The Era of Classic Game Remasters

Looking at the reasons behind game remasters with a focus on Age of Empires II Definitive Edition

A lot of remastered versions of classic games have been released recently. The biggest was probably Classic World of Warcraft last year with millions of people watching on Twitch for the first week. Other noteworthy ones are Age of Empires II Definitive Edition (2019), Command & Conquer Remastered (2020), StarCraft: Remastered (2017), and WarCraft III: Reforged (2020).

Many of the original games were released in the late 90s and are not playable on modern systems anymore, or at least not without a lot of technical knowledge. Therefore, the main reason to remaster a game is to make it compatible with modern hardware and make the game accessible to more players. There are two different approaches to remastering a game. The first is to keep the gameplay completely identical and only add high-resolution display support and modern networking code. With this even bugs or clunky behavior remains in the remastered version. The alternative is to change some of the core gameplay aspects with the hope of creating an overall better experience.

Why remaster a game?

There are a few reasons why a company would choose to remaster a game. Besides making the game available on modern platforms with support for today’s high resolutions displays, there is a big nostalgia factor for many players. A lot of people played these…