This past Sunday, for the first time since before the pandemic, I had the opportunity to share a panel with attendees of PAX East! Demakes Decoded: From HD to 8-Bit In an age of HD remasters, demakes buck the trend by reimagining a modern game for a more primitive console. Ever wanted to play Silent Hill 2 on the NES, Disco Elysium on Game Boy, or Portal on N64? Now you can! But how much of a game’s core gameplay is dependent on technology? What features are important to preserve, and how do you adapt the rest? Is it really the same game — and do the original copyright owners think so? We’ll chat with four demake devs about their projects, inspirations, and challenges, exploring how they balance modern innovation, technical constraints, and retro nostalgia. Featuring: Ken Gagne (he/him/his) [Editor, Juiced.GS] James Lambert (he/him/his) [Developer, Portal 64] Jasper Byrne (he/him/his) [Designer, Superflat Games] Colin Brannan (he/him/his) [Developer, Disco Elysium: Game Boy Edition] Animal Planet (they/them) [Developer, PicoWars] The audio from this panel is presented as a bonus episode of the otherwise defunct IndieSider podcast. Stream it below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, or RadioPublic, and click past the jump for a written transcript. Transcript Ken Gagne: Welcome to the last day of PAX East 2024. Thank you for waking up before the crack of noon to join us for Demakes Decoded: From HD to 8-Bit. My name is Ken Gagne, pronouns he/him. Very excited to be sharing with you a panel of amazing developers today. A little bit of introduction and information before we get started. First, I want to start with a blank slide, land acknowledgment saying that we are residing on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Massachusetts people whose name was appropriated by this Commonwealth. We pay respect to the Massachusetts elders post and present. We acknowledge the truth of violence perpetuated in the name of this country and make a commitment to uncovering the truth. So this panel is about Demakes Decoded: From HD to 8-bit. And first, how many people here have no idea what a demake is? We got one person, two, three, four, five. Excellent. So for those five people, let’s establish what a demake is. A demake is not Resident Evil 4. That would be a remake. We’ve had some amazing, wonderful, very enjoyable and highly received and acclaimed remakes in the last few years. Resident Evil 4, Super Mario RPG, that weird game by Square that nobody thought would ever come back. And of course, Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. So those are all remakes. A remake is re-imagining an older game for a newer system. It’s not just applying a new coat of graphics like The Last Of Us. It’s such a technological leap that they are actually almost going back to the drawing board and making a new game inspired by the original game. A demake, what we’re talking about today, is just the opposite. It’s re-imagining a newer game for an older system going backwards in time. And we have four developers here today who I’m about to introduce. So first, who remembers Portal? Yeah. Portal came out in 2007, 17 years ago, for Windows and Xbox 360. 11 years before that the Nintendo 64 came out, and James here has ported it, has ported Portal to the N64. And this is what it looks like. James, say hello! James Lambert: Hi, I’m James Lambert. Yeah, and I ported Portal to the N64. And I guess I just repeat what he said. It took me about two years to get to this point. And then the YouTube channel, if you want to check it out, you can see kind of the progress in the videos. And unfortunately you can’t get the ROM for me right now because Valve told me to take it down. But I’m sure if you searched online, you would be able to find it somewhere, but not just from me. Ken Gagne: Yeah, it’s like the Streisand Effect. The more you remove it, the more visible it becomes. James Lambert: Of course, yeah. Ken Gagne: Where are you coming in from for the panel? James Lambert: Yeah, I’m from Utah. That’s it. Ken Gagne: Well, thank you for coming all this way. James Lambert: And nobody else is. Ken Gagne: Another game that is actually going in both directions right now, a remake is coming for Silent Hill 2, which was originally released for the PlayStation 2 in September of 2001, where, speaking of James, James Sunderland is trying to find his dead wife, who he mysteriously received a letter from. And even more mysteriously, the game has been ported to the 8-bit Nintendo called Soundless Mountain 2. And the master of that thesaurus would be Jasper Byrne here. Hello, Jasper. Jasper Byrne: Hi there. Yeah, I made this one in 2008, so it’s quite a long time ago now. But it was originally for a competition for demakes run by The Independent Game Source, or TIGSource. It was a forum where a lot of indies used to post back in those days. And to my surprise, actually won the competition. And so that actually ended up getting it noticed a little bit by, I guess, journalists and stuff. And ended up leading onto me doing another game like Lone Survivor, which was sort of using what I’d learned from this if you like. So another 2D survival horror game basically. So yeah, it only goes up to the apartment section, but I did always want to finish it. Ken Gagne: But all these demakes are fully playable. These aren’t just tech demos, which is pretty awesome. You can actually just download them and play them. The next panelist we have is somebody who was inspired by Disco Elysium, which is a noir-style game that came out for Windows originally in October 15th 2019. And it just seems a natural candidate of course, to port to the original Game Boy. So we have Disco Elysium: The Game Boy Edition by Colin Brannan. Colin Brannan: Hello everybody. Yeah, it was like a pandemic project for me four years ago really. I was just trying to figure out something to work on in my spare time. I hadn’t done anything creative in a few months. And there’s a really neat tool out there called GB Studio, which I totally recommend to anyone for making Game Boy games like this. And so this is actually completely without code. I’m an artist, not a programmer or an engineer. So yeah, there’s some really cool stuff you can do with such a small tool and then they even let you export an actual ROM. So people have been playing it on actual Game Boy hardware as well, which is super cool to see for me. Ken Gagne: Wow. Is this your first project like this? Colin Brannan: I’ve done other small game stuff before, but this is the first thing that really got any traction or had anyone talking about it. Yeah, my first demake, yes. Ken Gagne: Awesome. That’s really cool. And last but not least, another game that’s also been remade, Advance Wars, originally came out for the Game Boy Advance on the same day as Silent Hill 2, September 10th, 2001, remade for the Switch in 2023, and re-remade, this is the original up there, or rather the Switch version. This is a tactical game of sorts. And it was remade by Animal Planet at the end there for the PICO-8, which is what exactly? Animal Planet: So it’s a fantasy console, as in it takes the idea of older consoles and makes it run on modern hardware. It’s all fake. No, but it introduces fictional constraints. Is there anything else to that video or is it just the- Ken Gagne: Sorry. Animal Planet: There we go. There’s the game. Yeah, so the PICO-8 takes ideas of making games for older consoles. You’ve got constraints, but all these constraints in this example are kind of artificial. It’s got an artificial palette, token limit, things like that. It creates interesting constraints for making the game. And originally I’ve been kind of making this game for over a decade since I started programming because I was enamored with how artificial intelligence works for games like StarCraft and the old Advance Wars games. And I wanted to get into that and see how that really works. So it was an off-and-on project for very long, and I restarted it many times. And eventually I was like, “I’m making it so.” Ken Gagne: Awesome. Thank you. And then that brings us back to me. I am not a developer or an artist. I am an editor of a magazine called Juiced.GS. It’s currently in its 29th year of publication. It’s print only, not a PDF. And it’s a magazine all about the Apple II computer. Who remembers the Apple II? Yeah, you probably remember it because you grew up playing Oregon Trail in school, or maybe other games like Wizardry. Wizardry, the Apple II version of Wizardry is actually on the show floor at the Atari booth. It’s amazing. I’m not kidding. You can go play it. And the Apple II originally came out in 1977, and it has been the home to many amazing demakes in the last few years, like The Secret of Monkey Island, Out of This World, also known as Another World, Myst. And these are all playable by the way, Kerbal Space Program, and Portal. And those were all actually made by the same demake artist. And he recently submitted Portal to an online competition. And when you fill out the form, they asked, “What is the name of your game?” And so he said, “My game is called Don’t Tell Valve.” And we did a cover story a few years ago all about demakes for the Apple II. I have some copies here I’ll be giving out later if you want to read that. And so these are our panelists and we’re here today to talk about the demakes that have been created, that we’ve outlined. And I want to start with an open question to any panelist who would like to answer, and that question is but why? Why demakes? Why? Anybody, why? Colin Brannan: I think with, Animal Planet, you mentioned constraints earlier with your response, and I think that’s what it was for me is that when you’re working with a modern engine like a Unity
