

While "Retro City Rampage" is neither remake nor demake, Provinciano is no stranger to either form. The game was born out of an earlier attempt to demake the popular "Grand Theft Auto" series. Provinciano intended "Grand Theftendo" to be played on the original Nintendo console, but he abandoned the project in the early 2000's. And in the nineties he opened up the world of remakes to other developers by painstakingly ripping apart, reconstructing and open-sourcing the software used to run many of the titles from the popular publisher Sierra. That reverse-engineering project, he says, was like "the world's best Sudoku puzzle."

"Within our little subculture Brian Provinciano is an old hero," said Steven Alexander, a co-founder of Infamous Adventures, which creates new retro-styled games as well as Sierra remakes. Sierra's games - series such as King's Quest, Police Quest, and Space Quest - were often critically acclaimed when released in the 80's and 90's and that company alone has its own community of retrogaming devotees. (The idea for this post came out of a late-night search for a childhood favorite: the King's Quest series of games. Below: a composite of the original King's Quest 2, to the right, and the AGD Interactive remake.)

One of the key attractions of retrogaming may lie in its limitations. Modern consoles and games are lightning-fast and have virtually no restrictions on storage. That's led to "a lot of poorly developed games," Alexander said. The restrictions older-style games impose on image and sound quality force developers to put more thought into what goes in - and what's left out. "You have to boil it down to find the essence if you will," said Ian Bogost, a Georgia Tech videogame researcher who teaches a class called "Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes." In a way, retrogaming is to videogames as minimalism is to art: both revolve around a focus on the fundamentals.

While those quality restrictions apply mostly to demakes, remakes suffer from their own limitations, as Dr. Bogost points out in his 2009 book "Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System." In 1981, Atari released "Yar's Revenge," a game that went on to become a best-selling original title for the console. The game was originally intended to be a copy of the arcade game "Star Castle," but critical hardware differences stood in the way. So Atari focused on the features that made "Star Castle" great and improvised with the rest, as developer Howard Scott Warshaw explained in an interview reprinted by Dr. Bogost: "I did something no one else had ever done. I went to my boss and said that I had an idea for an original game that would use the same basic principles of 'Star Castle' but was designed to fit the [Atari Video Computer System] hardware so it wouldn't suck. And to their credit, they let me go with it."