How old does a game need to be to warrant a remake?

[JWeinCom]

My opinion on remakes has changed a lot over the past couple of years.

We simply consume media differently than we used to. Take a show like Avatar: The Last Airbender. In the old days it would have its run on Nickelodeon, they'd show the reruns for a few years, then it would be relegated to reruns at like midnight on some obscure channel for nostalgia purposes, while younger kids would be like "what's an Appa"?

Now, with Netflix, it's still fairly relevant and popular among a wide range of ages something like 15-20 years after its initial release. Outside of a few rare examples like Seinfeld, a show that hadn't been running new episodes for a decade wouldn't still be that relevant years later, but due to streaming, shows have a much longer lifespan.

The games industry is going the same way. Back in the before times, in the long long ago, a game would release on a console, and that would be it. Your Marios and Zeldas would get remade, but unless something was uberpopular, it would come, be forgotten, and go. Now, it gets polished up and rereleased every five years. It's not necessarily for the people who have already played it (although lots of people seem to be willing to buy the same game several times) it's more to reach a new audience. And of course those people COULD have simply gone to a used game store and picked it up, but you need to do something to bring it back to the store front, and also it needs to be sold through the new games market, or else developers have little incentive to bring spend marketing $s bringing back interest.

And I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. It could mean companies rereleasing the same games over and over again, but it also incentivizes the creation of games that will stand the test of time. Before streaming, reality shows were dominating the TV market to a ridiculous extent. And while they're still prominent, streaming has helped reestablish the kinds of long terms shows people will be watching for some time to come, rather than shows like survivor or American Idol which few people are watching after their original run.

So, to answer the question, I don't think it has much to do with the visuals and it's not intrinsically linked to time. It really depends on the particulars of the game and how much it can potentially resonate with modern audiences. Undertale could have probably run on a SNES, but I'm fairly sure it will make its way to every console over the next two decades in largely the same form, because it's the type of game that will be able to appeal to new audiences for quite some time.