The Strange Case of the Amateur Video Game Remake

Meet the fans who dedicate themselves to remaking old games for fun.

HD remakes are all the rage these days. From Aliens versus Predator to Zone of the Enders, dozens of ageing games are embarking upon comeback tours on modern machines. Some have simply had their code tweaked to run on today’s hardware, whereas others have undergone complete HD makeovers, but they all share that same desire to bring classic experiences to modern audiences - and make a quick buck on the side, of course.
While HD remakes are now as popular with publishers as dubstep and microtransactions, that urge to update games for contemporary hardware isn’t something new. Since before the turn of the millennium there have been small, dedicated groups of fans striving to upgrade their most treasured gaming memories. In the weird world of the amateur remake, fanatical dedication clashes with seemingly impossible goals; and the results of this collision can vary greatly.
Recreating a game developed by a large team of professionals in a different engine is an enormous project, and consequently many of them fail to fulfil their lofty ambitions. One such example is Dark Forces: A Mod For Jedi Academy, which attempted to recreate the classic Star Wars FPS in the Quake III Engine. The project was the brainchild of Dave “Darth_Linux” Turner, who seized the opportunity after seeing Jedi Knight II demonstrated for the first time.

While HD remakes are now as popular with publishers as dubstep and microtransactions, that urge to update games for contemporary hardware isn’t something new.

“I went to the Lucas Arts forum, which had recently created a new room for Jedi Knight, and I just posted a general ‘anyone interested in remaking Dark Forces, send me a message.’  Within a day I had about 10 responses from various disciplines, so I quickly dumped all of the original assets from the game and started converting them to the Quake 3 formats.”
The project quickly gained momentum, and the ten man team were soon releasing screenshots of the first room of the first level, causing the team to double in size overnight. “The whole process was very exciting,” says Turner. “The enthusiasm of the team and the community was immediate and I probably spent three hours a day before/after work just checking in new assets, testing them, creating a release, sending it to the team, and then figuring out what needed to be done for the next day.”
The work required to rebuild a game in this manner goes much further than visual improvements. The Dark Forces team also re-recorded voiceovers using actors who sounded similar to those in the original game. They even remixed the entire MIDI soundtrack to maximise its quality. “Using layering techniques I was able to create a more robust soundtrack” says Ben Blystone, the remake’s sound engineer.  “But by combining and adding voices, changing and modifying instrumental sounds, adding orchestral reverb, etc it threw off the mix, so I had to go through and re-mix every file and do a lot of tweaking. I even fixed a few mistakes in the original files that weren't apparent until the music underwent this process.”

The Dark Forces team re-recorded voiceovers using actors who sounded similar to those in the original game.

Development of the remake continued apace until the release of the Source engine in 2004, at which point even the remake’s visuals were beginning to look dated, despite porting all the assets onto the updated Jedi Academy multiplayer engine when it was released in 2003. Worse, the port caused problems of its own. “We were missing someone to actually write code in JA-MP to get the puzzles done,” explains Turner. “And it started to become apparent that without a coder, there was no way we'd be able to finish the last half of the game.”
Sadly a coder was never found, and the team resolved to finish the first six levels of the game and leave it at that. Even so, the project was not officially cancelled until January 2012, almost ten years after Turner posted his initial forum enquiry.
It seemed strange to me that someone would spend so much of their time painstakingly rebuilding somebody else’s creation. What drove them for so long when the best possible result was a slightly improved looking replica? “I didn't have the technical background nor the imagination to come up with something on my own,” answers Turner. “But I was happy to breathe new life into Dark Forces.”

Updating a classic game so modern players can enjoy it in like its original audience is an admirable intention that anyone can understand. This was also witnessed first-hand when Black Mesa, the Source engine conversion of Half-Life, was released last year to significant critical acclaim. But what happens when the game in question isn’t a classic? How do you set about remaking a game like that, and why would you want to in the first place?

Updating a classic game is an admirable intention that anyone can understand.

Bilal Bakri is the project lead on Renegade X, a remake of Command and Conquer: Renegade using Unreal Engine 3. The original Renegade received mixed reviews on release. Scheduled to debut around 2000, it ended up being delayed until 2002, by which time both the visuals and netcode were outdated. “You also have to remember that during 2002 a lot of people had slow internet, so a lot of people just played the singleplayer and kind of discarded the game afterwards,” says Bakri.
Bakri believed that underneath the clunky exterior was a fantastic multiplayer game which had been missed by its original audience, and became heavily involved in the Renegade modding community, working on mods that aimed to improve and expand the Renegade experience. “The multiplayer was one of the first multiplayer games that actually introduced a wide variety of vehicles as well as flying vehicles, and it came with ten maps, and most teams were dynamic yet balanced at the same time.”
When Epic revealed Unreal Engine 3 in late 2004, Bakri realised Epic’s technology had the potential to power a version of Renegade that matched with Westwood Studios’ original intentions. The announcement of Unreal Tournament 3 provided the perfect framework for such a project, and Bakri resolved to recreate Renegade as a mod for UT. “We started building the team and the design documents in 2006, and just after that point, we worked in secret for a few months. By the time Unreal Tournament 3 came out, we were ready.”
The mod went through several beta versions, and had a steadily growing fan base when Epic released the Unreal Development Kit, at which point the team decided to transform their mod into a standalone game. They received permission from EA to use the Renegade name and trademarks provided it remained free and started work, rebuilding many of the assets from scratch.
“We decided that how we would approach the standalone multiplayer was at first we would make a single-player campaign which would get the core features finished, so that we would have all the weapons and vehicles set up (or many of them set up), a new HUD, new character animations, character features like dodging and sprinting and these things, and that we would put it out there as like a singleplayer demo.”
This demo, a two hour campaign titled Black Dawn, was released last year, and has to date received 300,000 downloads. Now the team is focussed on the full multiplayer release. Interestingly, they are planning some significant changes to the vanilla game, which seems counter-intuitive to the philosophy of remaking a game. Bakri argues Renegade X is not supposed to be a straightforward remake, but the game Renegade was intended as being. “You can no longer really get away with just a game from 2002 with updated graphics,” He says. “We want to do air-strikes, which were in the original C&C games but not in renegade. We want to do some things with super-weapons and capturable buildings.”
There’s more to amateur remakes than sprucing up a crusty old game for the sake of some quick media attention. Instead, it involves a complex mixture of desires; desire to give something back, to update an experience and share your love of a game with modern audiences, and sometimes to realise the potential of a game that didn’t quite work out the first time around. They may not always meet with the success of Black Mesa and Renegade X, but the effort can still ultimately prove worthwhile. “I still get emails every couple of months or so from people who still love the Dark Forces Mod,” says Turner. “So yeah, I'm proud of what I was able to do.”