple Remake-related spin-offs, which is precisely what it is doing (Bains, 2022).
This sketch suggests several implications for temporalization research. Firstly, and perhaps most interestingly, is the idea that the full remake—even what I’m calling the spectacular remake, the great boogeyman of the authenticity discourse—need not supplant the original. Secondly, the idea of the remake as supplementing the original begs for a new kind of comparative analysis in which the pleasures of both games can be understood in dynamic relation to one another. And finally, it shows that serious critics and scholars of the game industry's pattern of tech fetishization and fan exploitation should attend to the temporalized triple-A game beyond the space of the game itself to account for the media event that something like Final Fantasy VII: Remake opens up in gaming's cultural sphere.
Yakuza Kiwami and Yakuza Remastered Collection—The Definitive Mode
The Yakuza series began with Yakuza for the Playstation 2 in 2005 and has since ballooned into a considerable media franchise, including no fewer than eight mainline titles, several spinoffs, a short-lived television series, several radio plays, and a major motion picture directed by the (in)famous Takashi Miike. Until the most recent entry, each game in the series has followed Kazuma Kiryu as he punches, kicks, and stabs his way through Japan's neon-lit underbelly in a single long over-arching narrative running between the mainline entries. By the 2010s, when work began on the franchise-wide prequel Yakuza 0, the games’ ambitious continuous narrative spanned three console generations, from the Playstation 2 to the Playstation 4, making the earliest games—and thereby the story's all-important initial context—inaccessible to newcomers and younger players. So, in 2015 Sega, the series publisher, and Ryu Ga Gotoku, the games’ developer, began a massively ambitious temporalization campaign aimed at making the entire Yakuza available on a single console (the Playstation 4) in time for the release of Yakuza 6, which promised to conclude Kiryu's story. This resulted in two full remakes of the Playstation 2 installments—which became Yakuza Kiwami and Yakuza Kiwami 2—as well as the Yakuza Remastered Collection, which contained graphic updates and script changes for Yakuza 3, Yakuza 4, and Yakuza 5.
If spectacular remakes like Final Fantasy VII: Remake promise future payoffs by opening up the space of a media event, definitive rereleases like Yakuza Kiwami and Yakuza Remastered provide value by deliberately marking an event's conclusion. The temporalized Yakuza games hang together as a single, totalizing series which ends definitively (at least when they came out) 14 with Yakuza 6. Each temporalized Yakuza game includes the standard upgrades—graphical upgrades, platform compatibility changes, interfacial quality of life improvements, and narrative changes—all of which promise to make the older games more appealing to players in the 2010s. Unlike FF7: Remake, with its event-opening spectacle, the temporalizational changes to the Yakuza games instead work backward from the prequel Yakuza 0 to bring the series to a definitive close. The Kiwami and Remastered games include not just a complete, “improved” re-localization (a costly investment on dialogue-heavy games like these), but a re-localization that promises to “more seamlessly tie all seven games together” (Tekaia, 2021). The graphical upgrades likewise work backward from the style established in Yakuza 0 to ensure that the series’ trademark locale—a rough Tokyo neighborhood called Kamurocho—looks and feels like a single, consistent setting. Which is to say that all of the temporalized Yakuza games take an unruly, open body of works and transmute them culturally into a single, self-contained cultural object.
The primary implication here should, I hope, be clear: big-budget triple-A remakes, ever the authenticity discourse's bête-noire, may share numerous formal similarities that nevertheless combine into almost opposite cultural strategies. Final Fantasy VII: Remake makes the world of FF7 approachable by opening up a new, underdetermined spectacular space. Yakuza Kiwami and Yakuza Remastered, by contrast, make a notoriously shaggy and convoluted narrative approachable by bounding the games’ discursive edges and closing down its potential future, thereby ending Kiryu's event definitively.
Mega Man Legacy Collection—The Antiquarian Mode
Mega Man Legacy Collection is one of Digital Eclipse's most ambitious temporalizations in the company's thirty-year history. Founded in 1992 by Andrew Ayre, Digital Eclipse quickly established itself as one of the first emulation-focused firms in the market with 1996's Williams Arcade Classics, perhaps the first really successful re-release of arcade games on home consoles. Since then, Digital Eclipse (or Backbone Entertainment, as it was briefly known in the mid-2000s) has specialized in faithfully temporalizing older games for modern platforms. And since the addition of erstwhile games journalist and head of the Video Game History Foundation Frank Cifaldi in 2015, those temporalizations have taken on a distinctly preservationist flavor. Cifaldi, in a 2016 GDC talk on emulation, revealed that he envisions Digital Eclipse acting as a Criterion Collection for games in that it plans to release boutique packages of “great” titles supplemented by a focus on paratextual materials (Cifaldi, 2016). The Mega Man Legacy Collection represents the company's first foray into this Criterion approach. The Collection includes the first six Mega Man games (the installments released for the NES), as well as a huge number of bonus features including new interfacial features like save states; added challenges and gameplay modes; and, most significantly, a new museum function which allows players to observe, research, and battle every enemy from the included games.
I call Cifaldi's approach to temporalization the “antiquarian mode” in reference to Nietzsche's concept of antiquarian history. For Nietzsche (1983), antiquarian history is history which the historian or antiquarian “wants to preserve for those who shall come into existence after him the conditions under which he himself came into existence” (pp. 72–73). As Suominen (2017) has pointed out, in video games the antiquarian urge often affects collectors first and most powerfully, who channel the desire to preserve “the conditions under which he came into existence” by writing not histories—that is, narratives interpreting the past—but catalogs which individualize games into self-sufficient and ostensibly timeless aesthetic objects. This desire to preserve and to contextualize runs through the Collection which, unlike the remakes above, takes pains to ensure that the original games themselves remain pure and unchanged for posterity. The point, as Cifaldi notes, is ultimately to “contextualize and celebrate” (Cifaldi, 2016) great games, not reinterpret them. The adaptive value of the Collection instead derives from the ostensible purity of its adaptation and its bonus features, from which Cifaldi and Digital Eclipse can extract financial value as well as the social and cultural value of preserving what they feel to be an important part of the medium's history.
The value propositions inherent to the Mega Man Legacy Collection are even clearer when viewed from the perspective of the collection's target demographic. Unlike Final Fantasy VII: Remake and the temporalized Yakuza series which, by virtue of their triple-A production context essentially must target a mass audience, Cifaldi has pointed out that the Mega Man Collection and its successors were designed from the start as a “boutique packages for fans and collectors” (Cifaldi, 2016). The need to appeal to such a broad swath of players makes identifying value propositions in triple-A games difficult compared with the collectors market, whose well-established subcultural values allow for more specific analysis. 15 At base, collectors tend to attach fetish value to the physical object of desire, which in turn allows that object to “[possess] symbolic meanings that replace or mask utilitarian meanings” (Boradkar, 2010, p. 253). That is, collectors can be expected to derive value from the simple fact of ownership of something like the Mega Man Legacy Collection, a likelihood which Cifaldi acknowledges in his talk: “We wanted to create a package that could provide value for anyone interested in these games even if they already owned them or emulated them … we wanted to create a collector's edition that fans could keep on their shelves” (Cifaldi, emphasis mine). Fans might also buy into the clear cultural temporalization happening throughout Digital Eclipse's design process. Part of the appeal of the Criterion Collection for its consumers is that the Collection legitimates cinephelia; the Collection's DVDs and Blu Rays’ premium pricepoint, vaunted design, and subtle cinematic references flatter the consumer's knowledge and recast them from simple moviegoer to film connoisseur. The Mega Man Legacy Collection likewise legitimizes fan practices like emulation, collecting, and obsessive research on top of its legitimation of a hobby—retrogaming—that many in the subculture tend to be very protective of.
The antiquarian mode perfectly fits the authenticity discourse's ideal of the perfect rerelease. It clearly separates the old from the new and it empowers the player to do or think about history on their own, unlike remakes or “best of” collections that hand history over to corporations and their ahistorical profit motive. But as Foucault (1977) noted in his essay on Nietzsche's historiographical writings, the latter was actually writing against antiquarianism, which he felt “tended to block creativity in support of the laws of fidelity” (p. 162). If we take seriously the idea that temporalization has cultural effects, benefits, and drawbacks above and beyond some obsession with historical authenticity, we should also observe that the Legacy Collection is the only offering here which does not display a real creative spark. Final Fantasy VII: Remake and Yakuza Kiwami/Yakuza Remastered may be ahistorical, but they are ahistorical in service of creating a new experience out of old—even dead—material. In the end, neither approach is better or worse, simply better or worse for different players, consumers, and purposes.
Conclusion: Toward a Critical Temporalization
While deep cultural readings of these three temporalization strategies fall outside this article's ambit, the remarkably different cultural logics at play point to the remarkable amount of work yet to be done on game rereleases. At the very least we must acknowledge, however reluctantly, that these strategies have been remarkably successful. Even given the game's niche market, Digital Eclipse has successfully sold over a million copies of Mega Man Legacy Collection (Doolan, 2018) and over 1.4 million units of the Mega Man X Legacy Collection follow-up series (Gonzalez, 2019). The Yakuza Kiwami and Remastered games have boosted the series sales over 20% in the three years after Kiwami's launch (Fusci, 2020) while Final Fantasy VII: Remake has sold over five million units (D'Angelo, 2020), to say nothing of the other profit streams it sets up through spinoffs and cross promotions. Temporalization is clearly here to stay.
As I see it, temporalization research has two promising directions for further research. The first comes from temporalization as a labor process in great need of empirical work. The field of game studies has produced several excellent works on issues of localization and culturalization; the same absolutely must be true of temporalization. Studios like Digital Eclipse have survived for decades in a tumultuous industry by becoming the masters of retro re-release, but the secrets to their success are still unknown. How might different regions differ in their approaches to temporalization, for instance? Does temporalization work require cultural skills, technical skills, or both? As temporalized games grow more and more popular (and there is every sign that it will), then scholars of games must understand how temporalizing firms develop their concepts of authenticity and integrity and how these values are inculcated into temporalizers, that is, actual workers. What temporalization is and how it operates within the political economy of games is still very much up for debate. A similar empirical approach should be adopted for the study of temporalization and reception through a phenomenological lens. The delights that a game like Final Fantasy VII: Remake offer are highly embodied, for instance, and beg for further research into how and why players flock to certain temporalizational strategies over others.
The second path starts from the treatment of temporalization as a research methodology interested in analyzing the typically implicit connection between temporalizational strategies and broader cultural attitudes. In essence, we need to analyze temporalization strategies in order to understand how they communicate conceptions of history, time, continuity, and memory to their player base. Though I have taken pains to avoid critiquing specific temporalization strategies here for fear of obscuring the concept itself, we can no doubt intuit that certain strategies will be more or less beneficial for the medium and its players than others will. Of particular interest here is, I think, less the splashy spectacular work that goes into remaking a game like Final Fantasy VII than the subtle use of historical expertise and preservationist language to communicate the value of an antiquarian package like the Mega Man Legacy Collection. While my brief sketch of the game focused heavily on the limitations that the antiquarian mode sets on re-creation and creativity, we must also recognize that the cultural politics of expertise in gaming render a game like the Legacy Collection more politically ambivalent than the general faith in bottom-up fan histories might otherwise suggest.
By way of a final warning, the key to temporalization research will have to begin and end with the recognition that not all temporalization is created equal. Much of the work on preservation, nostalgia, and retrogaming has, to date, been muddied by a focus on wide-scale practice-level analyses, in which, say, “emulation”—a hugely open set of practices for preservation and access—is rendered discursively monolithic. This makes analysis easier but it also obscures the diversity and internal contradictions running through emulation. And once we begin throwing other temporalizational categories into the pot—porting, adapting, remaking, and so on—it should quickly become clear that we cannot and should not try to speak of temporalization as a self-sufficient, consistent whole. Temporalization is a practice loaded with sub-practices gleaned from marketers, fans, designers, preservationists, and more besides, and we should expect no less complexity from its concrete manifestations. And in much the same way that investigations into the work of translation and localization led to re-estimations of who should have creative control of adaptations’ meaning and how, looking into temporalization work can and should lead to a reconsideration of the creative agency possessed by temporalization firms like Digital Eclipse. Because these firms will continue making the past present again, whether scholars like it or not. After all, old games are going places. It falls on us to follow them.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Logan Brown would like to thank Raiford Guins, Jaroslav Švelch, and his two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback on early drafts of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
