Retro remakes — what survives a conversion, and what quietly does not
A remake is a claim about what a game essentially was. Deciding which parts to keep is the whole design job, and the parts that get dropped are usually the ones nobody thought to defend.
The three things a conversion has to decide
Resolution, timing and difficulty — in that order of visibility and reverse order of importance.
Resolution is the easy one and the one everybody notices. A game drawn for 256 by 192 pixels on a television has to appear on a display with far more of them, and the choice is between scaling the original pixels honestly or redrawing the art. Both are defensible; pretending there is no choice is not.
Timing is harder and matters more. An 8-bit game was written against a fixed frame rate and, on the Acorn Electron, against memory contention that slowed the processor in specific graphics modes. Reproduce the code faithfully on fast hardware and the game becomes a different game. Every serious conversion contains a decision about which speed was the real one.
Difficulty is the one that gets quietly changed. Games designed to be bought once and played for months are calibrated for an audience with nothing else to play. Conversions frequently soften that, usually without saying so, and it is the single most common undocumented difference between an original and its remake.
Two more things change and are deliberately not on that list, because both follow from the three above rather than standing beside them. Sound is the first: a machine with a one-bit beeper or three tone channels used audio as an information channel, so a wave of enemies or a falling boulder announced itself, and a conversion with sampled audio has to decide whether to reproduce the signal or merely the atmosphere. Input is the second: a game written for a joystick or for four fixed keys with a known repeat rate feels different through a modern keyboard, and the difference lands squarely on the timing decision already described.
What the section actually listed
Fourteen remakes, free, three of them playable in a browser — and a form inviting readers to submit more.
The remakes section was not a commentary page. It was a catalogue of fourteen free downloads with a short line against each, and the composition tells you more about the culture than any argument would. Three were playable in the browser rather than downloaded — a version of Jumpman, a version of Asteroids, and a version of Rick Dangerous — which in the mid-2000s meant a plug-in and a small window, and meant a reader could try a remake in the thirty seconds before deciding whether to care about it.
Four were cross-platform in a way commercial releases of the period frequently were not. Versions of Manic Miner, Exolon and a game listed as Humphrey were offered for Windows and Mac, and Head Over Heels for Windows, Mac and Linux. A Linux build of a fan remake in 2006 was not a business decision, because there was no business — it was somebody compiling for the machine they happened to use, which is the whole difference between this catalogue and a storefront.
The source machines named on the page span the era rather than favouring one: an Amiga title from 1992, a Commodore 64 game, an Atari 2600 game credited to its original publisher, a coin-op conversion, and a run of British 8-bit titles. Two remakes credit the author of the original rather than the machine — one names Clive Townsend, one refers to a Cecco classic — which is the page at its most careful, and the closest thing to attribution practice this catalogue has.
Two things about the arrangement are worth stating plainly. Everything in it was free, which is why this section and the paid listings elsewhere on the site were kept apart. And it ran on submissions: the page carried a form inviting anyone with a freeware game or a remake to have it listed, so the catalogue grew by people volunteering their own work rather than by anyone going looking. That also means it records what fan authors chose to send in, which is a different sample from what was being made.
A catalogue of remakes of commercial games raises an obvious question about rights, and this archive does not host any of them — no downloads, no playable copies, no files of any kind. What is kept is the record that the list existed and what was on it. The copyright and takedown page sets out how a rights holder can raise anything on this site, and it exists specifically because pages like this one describe other people's work.
Remake, conversion, or tribute
These three words get used interchangeably and mean different things. A conversion moves the same game to new hardware, keeping the levels and the rules. A remake rebuilds it, usually with new art and sometimes with new levels. A tribute is a new game in the shape of an old one, with no shared content at all.
The distinction is practical rather than pedantic, because it determines who holds the rights and who deserves the credit. Hap-Hazard was described from the outset as a tribute to Jumpman rather than as a version of it, which was the accurate description and also the safe one.
The clearest case in this archive of a conversion done properly is the Repton series, where the company that published the originals is the same one selling the modern versions. That continuity of ownership is rare and it removes most of the questions the other two categories raise.
Questions about remakes
What is the difference between a remake and a tribute?
A remake rebuilds a specific game, usually sharing its levels and rules. A tribute is a new game built in the same shape with no shared content. The distinction decides who holds the rights and who gets the credit.
Do retro remakes usually change the difficulty?
Frequently, and usually without documenting it. Original games were calibrated for an audience with very little else to play, and conversions tend to soften that quietly.
Why does timing matter more than resolution in a conversion?
Because resolution changes how a game looks and timing changes how it plays. An 8-bit game written against a fixed frame rate, and in some cases against memory contention that slowed the processor, becomes a different game when that constraint is removed.
How many remakes did this section list?
Fourteen, all free. Three were playable in a browser and four were offered for more than one operating system, including one build for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Can the remakes be downloaded from this site?
No. This archive hosts no games, no playable copies and no files. It records that the catalogue existed and what was listed on it, and the copyright page sets out how a rights holder can raise anything here.