For a long time I’ve wondered why one of the greatest classics was never remade, when even lesser titles were getting reiterations. Paperboy it seemed, to me at least, was overdue a revival, it would benefit well from a full 3D environment. It wasn’t until I read Steven Pool’s ‘Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames’ for a second time that I realised that a remake would face so many problems.Paperboy played on a simple fixed isometric viewpoint and you only had one direction of travel, forward. It’s these two parameters that made the game work. The gameplay came from the forward planning that the game required for you to make, without this you have something other than Paperboy.Say for example you were charged with modernising the game. You can expect that your design brief would include a fully roamble 3D environment, if it didn’t then it wouldn’t be a ‘modern game’. You’d be forgiven for attempting to zap inspiration from Activision’s Matt Hoffman’s Pro BMX or Acclaim’s Dave Mirra’s Freestyle BMX games.The problem with the model for these games is the level of freedom you’d allow the player. If you give Paperboy the ability to roam around and backtrack then the game becomes easy and you have to impose a time limit. In doing so the game no longer becomes Paperboy and the fanboys rise-up. Okay, so let’s take another approach.How about an on-rails shooter in the style of the Panzer Dragoon series, where you have a fixed route, our round, for the Paperboy and he is then expected to aim and fire the papers at the post boxes and doors he passes? This could definitely be a fun game. However you’ve taken away the control of the Paperboys movement and the game becomes related to the original trough name only.The answer then seem to be to create a game that retains to original viewpoint, one which allows the player to view both the road in the direction of travel, along with its obstacles, and the targets of the papers in one screen. Lowering the camera to a standard third person perspective would do nothing but frustrate, as the player would want to flick between both the road and houses quickly. The angle simply wouldn’t be wide enough; the playfield needs to be displayed on one screen.It would then appear that all you’d actually be capable of is a graphical update, because as we’ve seen changing the gameplay elements isn’t really an option unless you are creating a new game that shares a name with an old game. That’s not in the realm of an ‘update’.So where does that leave you? You either participate in an exercise in futility, which is the graphical update, alienate both original fans and new comers to the series, or you take the route Hasbro did when reviving some of the old Atari licences – you create new games, either loosely or not at all based on the originals, which as we’ve seen isn’t a good idea.But what about those that have got it right, that have resurrected an old IP and have given it brilliant treatment? Prince of Persia springs to mind. What Ubisoft’s PoP team did was clever. Firstly they choose a title that could and, as time has proven, did gel well with current videogame paradigms, an action adventure.Then they created a game that borrowed the original’s aesthetics, creating a mise en scène that reflected the feel of the IP’s origins. But they didn’t leave it stagnant. The added new moves to the character that was in keeping, they added a fresh back-story and presented a good synchronic story, adding new characters and developing that of, the previously mute, Prince himself.With the careful treatment of the correct licenses, remakes can be good. But the incompatibility of modern and older videogame representation, semiotics and paradigms makes transitions thwart with minefields. Solutions and approaches today are much more sophisticated, but problems still arise especially in the area of graphic representation, an area in which older games seem to have much more solution.The topological view in Asteroids is great at the representation of that game, but would also work for a simplification of nearly any current work. In other words most modern games could be regressed to a state of 2D. However Asteroids would become unplayable in the extra dimension; to manoeuvre a ship 360 on all three axis whilst blast Asteroids approaching you is a nigh on impossible task. I know because I once created a 3D version of Asteroids. The game came down to being played on two HUDs with the main screen displaying, mostly, nothing. It was awful.It’s not to say that older or new games are any better than each other, but that simply the mediums are different, both with there own merits and demerits. But where older games may have had gameplay as their meat, new games have narrative, or the story. The FMV has replaced the highscore as the driving factor behind play. But that is a different discussion.