A few minutes into starting last week’s Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner remaster, Mars, there’s an image that shows off some of the people who helped usher the celebrated 2003 action game into the age of 4K resolution and virtual reality. There’s also this small mention:

“A tribute to the original production staff and contents” is a far cry from giving appropriate acknowledgement to the folks who designed the foundation. Where is game director Shuyo Murata, or artist Yoji Shinkawa?

This update to Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner was a collaboration between Cygames and Konami. It’s a team building on top of a game made by a very different set of people. I started looking into this crediting situation after seeing a tweet claiming the game didn’t acknowledge the work of its original developers at all. That’s not true, but it is complicated, and as I started looking into the way other remakes/remasters handle this, it’s a total mess. A mess that's lingered in games for decades.

By all accounts, the work Cygames did on this update is excellent, and was no small effort. Updating a game for 4K resolutions and virtual reality is not a matter of exporting some art from Photoshop and calling it a day.

The image above comes at the start of the game and is a form of weak, nonspecific crediting for the original staff, but you can only fit so many people on a single screen, so I figured there was more somewhere else. These days, it’s common for games to let players pull up a credits scene in the options menu, and Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner is no different. That section of credits, however, is solely dedicated to those who worked on the remaster. There is no mention of the original development staff, without a discernible reason why. There’s not even a shout out, as seen above. The former creatives aren’t acknowledged.

Huh. When I asked Konami about this, they were originally a little evasive.

“At this time, we do not have any additional information to share,” said a spokesperson.

A few days later, though, they followed up with the image seen in this very story.

It’s at this point I decided to dig a little deeper. The menu-bound credits screen was clearly built for this update. What happened to the original credits, the ones that roll when you beat the game? Some remasters keep that intact, others don't. I didn’t have time to play through Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner to find out, but thanks to the Internet, there was someone who’d already uploaded a full playthrough:

Lo and behold, there were the pure, untouched credits for the game—including producer Hideo Kojima, who infamously split from Konami years back during a bitter creative divorce. These don’t appear to have been touched by Cygames in any way, shape or form. They are simply the original credits, which means Cygames, who updated the game, isn’t mentioned.