Demakes Decoded at PAX East 2024
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 or an Unreal, you can do anything really. When you’re working with older hardware, you have those constraints and that makes your project scope much smaller and you have to really get more creative and make more interesting choices. And also, your project, you can’t go forever on something. You’re like, “Okay, I can only do so much.” And it helps you keep your own … Your projects finish. There’s only so much you can do with them, which was important for me at least.
James Lambert: And along with that, with working within the constraints, I agree with everything with there, but also it’s kind of fun to try to push, at least in the N64 case, push the limits a little beyond what you think could have been done, see what those limits actually are. And that, I really enjoy working within those constraints and trying to push beyond what you thought was possible.
Jasper Byrne: Yeah, I guess I’d just add to that, they also … Because I think some of those things apply to just making a game for an older system, but maybe also that it is trying to figure out how an existing game could work in a different visual presentation or something like that. So how do you solve the problems that were in 3D in 2D or whatever it is, or through a very limited palette or whatever it is. Maybe that’s an aspect of it that interested me, I would say.
Ken Gagne: And one of the nice things about these platforms that have constraints is nowadays if you want to go to … When I was a kid, you could grow up and go into computers. But nowadays, you’re going into graphics or networking or AI or all these other disciplines because computers are so big. You can’t grok the entire computer. With an older machine, you can be the designer, and the level creator, and the programmer, and the sound designer, and you can do everything as just one person like we used to do 40 years ago. So it’s nice. Show me somebody who did a one-man game or one-person game for PlayStation 5. That’s not as likely as it was for the PICO-8 or the Apple II. How do you choose … I’m sorry, go ahead.
Jasper Byrne: No, I was just going to maybe also say it’s also interesting to look at the way mechanics have evolved and game design has evolved, and apply those things to an older system and see what it would be like if you like, sort of thing.
Colin Brannan: Yeah, that was a big thing for me as well. Because I work in UI and I really want to see UI has developed so much over the past decade, especially since the RPG-ification of everything. And it’s so complicated now and you have so few inputs on an old Game Boy. And I was like, “Well, how do I take these systems and mechanics from a modern RPG and try and crunch them down into this little machine?” You got six buttons total plus start and select. How can that work?
Ken Gagne: Yeah. And Colin, I actually want to hear from you about the next question, which is how do you choose which platform to demake on to? Because you took a PS4 game. You could have easily remade it for PS2 or PS1 or N64. What made you look at Disco Elysium like, “Oh, that’s going to be an awesome 8-bit black and white game.”
Colin Brannan: Well, it was the other way. Because I found the tool I used, GB Studio, first. And then I was thinking about this seems cool, I want to make a UI heavy game for the Game Boy. And so I had the platform first and I started thinking about games I’ve been playing recently that I really enjoyed and that had maybe interesting systems or really contemporary ideas for characters and leveling up and stuff. And I was like, “Okay, well, let’s take that and apply it to that platform.” So it was actually the other way around for me.
Ken Gagne: I see. Okay. And I also want to hear from you, James, because you chose the N64 for Portal, which of the demakes on here, is the most technologically recent platform. But I want to point out that the N64 came out in September of 1996, which is closer in time to the moon landing than it is to today. So yes, it’s a newer system, but not by much. So why the N64?
James Lambert: Actually a lot of the same reason. I had started working on N64 homebrew games because it’s a console I grew up on and it makes me feel old hearing that moon landing thing.
Ken Gagne: Mission accomplished.
James Lambert: It’s the console I grew up on. And so it kind of inspired me to learn to make games in the first place. And so when I recently discovered, recently being before the pandemic, discovered people are figuring out how to make games for the N64, I learned the tooling, did a few game jams, and then I was just kind of tinkering with the variety of different ideas I had. And I thought, “I wonder if it’d be possible to do the Portal effect, where you can render through a portal and go through it.” So I thought, “Let’s just try it.” And I got it working and I’m like, “How far can I take this?” And just kind of took off with it.
Ken Gagne: Amazing. And similarly, how do you choose the game? Like Animal Planet, you did Advance Wars, which every time I play Advance Wars I’m like, “Oh, they remade Desert Commander from the 8-bit Nintendo.” Thank you, thank you. So the mechanics of Advance Wars seem like relatively mathematically simple, and I’m saying that as not a developer. Is that something that influenced your decision of demake that game?
Animal Planet: I would say that that was a benefit of demaking that game because fans fortunately have Wiki’d all the aspects of combat, so I didn’t have to spend weeks balancing that game. I just plugged in the numbers and there you go.
Colin Brannan: Advance Wars, it is prescriptive, right? Like you know the same action or action will always have the same outcome. Like the AI always reacts the same way, right?
Animal Planet: Yeah, there’s a little bit of randomness, especially in combat. And in this game, there is no randomness in the PicoWars. So there’s no randomness. I fudged it a little bit, changed things a little bit, made it simpler mathematically. But ultimately, yeah. It wasn’t a reason to get into it, but it was helpful.
Ken Gagne: And so when you’re demaking these games, there has to be some sort of a sacrifice because it’s not going to be the same game when you’re done. So for example, Silent Hill 2, it’s this psychological horror game that has a pervasive sense of the unnatural. It’s not just an LJN licensed platformer for the 8-bit Nintendo like Back To The Future or something. So Jasper, when you were taking Silent Hill 2, was that an integral aspect of Silent Hill 2 that you had to capture when making it into an 8-bit Nintendo game?
Jasper Byrne: I suppose I compromised it a little bit because technically it’s not actually a Nintendo ROM. It is a PC piece of software, Soundless Mountain. So I use that to my advantage to kind of add things that couldn’t be done necessarily like transparent fog, which obviously you couldn’t do on an NES. And the sound, I didn’t go with pure chip tunes. I went with sort of more distorted real sounds, almost as if they were coming out of a Street Fighter II cabinet, the way they were crunchy and 8-bit, that kind of thing.
So it was more trying to add a bit more realism there in the audio, I suppose, to make up for lack of detail in the visuals or something. But yeah, in effect, I cheated really with it because I didn’t stick to the exact. I think it would’ve been difficult to do it purest on the NES because I think part of what makes this work or made people like it was the audio, which is quite similar to actually Silent Hill 2, but just a little bit dirtier sort of thing.
Ken Gagne: Interesting.
Jasper Byrne: So I think with this game, maybe it’s kind of a different case to probably the others on the panel, because it’s not actually for an old system. My choice of why to make it for the NES was because I hadn’t grown up with the NES and it was always exotic to me. And I used to see a lot of pixel artists draw stuff in the NES palette and I found it really attractive. But I sort of knew nothing about it, so I kind of wanted to make what I imagined an NES game would be like, if you like, having not really grown up with it.
Ken Gagne: Yeah, because survival horror was really a term coined in the PS1 era when Silent Hill and Resident Evil came out. But it could be retroactively applied to some older games like Haunted House for the Atari 2600 and I think was it called Dear Home?
Jasper Byrne: Sweet Home.
Ken Gagne: Sweet Home, thank you, for the 8-bit Nintendo. So this whole genre didn’t really exist predominantly in that era, and it’s fascinating to see what it-
Jasper Byrne: Yeah, that fascinated me about it actually.
Ken Gagne: Now what about Disco Elysium, Colin? So I confess, I haven’t played that game. I know it was at one point banned in Australia.
Colin Brannan: I hadn’t heard about that.
Ken Gagne: Yeah, apparently just the rampant drug use.
Colin Brannan: Yeah, there’s a lot. Yeah, yeah.
Ken Gagne: Yeah. So when you looked at Disco Elysium, what was it you said, “I need to keep this but I can ditch this.”
Colin Brannan: Okay, so there’s a character in Disco Elysium named Kuno, which anyone knows. Kuno is not in my game. Kuno is a 13-year-old, who’s the worst person you’ve ever met, just shouting slurs all the time and stuff. And I said, “You know what? I’ve already tried to contract my scope a bit. I’m sorry to all the Kuno fans out there, but I don’t want to deal with this.” And then I got a bunch of messages when I put it out and people were like, “Where’s Kuno? Why isn’t Kuno here?” And I was like, “Sorry, I just didn’t want to deal with it.”
But there’s other stuff. The drug use is kind of fun and that also. I was interested in the stats, how they work and the drug use in the game is all about adjusting your stats. So it’s like, okay, so I have to put some of that in. It was just making clever little cuts in different places.
And also another big one was there’s a lot of text in Disco Elysium. And when you’re playing real Disco Elysium, you’ve got maybe a third of the screen is one big text scroll. On the Game Boy version, I have two lines, sometimes three max of 18 characters, not 18 words, 18 characters. So a big thing I didn’t realize when I started is I actually had to rewrite a good portion of the script of the game so that would fit in nice little chunks that were easily parsable without having to skip through too many different text boxes.
Ken Gagne: I’m sorry, remind me, is this the entire game you ported into?
Colin Brannan: No, it’s the first, I don’t know how long, it depends on how you play a game. But playing this takes maybe about 40 minutes or so. Which is longer, I planned for 15 minutes and then you start working, you start putting little things in there. And then luckily, because it’s on the Game Boy, I’m a little bit contracted to what I can do, it’s like you start putting stuff in and go, “Oh god, I’ve made a 40-minute thing here.” But yeah, it’s the first. It’s up to the point where you solve a couple of the mysteries a little bit earlier if you get lucky with some of the rolls.
Ken Gagne: Are there any ways in which you think your version of this game is better than the original?
Colin Brannan: No, not really. I am pulling so much from them. It’s entirely derivative I think in a lot of ways, which is fine. I don’t think that’s a judge against me, but I’m taking what they’re doing, going, “This is really cool. What if it looked like this instead?” I don’t think better is really a scale that does much work for talking about comparing the two.
Ken Gagne: Okay, that’s fair. What about you, James? With Portal 64, obviously the portal mechanic is core to the game and we saw that demoed in the video and some of the graphic fidelity might be a little more pixelated. What other changes did you have to accept?
James Lambert: Yeah, so with that one, the fidelity had to be dropped. There’s not as much detail in many of the levels. I don’t have the nice baked ambient inclusion textures on the walls. But I did try to use Portal, the original Portal, as close of a template as I could have managed for like, “Okay, when do I need to add details to certain places?” I think this footage is a little old that you’re seeing here, but like the little light indicators that indicate which buttons are connected to which parts of the puzzle, I ended up adding that later.
But I tried to get the important pieces in first. Obviously the portal gun, that’s important to be able to render portals through. But then as I got that and then I said, “Okay, now I have the core done, let’s just start adding details as I can and just keep iterating on that.” And trying to push that as far as I could. I’m trying to think what the biggest thing that I didn’t get to that I was hoping I could. I know being able to render multiple Portals deep in recursions, so you see through a portal, through a portal, through a portal. Well, in an early demo I could go quite deep, but it was because there’s very little rendering. But later on, I kind of had to stick with just two layers deep and I couldn’t use some of the tricks they used for pushing that further.
Colin Brannan: So I have a quick question about that. So the portals are still really impressive when I see them in game. It’s just really cool tech. Did you use the same tricks they use in actual Portal or did you have to come up with your own ways to make it work on the N64?
James Lambert: I don’t know how much I matched with what they did. I had a cater to what N64 could do. So I think it is a little different. I kind of use tricks with partitioning the Z-buffer. And I don’t know how much detail I go into here. So I think I had to use some tricks that are a little bit different there. But I guess one way to think about the portal rendering, everybody knows that N64 can do split screen. So it’s just split screen rendering, but within the same area, if you think about it that way. That’s kind of the way to think about it.
Ken Gagne: That’s amazing. I had no idea. One of the other key elements of Portal, the original, is GLaDOS. And a lot of that comes across in the amazing voice acting. How were you able to preserve that, if at all?
James Lambert: Yeah, so just with that, I just took the game bundle. Portal has what they call VPK files. All of the data for the game is in it. So I just made it so when you were building the ROM for Portal, you said this is where I have that installed on my system. And I was able to extract the sound files, lower the sound quality, compress it to the N64’s audio format, and then bundle it in it directly. So I didn’t have to include any of their assets in my project in order for it to build. It just grabbed it from theirs and changed the quality down to include it.
Ken Gagne: Let me see here. So when you’re porting a game to an older system, a lot of older games we grew up with were awesome partly because we didn’t know any better. And then we’ve had a lot of quality of life improvements. Like try playing the original Final Fantasy and stocking up on 99 potions. It takes a long time. Or trying to figure out which sword is better, this one or that one. And you have to equip them to find out and maybe go into battle and see how much damage they do. So we’ve had a lot of just the general user interface of games has improved. The way you navigate through the world has improved.
When you go back in time and demake these games, how do you avoid those paper cuts that existed back then? Or do you embrace them and just say, “This is what it would like if this game existed back then. Yeah, it would suck. Thank goodness it didn’t.” Jasper.
Jasper Byrne: I think in the case of Silent Hill 2, I couldn’t honestly find much that had dated. I think it really stands up very well even today. So I just went as hard as I could on trying to recreate every aspect, like how the menu looks, the noise when you use the menu, up and down. All of those little details, I just tried to steal verbatim. It depends on the game I suppose, but for me, I think that one really has held up well.
In going to 2D, it gets rid of the question of tank controls and things like that that you’d have in a survival horror back then. Actually Silent Hill 2, I think it had, well, it does have the more modern type of controls anyway, which was kind of different from Resident Evil at that time, I suppose. At least up until, well, the prior one had been Resident Evil 3, I guess. But even the original Silent Hill I think has a camera, the modern controller movement, not the tank controls, if you like.
So in that sense, it hadn’t really dated. Had it been a 3D game and doing a PS1, well, I guess you’d have to do a PS0 demake of Resident Evil 1 or whatever and it was in 3D. In that hypothetical situation, I guess you might update it to not have tank controls or something like that. But then-
Ken Gagne: You just inspired my PAX East 2025 panel, In Defense of Tank Controls.
Jasper Byrne: I love them.
Colin Brannan: I have to say, the tank control sickos are out there.
Jasper Byrne: I’m just saying, yeah, a demake artist might choose to do that. But I personally love it.
Ken Gagne: Same, same. Thank you. Did you see that somebody, I guess this is kind of a demake, they modified the original Super Mario Kart for the Super Nintendo to have tank controls? It’s fixed camera angles, and as you go around the course, the angle changes to different static points. Another demake, somebody ported Tears of the Kingdom’s Ultrahand to Ocarina of Time. All right, just a brief aside there. Sorry.
So Animal Planet, what about when you were porting Advance Wars? Are there some modern quality of life improvements to game design and UI that you were able to bring back to PicoWars?
Animal Planet: Yeah, I think a lot of it was really nice user interface that the Advance Wars game had. They took a strategy game where you’re controlling tens of units at least and they put it on a handheld console that had just gotten color, so there’s a lot of UI aspects to that. I guess I really had fun … It’s a weird thing, but it was a real challenge to make the arrow. So when you select a unit, you are now commanding it where to walk. And getting that arrow to look nice and to be connected in this limited system where I couldn’t really. Well, when it’s a 16 by 16 grid for every little character, I don’t know, it made it difficult to make it even at every point. Play it, see it. It loops around pretty nicely I think. That would be the user interface aspect that I enjoyed working on.
And I don’t know if I made it any cleaner though. Like Jasper was saying, they had some good people in that game. It was more about simplifying what they already have and making it clean and fun and in a new style. And I think the PICO-8 fantasy console also really shined in that regard. It made everything look really fruity, just very colorful and vibrant and almost tropical. PicoWars feels like Advance Wars on a tropical island.
Ken Gagne: As a magazine editor, I was taught that an article isn’t done when you have nothing left to add, the article is done when you have nothing left to remove. So when you say you simplified Advance Wars, did you take away some things that weren’t really needed in the original and just get rid of the cruft?
Animal Planet: Yeah, there’s a lot removed. It would’ve been really not possible to include as much as is in that game because, well, speaking of the constraints of the PICO-8, you only have a certain amount of code you can put for every single cartridge they call them. And there are really hacky ways, there’s my game again, there are really hacky ways to make it so that you can have multiple cartridges, but all the state of the game is erased every time you switch a cartridge. So I had to write serialization code, so store it in memory and then reload it. And of course, this would all be unnecessary if it was written in Godot or something or Unity, like a modern game engine.
So things that had to be stripped. There are no naval units, there are no air units. Commander superpowers are unfortunately just really couldn’t be fit in if the artificial intelligence is there too. But commanders do have their own quirks and stuff, like there is a long-range specialist. And coming up with a few new special abilities for commanders that aren’t in the original game was a lot of fun. So there’s some new stuff there for sure.
Ken Gagne: I think it’s especially bold that you chose to demake a Nintendo game because they are quite litigious. There have been a lot of Zelda and Metroid games that have been taken down over the years. And I’m curious, I’ll save you for last, are the developers of the original games aware of your creations? Some people actually seek out the original creators’ opinions because they’re like, “This is an homage to what you’ve done. You’ve inspired me and I want you to know that.” And sometimes the response to that is not great. So have any of you, save you for last, gotten responses from the original developers or are you aware that they’re aware of it?
Colin Brannan: So I was really fortunate actually. They sought me out. I don’t know where they saw it, but I think it was when I posted the first build of it to a GB Studio Discord to get some hints on stuff from people, about a week later, someone from ZA/UM, the studio that makes Disco Elysium, their marketing team sent me an email and was like, “Hey, we’re putting together a second anniversary press release in three months and we want to put a bunch of fan work into it.” And they said, “We really like your project. We approve it.” Yeah, sorry to everyone else. It was very strange.
But now I’ve got their stamp of approval, which means everything needs to be a little bit more by the book. And also I was like, “Oh, a lot more people are going to see this now.” So I am not a musician. I had no music in the project at that time, and I had to reach out to someone and go, “Hey, I need some sound in this that’s not just the worst bleeps and bloops you’ve ever heard. Can you go in and remake the soundtrack?” But the soundtrack is licensed music from another band. So then we had to go to the marketing and the marketing was like, “Yeah, we need to check with the band that they’re okay with us putting this thing out.” And it became a whole different kind of headache. But everyone was okay with it as long as we weren’t making any money in the end.
Ken Gagne: So when you say you have their seal of approval, are they tweeting about your game or otherwise acknowledging it publicly?
Colin Brannan: They did. Yeah, they’ve tweeted a couple of times and stuff, and I think it was originally an email to news outlets and stuff. I remember when they first sent it out, they must’ve done a marketing release or something with a bunch of different fan projects for the two-year anniversary, and I think some poor IGN intern, it must’ve been a slow day and they needed to make 30 minutes of content because they uploaded the first 30 minutes of Disco Elysium Game Boy onto IGN’s main YouTube account. I was like, “Y’all know, this is just a fan thing? This isn’t real. You played basically the whole game.” But okay, sure.
Ken Gagne: That is amazing. There is a particular game on the show floor this weekend that looks very much like a Konami game. And I was in line to play it, and the two people in line ahead of me were talking and one person said, “How is this not a copyright violation?” And the other person said, “Probably because Konami doesn’t care about their IP anymore.” So Jasper.
Jasper Byrne: I literally saw that advertised outside the front, that game that you’re talking about. And it was literally on the poster outside. And at distance, I thought it was a Konami game. And then I saw it closer and I was like, “Okay.” It really is very close, isn’t it?
Ken Gagne: Is Konami aware of Soundless Mountain 2? Because you made this game 16 years ago, right?
Jasper Byrne: I did send it through their official channel and never heard back. But I also sent it to Masahiro Ito who did the art. And he said, “That looks really interesting and I’m going to play it.” And I never heard back from him. So I don’t know quite honestly whether he checked it out or not, but I liked the idea that he did.
Ken Gagne: It’s fascinating that you took the initiative of reaching out to Konami. That’s kind of like playing a game. Let’s poke the bear and see if it wakes up and if it doesn’t run away.
Jasper Byrne: Well, I guess because it was entered into the bootleg demakes competition, and so we had to change the name to make it look like it was a knockoff cart that was just skating around copyright anyway. So all the characters have changed name. He’s Jake, he’s not James.
Ken Gagne: Completely different.
Jasper Byrne: Every line of dialogue is slightly changed, all these sort of things. There’s not one line of dialogue that’s taken verbatim. All the character names have changed. It’s called Soundless Mountain, obviously, that sort of thing. So I just try to be very careful about that and not do anything that could be … So I guess it counts as parody, does it? I don’t know, honestly.
Ken Gagne: And parody is legally protected free speech.
Jasper Byrne: Right. Yeah, so technically I think I might have a leg to stand on should they ever try and care about their IP anymore.
Ken Gagne: Maybe you could claim that this is what they’re remaking this year when it comes out for PS5.
Jasper Byrne: Yeah, they might come after me now, I don’t know.
Ken Gagne: We’re jumping all the way from the 8-Bit Nintendo to the PS5.
Jasper Byrne: Maybe I should try sending it to Ito-San again and see if he has played it.
Ken Gagne: I think they should buy this off, put it in as an Easter egg. So James Sunderland is walking around Silent Hill, he finds a dilapidated arcade console. He starts playing it and it’s Soundless Mountain 2.
Jasper Byrne: I’m not going to lie, that would be my dream.
Ken Gagne: If you could play Outrun in Shenmue, why not play Soundless Mountain 2 in Silent Hill 2?
Colin Brannan: There’s that bit in Metal Gear Solid 4 where Snake has a dream and he’s back in Metal Gear Solid 1.
Jasper Byrne: Or Day of the Tentacle where you can play Maniac Mansion on a computer in Day of the Tentacle. I love that.
Ken Gagne: There’s a Call of Duty game where you can play Zork. And Pitfall for the Super Nintendo had Pitfall for the Atari 2600. Come on, the opportunity is there, the precedent is there. You could be rolling in it. Come on.
All right. So James, I understand that you took your game, that is inspired by a game by Valve, and you uploaded it to Steam, which is run by Valve. How’d that work out for you?
James Lambert: Well, it didn’t actually make it to Steam. It was just a GitHub. I did do it where I just distributed a patch where you didn’t download the ROM for me, you had to go grab a file from your Steam installation to generate the patch. Turns out that is actually against the terms of service of Steam. But anyway.
So in terms of getting permission, so sometime in December, somebody from Valve reached out to me. He had worked on the original Portal and he was just telling me they thought Portal was pretty cool. And by the way, the portal paradox where if you drop a piston over a cube and you ask the question is does it shoot out or does it just stop and then fall, the guy who wrote the original physics for Portal says that it shoots out. So just if there’s any question there.
But anyway, so I got in contact with them. He loved it. The legal team less so. So had some back and forth with them and it took a while to get this figured out. So clearly there are people at Valve who wanted to see this project continue. But ultimately, because I was using libultra, which is Nintendo’s proprietary library for the N64, they’re like, “We don’t want to touch that.” So they had a can of it.
And I think even outside of that, I asked if I could use an open source one like libdragon, and they weren’t really on board because I could lose control over the distribution of a ROM. Because I wasn’t distributing on Steam. And I know a lot of people were taking my ROM and just putting it on their phone emulator so they could play Portal on their phone. And I feel like Valve kind of saw that and thought, “We don’t want to lose control over and not be able to monitor the distribution of this game.” So I think for those reasons, they wanted the project to end.
Jasper Byrne: I think if anything, there’s an element of it sounds to me like your game was actually too accurate and too close to the original game.
James Lambert: Possibly.
Ken Gagne: So it sounds like Valve didn’t want to touch the Nintendo library you were using. But as long as you’re distributing it on your own, can they really tell you to stop making Portal 64?
James Lambert: I’m no lawyer, so-
Ken Gagne: None of us are. None of us are.
James Lambert: I figured I’d rather just avoid the liability. I don’t know, maybe I could lawyer up and figure out what I could do legally and see where I can actually finish this within a legal sense, but I don’t know if I want to take that leap.
Ken Gagne: So in all seriousness, where do you go from here? Because you literally worked on this game on and off for years and if somebody just put a kibosh to it, I wouldn’t just move on to the next project. I would go into a deep funk and be like, “What’s the point of anything?” So where do you go from here?
James Lambert: Yeah. Well, I was using that project as an opportunity to grow my YouTube channel. And I also was learning a lot about developing for the console. I was building out physics engines and other assets, and so I’m just taking a lot of the learning and some of the code and porting over to a new game project that I’ve started on. So it’s still pretty early because I’m now using libdragon so I had to rebuild a lot of the core engine that I was using. But I just started on a new project and I’m hoping that I can use some of the momentum from that to carry over into a new project.
Ken Gagne: And will this also be a demake or be an original IP?
James Lambert: This is an original IP because I don’t want to get slapped again.
Ken Gagne: Sure. So this has been a professional development opportunity for you. What about for the rest of you? Why do you do demakes? Like Colin, you said that this was just a pandemic project for you. So is it just for fun and by day you’re a marine biologist or something?
Colin Brannan: Well, no. So at the time I was working on it, it was a hobby thing and then also a portfolio piece. But I wasn’t a game developer, I was a mechanic actually. And then later, not immediately after, but a little bit later, I actually did get a game development job afterwards. And I was like, “Oh yeah, because it’s a cool part of my portfolio.” And it was when I got hired, it was one of the most recent things I did. So I’m sure the people who hired me saw it. But then before coming here, I was talking to my boss about it and he’s like, “Oh, have you done those before?” I was like, “You hired me.” But yeah, it was another thing.
And it was also anytime I’ve worked, tried to start up a project … And personally for me, scope creep is just so real. So it was a good way to try and keep things in check and have a small project that I could easily finish and put out there.
Ken Gagne: Cool. What about you, Jasper? I know that this game, as we said, was made 16 years ago and you’ve made a lot of other games since then.
Jasper Byrne: Yeah. Why do I make remakes? Well, as I said, it was for the competition, so it wasn’t something I’d ever really considered up until that point. To be honest, I’d never even heard the word used until, Derek, you ran that competition for The Independent Game Source. Yeah, he’d obviously thought about it quite deeply before even coming up with that idea. But I don’t know what there was around at that time, 2008. I can’t really think of any. It is possible that, Derek, you invented it in some ways or invented the concept. But I remember him saying that it was based on the idea of you’d find these clone cartridges and consoles in China or whatever that would have a version of something that was nearly Street Fighter, but not. And so that’s why it was called the sort of bootleg demake thing.
So that interested me. It was just a sort of a funny concept in a way. Trying to imagine what one of these games where it was a kind of knocked-together clone of Street Fighter II or whatever would be like, maybe for a lesser system as well. Because I think that was true of it. So games would come out on later systems and then they would make it for the NES or whatever, like Street Fighter II for the NES or something like that. So that part of it interested me. It was funny in a way just to kind of picture what they’d be like because I hadn’t actually played them.
Ken Gagne: Yeah. What about you, Animal Planet? Why are you doing this? Well, we started off with that, so what I’m asking is what are you getting out of it now?
Animal Planet: Well, now that it’s over, it’s nice to see people play it. Advance Wars diehard fans that are just seeking anything on the internet that can keep filling that hole in their heart for Advance Wars. But what got me into it originally was it’s such a passion project. And the first question you were asking was what makes a good game a candidate for a demake. And I think any game, any kind of passion project is for it to be a passion project. And it was just something that I was thinking about when I was sleeping. I was thinking about when I was eating, waking, outside, running, whatever. So I think I’m actually missing that in my current project, which is why I haven’t been able to work on it. I can’t get a storyline down for it. With Advance Wars, it was like I love this game.
And I made a new story. There’s a prequel for it. So it was so exciting to get back into the war and do that. With this game, it’s like what happens? Really only what’s driving me is I’m having fun making the art, I’m having fun exploring the game engine and doing algorithms. But there’s something not gluing it together. And I think that there’s a passion part missing. So I think it’s really important to have that, find something that really makes your heart beat. Even if it’s, it’s a demake, ideally I’d be working on my own IP and my own story and be like, “This is me.” But I think that that’s where my heart was, and I think a lot of it creates a lot of value for people and a lot of people really enjoy that.
Ken Gagne: Awesome. It’s kind of like fanfiction from a software development perspective.
Jasper Byrne: Yeah, it seems to me like everybody’s coming from a place of loving these games, particular games that we’ve demade, a great deal. It’s just almost like paying homage to the games that really inspire us. I guess
Ken Gagne: Before I go to questions for the audience, I want to point out that there’s a huge demake community. This is a small sample of the demakes that are out there. Are there any demakes that inspire any of you or that you give a shout-out to that aren’t your own?
Colin Brannan: Bloodborne PSX is incredible.
Animal Planet: Same.
Ken Gagne: Yeah, Bloodborne for the PlayStation 1. So that is a thing. Yeah, anybody else?
Jasper Byrne: Yeah, I’m sure all of us love that one. It is quite incredible what she achieved with that game. Because she recreated the entire game.
Colin Brannan: Yeah, it was like, “Wait, it keeps going.” It keeps going.
Jasper Byrne: Boss fights and everything, and it’s quite an incredible project. Really inspiring actually. Yeah, I don’t know about too many others. I had obviously heard of a couple of the others on the panel.
But I guess thinking another aspect I suppose is the game, growing up with a home computer systems like the Sinclair Spectrum, we always had terrible arcade conversions that were much worse than the NES games and things like that. So in a sense, I kind of grew up with demakes, if you like, of arcade games. Because they were terrible. Again, like Street Fighter II on the Spectrum, which does exist.
Ken Gagne: You’re not being fair to the work you have done because there’s a difference between a demake and a crappy port.
Jasper Byrne: Right. Yeah, hopefully. Hopefully.
Ken Gagne: I want to switch to questions and see if this microphone is going to work for me because now this is the opportunity for you to not line up. You can stay in the comfort of your seats and raise a hand if you have a question. And I see, all right, let’s start right here. I saw your hand go up first. And by the way, a question is a short declarative statement that ends with a question mark.
Audience member: So James, you in particular mentioned having to use Nintendo related code and stuff like that. For the rest of you, did you have to research your target systems like development software or anything like that?
Colin Brannan: Sorry, I keep saying them, GB Studio is great. Check it out. It’s awesome. Their guidelines and everything are all, it’s like, “Hey, here’s what you can do. You can only have X amount of sprites in one scene or X amount of characters.” And they’re always very low numbers. So it was part of the software that I was using was giving me those restrictions and whatnot.
Ken Gagne: Cool.
Jasper Byrne: Yeah for me, it wasn’t anything beyond just the palette and the color palette really. How many colors does the NES have and what are they? That was all I really looked into technically. I didn’t try and follow the sound specifications or anything like that.
Ken Gagne: What we need is an N64 studio app. Just drag and drop. Boom, done. Here, have a copy of my magazine. And on the back there’s Steam code for a random game. Any other questions? Let’s go back here. Hi there.
Audience member: Do you think there’s any overlap between I guess the motivation for the stuff that comes out of the demo scene and demakes?
Colin Brannan: Demo scene being the music video tech that people make, right? Or the video game demo scene?
Audience member: No, the basically music video tech.
Colin Brannan: Yeah, okay.
Audience member: Obsolete systems. Video on a 2600 or whatever.
Colin Brannan: I think a lot of us we’re all coming, like we were saying about coming from a place of fandom of an original project, where demo scene seems much more interested in the tech engineering aspect of it. I’m not super involved in that though. I don’t know.
James Lambert: Me personally, I can’t really speak to that. I don’t have that overlap, I guess.
Animal Planet: I think other than sharing the same target as in older consoles, restricted consoles and spaces, I don’t see a ton of overlap.
Ken Gagne: Yeah, there is some overlap. The person who did the Apple II demakes I mentioned has also entered the demo scene. And right here in Boston, there used to be an event called Demo Party that you could go to every year and people just show off these amazing self-running demos. It’s like 16kb and it runs for two minutes of audio video on PC and it’s ridiculous. Yeah, and there are also some great, don’t stand in front of a speaker, some great Atari demos. Let’s hear from you.
Audience member: Hi. You mentioned Street Fighter II on the NES. How can you tell the difference today between demakes made today and demakes that were made on the black market in China and Russia, like Somari the Adventurer or Super Mario World on the NES, those games that you would often find on multicarts or Soulja Boy consoles, kind of stuff that YouTuber Rerez talked about?
Jasper Byrne: Well, obviously the motivation is the main difference because those people that were bootlegging those cartridges, they were just trying to somehow trick you into buying what you thought was a better game. Whereas I guess people like us who are doing this sort of thing are trying to do probably the best job that we can within the limitations if you like.
Colin Brannan: I also don’t want to be totally dismissive of it though because some of them at times you play those and they’re like, “This is actually all right.” And now I’m thinking what if someone remade the most bootleg thing you could find? Get a team together, spend a lot of time at it.
Jasper Byrne: Bootleg remakes. Yeah, that would be good.
Ken Gagne: So what, like Cheetahmen 64 or something? Sure. Let’s go right here.
Audience member: So has there been any game or console that you’ve been very passionate about wanting to demake onto, but it wasn’t really feasible, the challenge just being too great? You’ve mentioned the difficulties with porting to your specific consoles already, so I was just curious.
James Lambert: Yeah, actually, I really like the idea of trying to get an open-world sized game running on the N64. But then I consider, okay, but then I have to make an open-world amount of content. And that’s really the bottleneck. I’d love to try the tech, but unfortunately one person just can’t generate a lot of content. And you’re much better off I think targeting something that you can make a small slice of that feels complete rather than trying to go really broad.
Colin Brannan: I think it’s a Sid Meier quote or something about wanting to make a game that took entirely inside one apartment block or something. This idea of making a very open-world, but at a very tiny scale and just doing a lot of work still, but packing it all into the tiniest amount of physical digital space rather than a big expansive field or whatnot.
Ken Gagne: Cool. Let’s see, I saw a hand from you sir, with the New York, is that a Yankees hat in Boston?
Audience member: I’m sorry. I’m from Canada.
Ken Gagne: What part of Canada?
Audience member: Calgary.
Ken Gagne: That’s not Toronto.
Colin Brannan: No, sorry. Don’t give him it. No, no.
Audience member: So I wanted to ask, obviously this stuff comes from a love of these games. You wouldn’t make this stuff otherwise. But is there anything about it that it’s a little bit like seeing how the sausage gets made? Is there anything that’s you go back to these games and you kind of see through them a little bit. Does it ruin anything for you or is it just a positive thing overall?
Animal Planet: For me, no. It was such an incredible positive experience and being able to see the just tunnel vision-esque incredible amount of work that people have done to break down Advance Wars and have all the facts about the characters, but also just the battle statistics and all of that. That’s kind of why I got into creating this, to see how that really worked. And it was very fulfilling. No magic lost there.
James Lambert: No, same. I think I kind of noticed the little details they added the game and why they did things. You’re like, “Oh, that makes sense.” They’re little subtle things that they’ve added that you just wouldn’t notice without diving deep into it.
Jasper Byrne: It made me just love it even more. And I spent a lot of time just analyzing the pauses, how long fade-outs would take, how long you would spend traversing each room, and just looking at all of these timings and things. I feel like I learned so much about editing and timing and kind of pacing of a game just through just analyzing the videos. And luckily with Silent Hill 2, there were a bunch of documentaries as well that were made at the time that were really good that came out with the Director’s Cut. So just rewatching all that stuff just made me even more inspired and love it even more, quite honestly.
Colin Brannan: It’s like the thing I was attracted to was mechanics and systems. So I was already really thinking about how they were working. And then if you really like the music in a game, you can do a cover of it. If you really like the characters, you can do fan art. And it’s like I really love these mechanics and systems and it’s fan art of mechanics and gameplay in a lot of ways.
Ken Gagne: If you like a game soundtrack, go to OCRemix.org. They have a lot of great remixes of games. If you like reading about the games you’re playing and you want a more of an academic breakdown, go to Boss Fight Books, many of which are quite good, especially Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid. Let’s go right over here because you know what Desert Commander is.
Audience member: Yes, unfortunately I’ve been playing games that long. Actually, my question was for Jasper. I wanted to ask why Silent Hill 2? There’s a lot of horror games out for PlayStation 1. Could have done Resident Evil, you could have done Fatal Frame, you could have done Galerians, you could have done Countdown Vampires.
Jasper Byrne: That’s a good shout.
Audience member: Probably would’ve been better. But yeah, why Silent Hill 2?
Jasper Byrne: I love Galerians. Yeah, I love Fatal Frame as well. It’s because I guess I personally just have a large interest film and it was very influenced by film, obviously, and outside of the game world. So I liked a lot of the source material I think that they used to kind of research that game, like the movie Jacob’s Ladder or whatever. And so it just connected with me very strongly on that cinematic level. And I guess my dad was a screenwriter and we used to watch movies together, two a day or something. So it was really just that love of film that I felt within that game. It’s probably one reason I also love Kojima’s games or whatever.
Ken Gagne: Awesome. Thank you. I think that is the end of our questions, unfortunately, although we’ll be hanging out outside the hall at the end. In the last minute, I just want to go down the line. We do have our social media accounts up there, but I want to give you the opportunity to verbally plug your title, where people can find it. All your games are available online for free. Well, they were.
James Lambert: Allegedly.
Ken Gagne: So just going down the line here, where can people find you?
James Lambert: Yeah, I just have a YouTube channel, James Lambert. That’s all.
Jasper Byrne: Yeah, I have a Twitter, Jasperbyrne. It’s up there. And also Instagram is Jaspersonic because I make music as well, and it’s more the music side I put on there, Insta and TikTok and what have you. So JasperSonic or Jasperbyrne on Twitter.
Colin Brannan: Don’t find me. It’s fine. You don’t have to. You can send me an email or go to csbrannon.itch.io to check out Disco Elysium for Game Boy. But I’m okay. Come say hi.
Animal Planet: You can find PicoWars on itch.io/picowars or my Twitter, X thingy is listed there, Lambdanaut. I don’t post there too often, but yeah, some game dev stuff goes up there.
Ken Gagne: Awesome. Thank you all so much for coming to Demakes Decoded. Enjoy the rest of PAX.
