I recently watched the movie The Color of Money (1986). It is the sequel to the 1960s movie The Hustler, which I only learned about afterwards. I have yet to watch that movie. The Color of Money is great. I really enjoyed watching it. It takes its time to develop characters, which have remarkable depth. I could write an essay about this movie, but maybe take my word for it because the following argument is not built upon this being a great movie but instead on the shallowness of contemporary mass media.

I think that I am neither the biggest movie buff nor the biggest video game nerd, but I have a rough idea about what is going on in the market, and what I am seeing in both markets does not instill a lack of confidence. In movies, it seems that well-written story-driven productions with a moderate budget have all but disappeared. I cannot recall a movie released in the last ten to fifteen years that dared to show a male lead with any depth of character, playing a part in a story that is not completely brain-dead. There are probably some artfag independent movies out there, but how does this compare to bringing together a talented director, a good screenwriter, and a few great actors, with the goal of producing a well-made movie that is not only enjoyable to watch in 1986 but which may even stand the test of time? Today, you either get big-budget CGI-fests or artfag movies, with little to nothing in between. In the case of superhero movies, the problem is probably not nostalgia but creators being genuinely stuck as the source material is so shallow.

In gaming, the situation is even more dire. Studios are so desperate that they are remaking games people do not really care about. Sony recently released a remaster of the first Horizon: Zero Dawn game, which had only come out seven years prior. Was there really no better use for that money? Similarly, we get remasters of games which have at best a niche audience. A few months ago, Bandai Namco announced that they are going to remaster their Tales-of RPG franchise. This franchise was never all that popular, but it was not for a lack of trying. Between 2002 and 2009, there were a staggering eleven mainline releases. Afterwards, the output slowed down. Another great examples of a game nobody played back in the day is Beyond Good and Evil. I only know about it because games journalists cannot shut up about it as it was supposedly an early example of a game with a female lead. Ubisoft of course listens to the wrong crowd, so of course they released a remastered version of it, which probably sold even worse than the original release.

Probably a distinction has to be made between “good” and “bad” nostalgia. I do not understand at all why companies remake or remaster old games that were not popular, and expect that they will make a profit. This seems to be a case of nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, i.e. these people are so creatively bankrupt that their only option seems to be to prop up the corpse of some game of franchise, hoping to breathe new life into it, even though they should have enough market data to know that they are only going to burn their money. “Good” nostalgia can perhaps be excused, i.e. when games really were popular in the past, be it within a niche or more widely. Capcom’s remakes of their Resident Evil games have been very well received, for instance. Yet, in these examples you also wonder what they could have made with all that money instead.

Even successful remakes and remasters have the problem that the product is not genuinely new. There are sometimes attempts to subvert expectations, like it was done in the Final Fantasy VII Remake. Movies have had that problem for decades. Movie studios are so obsessed about turning every remotely successful release into a franchise that you wonder what would happen if they used this much effort on developing new concepts. The other day I learned that there are six entries in the Scream franchise. The first movie was no even that great. Yet, people kept watching his slop, so more slop they got. Perhaps the silver lining on the horizon is generative AI as it can help creatives bring their ideas to life with less money, thus reducing the commercial risk. This may lead to a new wave of creativity. In gaming we have seen a few companies and even one-man studios release rather impressive titles. In a few years, perhaps small groups of five to ten people, and a bunch of computers, will be able to bring their ideas to life, be it games or movies, at a fraction of the current cost. This would surely not lead to a movie with the same impact as The Color of Money, but we could perhaps ascend beyond the current age of slop.