I tend to share my colleague Ted Litchfield’s philosophy when it comes to remakes. Do what you want (though I prefer reinvention to a one-to-one remake), just don’t kill access to the original. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask for: the kids get to play a version of a classic, I get to keep playing my old favourite like 2005 never ended. Everyone’s happy.
Everyone but Capcom, anyway, which apparently took some real arm-twisting to get the original Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3 PC releases on GOG last year. It seems GOG had to make a few persuasion rolls to get Capcom to agree to it. Not necessarily because the company had business concerns about the move, but more because its execs literally couldn’t conceive of why anyone would want to play the originals when their shiny remakes exist.
“Capcom were like, ‘We have all of those remakes. It’s already the superior experience to those games,'” GOG’s senior bizdev manager Marcin Paczynski told The Game Business. “They didn’t really see the value in bringing back the vanilla versions.” Which, on the bright side, confirms a lot of my prejudices about games industry executives and their appreciation of art.
So GOG had to work to convince Capcom that there do, in fact, exist human beings who like to play old games. “It took a lot of convincing that there is an audience that has a lot of memories about those games,” said Paczynski, “and would love to experience exactly the same game again. Thankfully, we were able to convince them.”
Which is great, of course. To be honest, I don’t have memories of the original Resident Evil games—they seemed way too scary for child-me to ever pick up, but I still very much enjoyed heading back into the Spencer Mansion in all RE1’s PS1-era glory when GOG put out those releases last year.
It might bamboozle the suits, but original games have their value even when you’ve put out a new version that’s been UE5’d out the wazoo. Preservation is a positive end in itself; we’d probably be in a better state if more people with their hands on the pursestrings appreciated it.