But with the Ocarina of Time remake, Nintendo is showing us something different. It’s showing a game that has a lot of qualities of the version we first played on the Nintendo 64 decades ago, but is ultimately a new game. The first half of the trailer plays the greatest hits, giving us shots of Link doing the usual combat and puzzle actions that we’ve done during hundreds of replays. However, the shadows are a bit darker and the textures a bit more pronounced, creating a change that goes beyond transitioning from polygons to fully-rendered people and involves matters of tone.
The second half of the trailer only intensifies those feelings, as it adds voice acting and newly designed cut scenes, replacing the mostly static images and subtitles of the original game. Suddenly, Zelda and Darunia the Goron have voices, and they don’t sound like we expected when first played the game. Suddenly, Ocarina of Time isn’t the same game we played before.
But that’s not a bad thing, especially if we think of video games as art instead of just entertainment technology. If they’re just entertainment technology, then we can and should complain when the new technology doesn’t entertain like the previous technology did. But if they’re art, then we need to allow room for the work to change in order to be perceived differently. We need to let video game remakes be interpretations.
Other forms of art have long had to wrestle with questions of interpretation in adaptations and remakes. Consider one of the best examples of adaptation and remake, the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell and the three movies based on it, 1951’s The Thing from Another World, 1982’s John Carpenter‘s The Thing, and 2011’s The Thing.
Campbell’s original story focuses on a group of researchers in the Antarctic who repel the attack of a telepathic and shapeshifting alien. The 1951 movie takes the premise and turns it into the sort of sci-fi adventure popular during the nuclear era, complete with a group of jocular soldiers and scientists battling a vegetable creature with a definitive shape. Carpenter’s version amps up the gore and the cynicism that reflects his view of the 1980s, building to a far more ambiguous ending than either of the two other versions. Likewise, the 2011 movie is a product of its time, a Hollywood IP cash in that repeats familiar beats and emphasizes audience recognition.
While audiences may prefer one version of The Thing over the others, no one thinks that the worse versions cancel out the best. Heck, few think that even the worst versions shouldn’t exist. Instead, we understand them each as interpretations of the same story, valid in some degree in their own way.
