Shadow Warrior Remake: Letting the Past Lie

At what point will we have had enough? Will it be at the next generation, when our children start their remakes of remakes of games we played during our formative years? Will it ever stop? Will video games as a whole ever let the ‘90s die?

Case in point, Shadow Warrior. The once infamously super violent, super offensive, super stereotypical Duke Nukem 3D by the way of Big Trouble in Little China on crack, is now being remade for a modern audience. I sure didn’t ask for this. I admit snickering like the unwashed teenager that I was at the time when playing about the horrible, crude humor. “Who wantsa soome wang?” Yeah, very funny when you’re 15. But is that really worth dragging back out of the grave of games time was nice enough to forget?

During a time when we as a medium go through a never ending discussion of how video games can achieve relevance while being hyper violent, things like this aren’t really helping. Rise of the Triad, a game that was banned from sale, period, in my country, for being inhumanly cruel and violent, is being “faithfully remade” as well. When I was a teenager (yes, reader beware, another anecdote), Rise of the Triad was hotly traded on the schoolyard. Boy was that ever fun. A forbidden game! One where you could shoot people in the legs, so they would start begging for their lives. And then you had to shoot them anyway, because if you didn’t they’d start shooting again.

Crude humor. Even cruder hyper violence. Those are the things I remember both Shadow Warrior and Rise of the Triad for. What reason is there, why are we remaking those titles now, after more than a decade of those IPs lying dormant? Is it that my generation of freshly baked 30 somethings is now skidding into some kind of early midlife crisis, where we go back to the hallowed days of our youth? Really?

I admit, we do live in a (popular) culture, that loves nothing more than reheating old things. Especially when they are from the 80s. Retro chic, retro charm and all the stuff. But what for? And why can’t we do remakes of the games from back then, that were actually really good? Why is there Shadow Warrior, why is there Duke Nuke Forever, why a Rise of the Triad, why all this reviving of fun-but-horrible mid to late 90s franchises, that arguably have no place in the modern world?

Why can’t we have Magic Carpet reimagined? Why not even a spiritual successor? Because it lacked edginess, because it was not a hyper violent game? Because it wasn’t offensive, but genuinely a great game? Why can’t we remake the original System Shock (yes, because EA), at least in spirit? Why are even those independent guys now aiming for the games that aimed at the basest instincts of crude humor and flying intestines?

Games have gotten more and more violent, or rather more and more gruesome in the depiction of violence acted out. Even the game that currently (and — if you ask me — undeservedly so) receives the highest accolades as the most cerebral mainstream game of our generation, Bioshock Infinite, is about as disgustingly violent as those late Build Engine games from the late ‘90s. Exploding heads and screaming, burning people? Yep, we’ve been at that level of unpleasant comic violence ca. 1996. And it’s here to stay with us. So, maybe I’m wrong, maybe these games do have a place in our times, because spiritually, that is still where video games reside. Or is it?

But with Shadow Warrior, there is another problem. Video gamers as a whole pretty much have little problem with gratuitous violence. But Shadow Warrior was a game that lived off of the most horrible, decrepit anti-Asian cliches. A game that also was about as horribly misogynist as Duke Nukem (after all, it was created by the same people). Can we allow these sentiments a home in our hobby, in what we call “gamer culture?” We have to do better than this. And also, can’t we just start letting the past rest in peace and embrace the classics of our time, of the here and now, rather than reminisce about what we thought was cool when we, as a generation, were 16? It’s about damn time, if you ask me.