Paper Mario and The Peculiar Nature of Game Remakes

By Maddie Agne | September 28, 2023 | 12:10pm

Video Games Features remakes

Paper Mario and The Peculiar Nature of Game Remakes

In usual Nintendo fashion, last week’s Nintendo Direct presentation saved its heaviest hitter for last: a remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door will be launching in 2024, 20 years after its original release on the GameCube. Admittedly, I had no idea that this was Nintendo’s big announcement. Admittedly, when the trailer started rolling, I thought The Thousand Year Door was a new game. I was three years old when the original came out, and while the title rang a bell, I had no inkling of how special it was until I mentioned it to an older coworker.

We had talked about the Direct presentation earlier in the day and each expressed excitement, but it was unmatched by the thrill I was met with when I offhandedly mentioned the Paper Mario remake. My coworker was delighted, calling it one of the best GameCube games he had ever played, and of course he would be buying the newer version in 2024. And, for a moment, I think I might too.

Remakes and remasters are not new. In the music industry, remasters can be made to better suit new technology, to add more detail and complexity to a piece of music, or to help an artist get “closer to their original intention.” The 1980s and ‘90s saw 1960s vinyl get remastered for CD players, and in the last two decades those same CDs have been optimized for music streaming. It’s a common practice for creating a better product.

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In film and television, however, the story is slightly different and much more controversial. Take, for example, the Star Wars: Special Editions—versions of the original Star Wars trilogy remastered with 1990s special effects and new scenes meant to update it for “a whole generation of kids who’ve never experienced it that way,” as George Lucas put it to ET in 1997. What resulted, however, was years of controversy in the Star Wars fandom over whether or not the inclusion of Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker or a musical number in Jabba’s Palace ruined the sanctity of the original films. And in television, remakes like the Harry Potter and Twilight series are in early development—those are already books and movies!

The status of a remade videogame, however, teeters between multiple opinions. For one, videogame technology moves fast. They are created within the constraints of particular programming and hardware, but the pace at which that technology changes and expands often means videogames struggle to be flexible and perform at their best—or at all—on newer consoles and platforms. Unless my dad got rid of the ones in the attic, I don’t know anyone who owns a GameCube or a PlayStation. But almost everyone I know has a Nintendo Switch or a Steam account. This means they can play games like the remade Paper Mario or Final Fantasy VII—games that, before they were remastered, would be virtually unplayable without the consoles they were made for.

Remakes also open the door for accessible gaming. In an interview for Inverse, Naughty Dog’s Game Director, Matthew Gallant, listed haptic controls and text-to-speech outputs as modern innovations that remakes can include to open games up to newer audiences. In July of 2022, just nine years after its original release, The Last of Us was rereleased as The Last of Us Part I with enhanced accessibility features like audio descriptions and completely customizable controls that opened the hugely successful game to a new wave of players.

Unfortunately, however, videogame remakes and remasters are more often viewed as straight replacements than they would be if they were a movie or piece of music. This makes sense when considering how rapidly the technology for playing games changes and becomes obsolete, but it does still constitute an upsetting cultural loss when we have let go of original Game Boy cartridges in favor of the Switch’s own Game Boy library.

Okay, so we have an idea of where videogame remakes stand—but where does that leave Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door? It leaves us at an interesting generational intersection. From a psychological and philosophical perspective, we connect to videogames differently than we do to other media—it’s a “susceptibility that derives from interactivity.” According to Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin, philosophers at the University of Nottingham and the University of Leeds, we have a tendency to align our identities with those of the characters we play and to take on the videogame world as part of our own subconscious reality because of how we’re able to virtually touch, feel, and immerse ourselves in it. There’s a psychological impact found in games that’s harder to find in other media—we can relate to remastered Anakin Skywalker or Bella Swan as much as we like, but in the end we struggle to meld with them the way we might with even Princess Peach.

A videogame remake brings that back for the generations that originally played it. In a remake that nostalgia, that emotional investment, is able to come rushing back. More than that, though, it creates an opportunity for those original players to teach new players that emotional investment. In the same vein, new players become able to show older players how to interact with their favorite game in an updated way. My parents could still probably kick my ass in Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, but they also gave my brother and childhood memories that made it more special to teach them how to play Mario Kart 8. Racing games may not be the most intimate videogame genre, but it has an undeniable cultural significance within my family that has allowed the two generations in my household to find common ground time and time again.

And in the way a remake updates a game for new technology, even the language of the game is updated. The films of our grandparents’ age might present some vernacular barriers, but even those are easy to pass over with a brief explanation because movies and humans still speak essentially the same language as they did 70 years ago. The language of a Nintendo 64, however, is fundamentally different to the language of a PlayStation 5. The way these older games detail objects, actions, and controls is particular to the console and generation they were made for—so not only does a remake adapt a game for new technology, it can rethink its language to make it friendlier to fans, both grown up and new.

So this goes beyond merely showing your child a remastered Star Wars film and trying to get them to understand its cultural implication. When Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is rereleased 20 years after its debut, I may not be playing it on the original console that popularized it, but at the same time that I play it on the Switch that is so special and original to me, my coworker can teach me how to control and connect with the characters and environments that are so special and original to him. We’re not just showing each other a piece of media—we’re teaching each other a piece of our lives and still finding a way to connect through it.

Maddie Agne is an intern at Paste.