Ok I watched the video now. Itās very thoughtful and well made, but ultimately I canāt help feeling that itās kind of besides the point, at least as far as Iām concerned.
It starts by questioning which version of Da Vinciās Last Supper would be considered the āauthenticā one. I think thatās a very profound question, but I do think that the video is unconvincing when it bridges from there to videogames.
Physical works of art are ānon fungibleā. If you restore the Last Supper, you destroy the Last Supper as it currently exists and you create a new work. In these conditions, an utmost amount of care must be employed by artisans and technicians to make sure that the restoration is necessary and meaningful, and that leads to all sorts of complicated philosophical discussions on the nature of art. It also leads to considering that the real, original version of the work as intended by the author has already been irretrievably lost. We will never know what the Last Supper was really meant to look like, or at least we will never be entirely sure.
Videogames, movies and books are not like this. Black Mesa does not replace Half Life, itās a new, different thing. The author of the video spends time discussing version differences and display technology and patches and hardware differences, but frankly itās besides the point. If you really want you can absolutely buy original discs of Half Life and install it on old-school hardware. I can literally return to my old bedroom in my parentās home and plug my PlayStation to a CRT TV and reconstitute the 90ās gaming experience almost perfectly. I still have a GameBoy that I can use to replay Zelda in the exact same conditions as I did 30+ years ago. And when itās not practical to recreate the hardware setup, emulation usually gets us extremely close.
The philosophical discussion as to what constitutes a different version of a game and what constitutes a different game altogether is of no real import to me. As far as I can tell the only point would be to gatekeep discussions online, as if I said to people having played the FF2 Pixel Remaster that they havenāt actually played the real FF2, or if @Daisoujou told me that I havenāt played the real FF2 because I used an emulator and not the real hardware, or if I told him that I donāt think that he played the real FF2 because he used a patched version. I donāt think itās useful or productive to do that. I do think however that itās important to contextualize criticisms of the work based on the version being considered. You canāt say that itās wrong to complain about the progression system of FF2 if youāre playing a version that tweaks it significantly. You canāt say that itās wrong for a day 1 review of The Witcher 3 to complain about bugs if youāre playing the game years later with all sorts of bugfix patches.
The more interesting discussion to me, which the video briefly touches on, is that even if I was to recreate my 90ās bedroom to perfection and I told my 10yo nephew to come and play the original Final Fantasy VII there, they still wouldnāt experience what I experienced back then. The game would be perfectly identical, the presentation would be perfectly identical, but it still wouldnāt be the same experience because modern expectations and goalposts are completely different. What was a ground-breaking, state-of-the art experience for me back then would be a low-tech, āretroā game for him.
So in a very real sense itās actually possible that, for my nephew, playing the FFVII Remake today would be closer to the subjective experience I had as a kid when playing the OG FFVII.
Iām going to stop my ramble here because I could go on for pages and pages on this particular topicā¦
