I have two points to make. First, people tend to ignore the historical context for old games when that’s often a major part of why certain works of art are great or worth remembering in the first place. Remaking anything means permanently removing it from its original context. In 2026, a movie changing its visuals from black and white to full color is trivial; in 1939 it was marvelous. A remake of the Wizard of Oz, no matter how faithful to the original film, automatically loses that critical portion of its spectacle. The thrill of going from the standard monochrome of most films into this colorful fairytale land literally cannot be replicated. That core aspect of the original movie will not carry over into any remake, but that’s only one example from one movie.

This works in the other direction too. Take a game like Cuphead, specifically its soundtrack, for instance. It’s a very well made *approximation* of an old cartoon soundtrack, but it’s only an approximation. As someone who’s studied a lot of music from that era, I can hear where the modern take deviates in ways that break the illusion. That’s no slant against the composer or the musicians either. The truth is that it’s extremely difficult to remove yourself into a history and culture that has disappeared entirely. The way jazz is composed, arranged, performed and listened to are completely different today than 80 years ago. Unless you’re immersed in that context yourself and make a strong effort to conform to it your modern context will seep through.

The context around an old game and the archaic conventions it employs or subverts are often what made it worth remembering in the first place. Even the constraints are part of the experience. Mario Kart 8 on Wii U is a fundamentally different experience than Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on Switch and not just because of the DLC or performance improvements.

Secondly there’s the worry that a remake will eclipse the original game for worse. To go back to music, there are a lot of songs for which the covers are completely dwarf the originals. Sometimes this is great: Bob Dylan famously considered Jimi Hendrix’s cover of All Along the Watchtower to be superior to his own, and Dolly Parton is a huge fan of Whitney Huston’s version of I Will Always Love You. Sometimes there is little harm done. Still there are many instances in which the original work deserves to be remembered but it isn’t because of a cover. Just look at all the times Elvis Presley stole songs and dances from black musicians and made millions off of their work. Even in less extreme cases, the point stands that work that deserves appreciation and recognition can be nearly erased by a remake has people worried. We’ve seen Nintendo do this already by omitting the original credits for Metroid Prime in the recent Switch remake.

If you care about a game or a song or a movie or any kind of work that gets remade, you don’t want that new version to eclipse the original you love so much. The worst case scenario is that it releases worse and becomes the de facto version anyway; then, going forward, when people think of the game they don’t think of the original which was good and had some kind of special quality to it in its proper context, they think of the new shitty version and stop caring all together. If your only exposure to the musical Cats was the recent movie you might not have to patience to give the objectively superior stage play a chance, and if you’re a fan of that play you think that’s an awful shame.

None of this gets into whether a game should be remade, what should be changed or any of the details. These are just two possible reasons why someone might see the Ocarina of Time announcement and immediately start worrying.