Modern Hollywood loves to reboot. Star Trek, Batman Begins, Halloween, Friday the 13th... It is a brilliant means of both exploiting a familiar brand and making the new product seem fresh and innovative. And by repackaging a franchise, the canny studios are appeasing die-hard fans while simultaneously providing an entry point for newcomers who have not followed the established mythology. It's also a teeny bit post-modern and self-reflexive, and we love that sort of stuff these days.

With rebooting so common in the movie and comic book worlds, could the tactic be similarly employed by the games industry? Well, yeah, it already is.



Prince of Persia: Sands of Time effectively rebooted Ubisoft's athletic platformer series, and arguably, last year's Prince of Persia did it again - adopting the familiar rebooting tactic of reverting to the original title (see also Turok and the forthcoming Wolfenstein). Tomb Raider: Legend was marketed as a reboot to a tired series, which was dealt a sickening blow to the cranium by the awful Angel of Darkness; there are also rumours knocking about that the next title in the series will restructure the game as an open-world survival horror romp, bringing Lara slap-bang up to date with current design trends.

Elsewhere, EA is very much selling Need for Speed: Shift as a reboot, getting it back to the basics of driving slick cars really fast, rather than coming on like an interactive version of The Fast and Furious, ripped from the idle imaginings of an attention deficit adolescent. Capcom, though, has hinted that the next Resident Evil game will be a more radical rethink of the survival horror genre, out-rebooting Resi 4, which, come to think of it, was more a re-tune than a reboot because it existed largely in the same narrative continuity as its predecessors. And on the subject of survival horror, the forthcoming Silent Hill: Shattered Memories purports to be a re-thinking of the first title, using the same lead character and plot, and banishing memories of the later, much less successful, sequels.

Fans of fighting robots can also look forward to a reboot of the MechWarrior franchise, which was massive on the PC in the nineties. According to IGN, it's being designed by Jordan Weisman who was one of the creators of the BattleTech role-playing game from which the PC sims were taken.

If anything, the concept of the reboot makes more sense in the videogame sector than it does in movies. For a start, games are complex entities, with each new iteration in a familiar series adding many, many hours of fresh narrative content. Entering, say, the Zelda, Resident Evil, Half-Life, Dragon Quest or Metal Gear worlds at this stage must be massively intimidating - even if the developers go to great lengths to make each entry work as a singular, self-contained entity within the canon.

Also, videogames are going through a paradigm shift in terms of popular appeal at the moment. The faithful audience of young males has been joined by new demographics brought in by the Wii, PC casual games, and now the iPhone. Many of these people may be vaguely aware of long-running game brands, but won't have a clue about the key characters, sign post events and basic gameplay mechanisms. These issues can easily be resolved via a quick switch off/switch on - as JJ Abrams brilliantly proved with the recent movie, Star trek, which explicitly jettisoned decades worth of mythology, plot and character development to welcome in a fresh batch of kids brought up on flashier sci-fi fare (like, of course, the rebooted Battlestar Galactica).

So, which videogame series' - defunct or current - do you think would be ripe for this kind of re-appraisal and re-imagining? The remake of the original Monkey Island title may show there's a market for classic adventure titles, so I could see Zork, Myst (recently re-released on iPhone) or King's Quest making a welcome return in new forms. I'd also love to see mid-nineties faves like Baldur's Gate and Oddworld re-thought for the 21st century.

How about you?