Video Game Demake

Above, the real deal (1999).
Below, the fan-made demake (2011).

The polar opposite of a Video Game Remake. While a remake strives to offer an updated version of the game, both from a technical and a gameplay standpoint, a demake is a type of Fan Game that's purposefully built as an interpretation of how the game may have been, were it conceived and produced during a previous hardware or software generation. This means simpler graphics and sound, and simplified gameplay although the basics are mostly kept, often translated from 3D to 2D. It is often a Self-Imposed Challenge for the creators, who try to work with as few resources as programmers had back in the old days - some even program the demakes on the original old hardware, to produce newer games with a Nostalgia Filter. It's also interesting to try seeing if newer mechanics can work in less technically advanced games.

Due to their nature of being based on copyrighted material, demakes are usually fan-made and freeware. This hasn’t saved a few from getting Cease & Desist letters. There are also the Chinese bootleg NES ports, with varying degrees of quality. The rise of Retro Gaming, however, has made some official productions appear. Beside real and playable games, there are artists who have fun creating mock-up pictures of demade games, often taking the original resolution and palette limitations of old gaming machines into account.

A subtrope of Retraux, though some go the extra mile by being on the original hardware.

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Examples

Playable

• In 2008, TIGSource held the Bootleg Demakes Competition. Beside taking both major and indie games into consideration, many of the resulting games' titles are very hilarious. Due to a site restructuring some time later, the index page of the compo is long gone, but the dedicated forum is still up and, beside torrents of the complete archive, it’s worth tracking some games that were eventually updated. There's also a list of the games and their inspirators.
  • Alwa's Awakening was originally designed as an NES era throwback game. The creators later released an actual NES port.
  • Gang Garrison 2, an excellent demake of Team Fortress 2, has gone on to become the most popular of the bunch, also thanks its posting in 4Chan, where some users started modding it without consent. The authors, however, welcomed their contributions and the game has been constantly updated.
  • Rock Boshers is a ZX Spectrum-ized Red Faction (the original FPS, not the more recent episodes), so retro it has a Victorian Steampunk theme. In 2014, it was expanded into a full commercial release on PC, PS4 and Vita, called Rock Boshers DX and with an alternate graphical mode that makes it more similar to games on 8 bit consoles.
  • Soundless Mountain II translates Silent Hill 2 superbly. But don't get too attached to it, since, sadly, it covers only the first phases of the story.
  • Super 3D Portals 6: Portal as a genuine Atari 2600 ROM! Requires two joysticks to be played but the gameplay is translated superbly.
  • S.T.A.C.K.E.R. takes only the inventory management of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and mixes it...with Tetris.
  • Squish is the PSP puzzler Crush, rendered in 2D and given graphics like a shareware title from the early 1990s.
  • Little Girl in Underland, or what may have happened if Soviets found American McGee's Alice and turned it into a Communist propaganda game.
  • A few more recommendations here.
• Game Jolt's 2010 demake competition was interesting since it was focused solely on indie games – which are often retro-styled already.
  • The winner, Warning Foregone, is a simplified Warning Forever that's still quite fun. The competition version was later updated with more features and can be played on Newgrounds.
  • The runner-up, Sulkeis, deserved its place because it's not just a lower-tech Seiklus: while shorter and less varied, it's got completely new levels and situations that weren't present in the original (like the water streams erupting after one of the treasures is found).
  • Among the other games an honorable mention goes to Plants vs. Zombies Retro, a nice rendition of how the game could have been if it was published in 1986, even if it's a limited Endless Game.
• Eric Ruth's Pixel Force series, famous game franchises as if they were released on the NES in The '80s. Unfortunately they also share an annoying keyboard control scheme (and it can't be changed, but do a Google search for joy-to-key if you have a joypad). So far he has produced three: Left 4 Dead as an overhead shooter for one or two players, and with the locales of the first game reproduced quite faithfully; the first Halo as a Contra-esque platform/shooter, with a few overhead sections on vehicles and appropriately chip-tuned musical themes; and DJ Hero, complete with hit songs from the era. The latter got pulled because of Universal Music complaining about the chiptune rendition of the Ghostbusters theme.
• Ruth has produced further demakes, although they are not part of the Pixel Force series. One is Team Fortress Arcade: Team Fortress 2 as a side-scrolling, arcade-style Beat 'em Up.
• Ruth's most recent game is Serious Sam: The Greek Encounter, an overhead shooter in the signature 8-bit style. It's part of Croteam and Devolver Digital's initative that has produced several indie games based on the franchise.
• Rockman 7FC and Rockman 8FC, which de-make the only two non-8Bit entries of the Mega Man (Classic) series. Interestingly, 7FC predates Capcom's own Mega Man 9, while 8FC was released between 9 and 10.
• Capcom also produced Dark Void Zero. While not technically the same game but a prequel, it brings the action and flight mechanics in pixelated 2D. Many people found it more interesting than the main game.
• The infamous Chinese Final Fantasy VII for the NES. Visually, it doesn't even resemble an 8-bit rendition of the original, but at least it manages to convey the story of the original. A patch has been made to translate it into English and make it more faithful to the original.
• The Chinese Chrono Trigger NES bootleg, even more infamous because it's an incomplete game (it ends after the fight with Magus).
• Shen Qi De Mao Zi looks like a Famicom backport of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, but is a Nintendo Hard turn-based RPG instead of an action adventure game.
• Halo has had a demake as early as 2004: Halo Zero (a link).
• Halo 2600, available both as a rom and in Flash. A few cartridges have also been produced. Ironically, it's made by Ed Fries, a former Microsoft employee who was instrumental in bringing Bungie to Microsoft in the early 2000s.
• Not a full product but a Game Mod: BioShock's Arcadia map created in Doom II: Hell on Earth by its original level designer.
• Bringing Tomb Raider to Atari 2600 or so specifics (it's a bit above that, however) resulted in Retro Raider, basically Pitfall! with guns.
• D-Pad Hero, two demakes of the Guitar Hero franchise to play with a NES emulator.
• Another Guitar Hero demake: Shredz64. It needs some specific hardware though, to plug a guitar controller to the Commodore 64!
• VVVVVV has a list of demakes in its own forum; given its already got simple graphics, two of them had to resort to ASCII graphics. The other, VVVV, is a 4-kilobyte Java rendition by Notch.
• Fallout 3 as a JRPG. Made by Bethsoft themselves to introduce the Japanese public to the game.
• Minecraft users couldn't resist the temptation to remake maps from other games in cubed glory. Here's an example with a multiplayer map of the first Halo.
• Portal: The Flash Version, a 2-D Flash version of Portal, is an unusual example in that it was actually released before the game it's a demake of (The Flash Version released on October 9, 2007; Portal itself came out a day later). Later zigzagged by a map pack for the original game closely based on its levels.
• Final Fantasy X, an NES-like demake (headphones warning) that barely qualifies, given that it only has three themes, two maps, and no battles or interaction. It might PC executable given how the Chinese(?) text is rendered as glitched ASCII.
• Resident Evil, the NES bootleg with a combat system based on Resident Evil Gaiden.
  • Another one as a 8 bit RPG (made with RPG Maker), seemingly taking the graphics from the NES bootleg demake.
• My-N-Craft, a Minecraft demake made with... Microsoft Powerpoint?!
• Among the countless hacks of Super Mario Bros., Minimal Mario makes the graphics as really minimalistic.
• MooD, an arena shooter. The game it refers to is quite obvious.
• Left 4K Dead, another mini-demake by Notch.
• Thieving Raccoon: Sly Cooper as a Game & Watch.
• Another Game & Watch demake: God of War becomes Greek & Wicked.
• Donkey Kong Country, the NES bootleg. The graphics are actually ported well.
• Counter-Strike 2D is a top down shooter in the vein of Hotline Miami.
• Mega Man 2600, made in 2007 to run on an authentic machine, although it's only a short demo.
• Wolfenstein 1-D. Wait, what?
• Wolfenstein 3-D's first level has been ported to Pico-8. You can play it here.
• Codename Gordon, a Flash platformer made to resemble the first phases of Half-Life 2, back when the latter was still in production — in fact, some of those sections were removed in the final product. It's also a humorous take on the game — faithful to his Silent Protagonist role, Gordon Freeman has only emoticons to use in dialogues, and characters tell him the world has lost a dimension. Originally a fangame, it impressed Valve so much they used it as an official promotional product. The official site is defunct but the game is still among Steam's free games.
  • There's also Half-Life 2D, but it's quite a lousy game.
• ZPortal, the gameplay of Portal brought in the Doom engine through the GZDoom source port. See a trailer. Interestingly, the project started before the actual release of the original Portal and was based on how the game appeared in the first videos released by Valve. The authors are the same as Mega Man 8-bit Deathmatch.
• Portal on the Commodore 64. Playable on both emulators and original hardware, it maintains a modern control scheme (keyboard to move Chell, mouse or joystick to direct and shoot portals), it offers 20 chambers and a chiptune rendition of the ending song once you clear them.
• ASCIIpOrtal: source code site.
• Pebble of Time, a demake of Rock of Ages made by Zeno Clash developers Ace Team as an April Fools' Day joke. It was released with a fake press release from an angry indie developer claiming Ace Team stole their idea.
• Doom Parody, a Flash Gamebook-esque take on Doom with static images and limited animation.
• King's Quest V - The Text Adventure. Which is... well... a Text Adventure version of King's Quest V.
• There are at least a couple of Doom reinterpretations as a 2D platformer: the Russian-made Doom 2D (now remade) and Doom 2D - Knee deep in the dead.
• Wolfendoom. Instead of being just Doom backported into its predecessor for better or worse, it has an original and long storyline narrated in the internal "Read This!", putting B.J. Blazkowicz's Identical Grandson as a military consultant for UAC.
• Doom
  • Doom 4 Vanilla brings the weapons and enemies from Doom (2016) into classic Doom. You can even play it on real MS-DOS hardware. There's also Doom 4 Doom. While Doom 4 Vanilla makes no changes to the gameplay, D4D brings in elements like weapon mods and glory kills.
  • DBP 28: Fear and Loathing is a short demake of Doom³ in Doom II. Notably, the mod runs on limit-removing compatibility, meaning all the tricks and events happen in the original engine — it doesn't need any advanced source port features^note conveyor belts, colored lighting, slopes, dynamic lights, etc. other than the removal of static engine limits. Even the flashlight works, in a fashion.
• Pac-Txt, in the style of a text-based adventure game.
• An official 8-bit game for Tom Clancy's HAWX 2. It even allows you to unlock some exclusive content in the main game.
• Champion of Guitars, a hilarious Text Adventure take on Guitar Hero.
• G-Force is an overhead 2D rendition of Tempest, the most recent versions exactly, given the Amazing Technicolor Battlefield. Interestingly, it is also based on a little-known home computer game with the same name, dating back to circa 1983, which already tried to translate the gameplay with one less dimension. No more official page but can be found here.
• Edmund McMillen, creator of Super Meat Boy, asked some fellow indie developers to draw title screens for warp zones, with the basic idea "if Super Meat Boy was your game". Among them Terry Cavanagh, who had so much fun he decided to throw in a little game out of it, looking a lot like his own VVVVVV. You can try it here.
• Sewer Shark is an infamous Interactive Movie. The demake by Park Productions turns it into a vertical scrolling shooter, nothing exceptional but certainly more playable than the original. In a nice touch, you can choose to have it look like it's a Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, or Amstrad CPC game.
• Classic shooter Centipede was turned into a text adventure that vividly dramatizes a hellish Bug War. (Contrary to popular belief, this game is winnable.)
• Super Smash Land, Super Smash Bros. as it would've been on the Game Boy.
• Luminesweeper, a GBA demake of Lumines made as a protest against the high price of the PlayStation Portable at launch.
• C64nabalt is an unofficial port of Canabalt on the Commodore 64. It lacks sound effects, as well as some fine graphical details (but that would have been asking too much), but the rest is intact from the scrolling speed to the music, excellently ported to the SID chip.
• Even if not a straight demake but a spin-off of the main game, Steins;Gate: Henikuukan no Octet aka Steins;Gate 8 Bit is more than worth a mention. An extension of the True End of Steins;Gate, it is made to emulate the style of the Japanese adventure games of the 1980s on PC-88 computers. So, commands entered with a text parser (and like in the old games, they have to be written in English while the rest of the text is in Japanese), FM synth music, simple line art, few and somewhat gaudy colors, even scanlines. Look at a clip to get a better idea.
• RunMan GB is a simplistic one-button game based on RunMan: Race Around the World. However, beside the lack of color the graphics are oddly better than the original in some ways.
• Microsomnium is Psychosomnium, a small game by cactus (of Mondo Games, Clean Asia and Hotline Miami fame), as a Game & Watch handheld.
• Super Mario World may be the most well-known among Chinese NES bootlegs, due to its replicating many elements of the original. Interestingly, the bootleg has a prototype which saw mass release and a finished version only found on one cart.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2D, a 2D version of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). Currently, only Sonic's story is playable.
• Bit of War. Originally this God of War demake was an ugly Flash game but it has been since redone completely, going for a Super-Deformed style, graphics close to NES specs, and a wacky story with Kratos clashing with gods of other civilizations. It is both playable online and downloadable.
• Glest, a freeware game engine for Real-Time Strategy games, remade in 2D.
• Virtua Fighter 2 Genesis, an official port of the classic beat-'em-up, minus the polygonal graphics.
  • Similarly Virtua Fighter 10th Anniversary is the fourth installment in the series with the graphics and mechanics of the original.
• In anticipation of the release of Borderlands 2, Gearbox released The Border Lands, even presenting it as "the 1989 16-bit original".
• Johann Sebastian Joust is a physical party game for motion controllers in development. Ludwing Von Beatdown is a flash game that manages to reproduce its rules closely while using very simple aesthetics and sound.
• Princess Rescue, Super Mario Bros. on the Atari 2600. The author managed to put growing, Koopas to stomp and push, and even satisfying renditions of the iconic music themes. Video here.
• Similarly, there's Zippy the Porcupine a Sonic the Hedgehog game on the Atari 2600.
• Tyrian 2000 was going to have a Game Boy port, fully compatible with Game Boy Color and Super Game Boy (as in: able to give distinct colors to everything), but got cancelled near completion as the developers got interested in the Game Boy Advance and started porting Tyrian to it, only to hit a dead end and give up. Years later, a developer of Tyrian published the ROM for download on his very site, along with the last release of the actual game. The GBA port is not even 20% complete, thus being very glitchy and having bad graphics, but the Game Boy Color/Classic one is pretty much complete, including randomly unlocking encyclopedia entries! Both ports and the original PC game can be found here.
• Many J2ME mobile games, Especially Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow and Aria of Sorrow, Mega Man and various games developed by Gameloft. But, if one were to list all mobile games that qualify for this trope, it would be too long to not have its own subtrope.
• Micro Hexagon, a Commodore 64 version of Super Hexagon.
• Super Bread Box is a Commodore 64 rendition of Super Crate Box. Originally created for a competition, it has been expanded for a commercial release and is available as a digital download or a physical cartridge.
• The Molten Core was an April's Fool joke by Blizzard: a World of Warcraft game made like it ran on an Atari 2600. A few months later, however, someone made it real.
• The Mini Ludum Dare 50 in March 2014 was themed on demakes, and resulted in 85 entries (some underwent further updates after the cempo).
  • The Stanly Parable LD Demix takes The Stanley Parable as interactive fiction back to its roots as a text-based adventure. Of course, this being The Stanley Parable, the game retains its paradoxical theme of control and freedom and has Easter Eggs not unlike the original game.
• Sega's Hang-On Jr is an interesting early case of an official demake. Released six months after the original Hang-On, it has the same gameplay but different courses and severely cut-down graphics and sound, due to it running on a much inferior hardware similar to the Sega Master System - in fact, this version is more or less an upgrade of the Master System one, which was released by Sega shortly after the arcade one.
• Flappy Bird has been ported to the Commodore 64.
• L'Abbaye des Morts is a game styled as a ZX Spectrum program already, but to fit on actual Spectrum it had to undergo a few slight but still noticeable downgrades. The result can be downloaded here.
• The first two XCOM games (UFO: Enemy Unknown) had unofficial Russian ZX Spectrum versions by Vyacheslav "Copper Feet" Mednonogov. Each fit a single TR-DOS floppy.
  • UFO: Enemy Unknown, 1995. Featured real-time battles with a single operative.
  • UFO 2: Devils of Abyss, 1996. Had turn-based squad combat, like its inspiration.
  • More recently, OpenXCOM hosted a mod ("XenoOPs") for UFO Defense which made it look and play like Firaxis' XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
• Alone in Pico is a simplified reproduction - there is no combat - of the two initial floors of Derceto mansion in Alone in the Dark (1992). What makes it impressive is that it's made with Pico-8, a small and voluntarily limited game engine that you wouldn't have believed to be capable of handling even simple 3D graphics. The author even got the support and suggestions of Frederick Raynal, the original creator of the game.
• Lucius Demake is an official demake of the first episode of Lucius. Impressed by a mock-up made by a fan that reimagined the game as a top-down adventure from the days of the Commodore 64, developer Shiver Games decided to make an entire game out of it and even hired said fan to create all the graphics.
• Norman's Sky, manages to squeeze one of the aspects of No Man's Sky - the ability to reach and land on any celestial body you can see with seamless transitions - in a 64x64 pixels window. It was made for a game jam, months before the actual game's release.
• A case of the demake being more popular than the original: 2048, which is technically a demake of a clone (1024) of Threes. Each put their own twist on the basic "combine numbered tiles" ruleset to make the game interesting. 1024 used a hole in the middle of the board, Threes used two different kinds of initial pieces, and 2048 used mandatory "as far as it will go" movement. 2048, the most "action packed" of the three, was and remains the most popular, even though it is the most primitive (in graphic design terms) of the three as well.
• LuftrauserZ is an official Commodore 64 version of Luftrausers. It's quite faithful, plays very fast, and can also be acquired as a physical edition.
• Mega Man 2 on Atari.
• Castlevania on Atari.
• P.T.98, a recreation of the iconic looping hallway from the Silent Hills playable teaser if it was on the original PlayStation in 1998, from the person behind 98DEMAKE in the "Mock-ups" folder below.
• Super Sanctum TD, a top-down pixel art adaptation of Sanctum released a few weeks in advance of Sanctum 2. While it doesn't replicate the FPS elements that make the actual Sanctum games stand out in the Tower Defense genre, it incorporates most of the enemies and towers from them into a perfectly playable conventional TD game.
• Five Nights at Freddy's - Pocket Horror if it was on the Game Boy Color.
• Devolver Bootleg is a collection of demakes of various Devolver Digital games.
• Pac-Man Championship Edition got an official demake in 2020's Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1, as an 11th bonus game along with the classic ones, including the original Pac-Man.
• Yarntown reproduces a small part of Bloodborne, including two boss fights, with a top-down view and gameplay similar to a 2D Zelda game.
• 2020 saw the release of not one, but two NES style demakes of the first two Touhou Project games, that being Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers and Touhou Fuumaroku ~ the Story of Eastern Wonderland respectively. They retain the same names in both English and Japanese, but with the added suffix of "NES Demake" in English and "Famicom Demake" in Japanese. They play almost exactly like their originals but mimic the Famicom Disk System hardware. Demakes of Touhou Yumejikuu ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream, Touhou Gensokyo ~ Lotus Land Story, and Touhou Kaikidan ~ Mystic Square also exist.
• BloodbornePSX recreates Bloodborne in the style of PlayStation games, up to the end of Central Yharnam, plus some new additions.
• VS Puyo Puyo Sun is a port of Puyo Puyo Sun to the Genesis, commisioned by Sega themselves for the Genesis Mini 2. As the name suggests it consists only of the game's versus mode (with no CPU opponents), a single-player endless mode, and the audio quality is much lower, but the fact that they were able to get a game designed for the Saturn to run on the Genesis with almost no loss in visual quality is nothing short of impressive. They were even planning for it to be a full port of the game but simply didn't have time to finish the rest.

Projects

• Curse of Monkey Island Classic Edition, a project to recreate The Curse of Monkey Island similar to the first two Monkey Island games. A small demo was made available but the project was abandoned in late 2011.
• A group of Japanese fans is working on a Final Fantasy VII NES-like demake to put the Chinese bootleg to shame. Some footage has circulated and already shows a much better look – the sprites are redrawn or at least well-edited, for a start, and seems to have implemented most of the mechanics, like Materia. Unfortunately, it may never see the light of the day due to Squenix putting an eye on it. Crossing fingers that it manages to reach completion and a translation (hey, someone translated even the Chinese bootleg!).
  • There's also a complex Final Fantasy NES hack project in progress.
• Minitroid (scroll down a little), only a tech demo so far.
• There was a project for a Metroid Prime 2D, which would hve turned the Gamecube game into a traditional sidescrolling 2D Metroid, but it was taken down following a cease and desist from Nintendo.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Game Boy Color. Never went beyond the demo.
• Ocarina of Time 2D has been done a lot by different people, there's even a full list here. This one had a demo released, but seems to have been abandoned since 2016.
• Fableous, a Fable demake. May not progress further than the demo.
• Limbit, a programming exercise that won't see any release beside this video.
• Someone is trying to "demake" VVVVVV in Game Maker.
• A project of hacking Pokémon FireRed to create a demake of Pokémon Black and White.
• Grand Theftendo deserves a special mention. The project started in the early 2000s as a reproduction of a good chunk of Grand Theft Auto III on the NES, and it looked to be really impressive for the system. Then the author decided to expand the project and moved on to Retro City Rampage. However, he showed Grand Theftendo to the public in March 2011.
  • Retro City Rampage got its own demake: Retro City Rampage 486, a port of the game actually made for vintage 486 (or even a 386 with a math co-processor) computers running MS-DOS. It's released on a 3.5" floppy and even supports Gravis gamepads.
• From the TIGSource Compo forums, some projects that didn't make the deadline and were abandoned: a NES God of War (here◊), WolfSD (here◊), and Rapture (here◊ and here◊).
  • A couple more: Son of Romeo,◊ a Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time clone made in Klik & Play, the limited predecessor to Games Factory and Multimedia Fusion; and especially a CGA The Legend of Zelda made with programming tools of the era that never went beyond this video, sadly.
  • Except there IS a BioShock demake in 2D, but was only released for J2ME phones (while Verizon VCAST users got the 3D one), and only covers the first third of the game. The two other parts? Promised but never made true. The password it gives you in the end does NOTHING.
• A VGA demake of King's Quest IX: The Silver Lining. Never got past a demo with audio clips from The Silver Lining itself, and it seems the author never intended it to be more than just a spoof of the criticisms directed at the new unofficial episode. Apparently he's now working on a remake of King's Quest IV.
• Insomnia Dracula, dead project of a Hasslevania demake.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shades of the Nuclear Plant Explosion.
• Sonic 2: The Hybridization Project, a romhack of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 that ports the graphics and levels of the 8-bit version to the Genesis.
• Notch attempted a Java demake of The Lost Vikings, but it didn't go past the early stages.
• Heartlight 64, demake of a DOS Boulder Dash clone from the early 1990s.
• Uncharted Demake, made with the intention of looking like it was released on the Game Boy Color. Some test footage here.
• Skyrim for TI-84 calculators, although given the limits of the hardware, it doesn't really have much to do with the original.
• Out With A Whimper, yet another Halo with 2D graphics (which look excellent so far).
• Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for Game Boy Color. An original homebrew project that runs on the real Game Boy and Game Boy Color (dual compatible).
• Pokémon GO is being demade into a form for the Sega Dreamcast's Visual Memory Unit.
• Limbo on the Commodore 64. The minute of footage posted by the developer is really impressive.
• Half-Life 2: Classic strives to recreate the second episode of the series with the engine of the first. A demo with the first chapter is currently out.
• Kirby on Atari 2600.
• The Legend of Zelda 2600.
• NES style 8-Bit Splatoon.
• Splatoon as an 8-bit side scroller.
• SplatooD, a splatoon-inspired demake for the NES.
• King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow AGI (using a Text Parser interface and far simpler graphics/audio), gameplay videos are available here but it seems stuck in Development Hell.

Mock-ups

• Angry Birds in 1992.
• Atari 2600 covers of "old classics" like Resident Evil 5 and God of War 3.
• Among the best and most popular mock-ups are the works of Swedish artist Junkboy (alias Markus Toivonen, art director at Mojang, also with useful comparisons with the originals. Among them: Brütal Legend running on the SCUMM engine, Bayonetta's arcade shmup, Dead Space on the original Game Boy, and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots like the series never left the MSX.
  • He later made some more: Vanquish (here), Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Uncharted 3 (here).
  • Latest additions: Halo and Shadows of the Damned.
• In 2007, Pixelation held a competition based on mock-up renditions of known games on the old Game Boy. (You have to click each pic several times to make it big enough). Of note is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. as a free-roaming RPG with turn-based battles.
• During the aforementioned TIGSource compo, a few mock-ups were posted. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with the Sierra AGI Engine is the best.
• Mock-up of an 8-bit Half-Life.
• This Pixel Joint user made a few characters of World of Warcraft as they'd appear if the game used an engine like Ultima Online.
• Metroid: Other M mock-up.
• Alien Swarm in monochrome.
• Another vision of a NES Silent Hill 2.
• The first Monkey Island on the earliest Nintendo portables: Game Boy (notice the great pun in the title) and Virtual Boy. Also, Curse of Monkey Island on the Game Boy.
• 7th Dragon, GB edition.
• Fake 8-bit demake of Alan Wake. On the game's official forums there was also an April's Fool joke that the video underwent a Defictionalization: there was an actual downloadable file but, soon after the game started, a fake glitch made the player think it crashed the system before mocking him.
• Portal 2 on the NES.
• From a community manager of the Lionhead forums, Fable III in 1985.
• What if Starcraft was made in 1984? (Notice the description.)
• Kingdom Hearts for Game Boy and Kingdom Hearts II for NES.
• A small Game Boy demakes contest at YoYoGames.
• Another Game Boy demakes contest from an Italian forum. Notice there's also Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.
• Hilarious rendition◊ of how Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots may have been years ago, complete with Intentional Engrish for Funny.
• Also the first Metal Gear Solid on the MSX.
• From DeviantArt user Badassbill: Children of Mana on the C64, Luigi's Mansion on the GBA and crossed with Symphony of the Night, Ocarina of Time in the style of The Minish Cap, and BioShock looking too good for 1986.
• An elaborate April Fool's mock-up of a Game Boy Silent Hill 2, complete with a great 8-bit remix of the tunes.
• The cover for the Game Jolt Indie Demake competition was this rendition of Cave Story with even less pixels.
• Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday presents Retrofitted Gaming Classics.
• The original Warcraft in CGA graphics. Orcs and Humans are distinguished by the two different 4-color palettes used.
• What if Katawa Shoujo was one of the glut of eroge on the PC-98? Take a look here.
  • A thread from the official forum with some little mock-ups, like a SNES version (something made with RPG Maker 2000).
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc as a classic RPG and Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony's Debate Scrum in an NES game.
• Grim Fandango around 1990.
• Pieceoftoast has produced pixelated 2D renditions of some scenes from Half-Life 2, BioShock, Mass Effect 2, Portal 2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
• Game Boy renditions of two indie games: Blocks That Matter and The Binding of Isaac.
• NES cartridges of BioShock, Assassin's Creed, Skyrim, and more.
• Pixelized Skyrim.
• What if Skyrim was made in 1991?
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City's final mission on Commodore 64
• An April Fools' Day post on the Skullgirls website announced Skullgals for the Neo Geo Pocket Color (a reference to SNK Gals Fighters on the same system).
• SNK created a site which offered comparison screenshots of fictional ports of Psycho Soldier to analogues of the Famicom, Sega Mark III, FM-7, MSX and PC Engine. The Real Life systems were all current when Psycho Soldier was new, but it was never ported to any of them.
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker as if it was made on the NES.
• Dark Souls as a 2D Diablo clone.
• The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword for Game Boy.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Game Boy Color.
• Maldita Castilla as a ZX Spectrum game.◊ Made as an April Fool.
• Metroid: Other M as an NES game, created for April Fools' Day.
• Starry Expanse, a fan project to remake Riven in the Unreal Engine, has released blog posts on April Fools' Days announcing switches to the Doom engine and the OS of an ancient mobile phone.
• The YouTube channel 98DEMAKE makes videos of games if they were made in 1998 on the original PlayStation.
• Nintendo Wire's De-Make Series of videos shows how famous Nintendo games would have looked on older Nintendo systems (or even newer, as with Ocarina of Time on the GBA).
• The Regressor has made many low-poly Nintendo 64 models of Splatoon as here as well as PlayStation 1 versions of Undertale characters (see videos of the Neutral Route Final Boss here and the Genocide Route one here), a recreation of the teaser trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on the N64, and many more.
• Screenshots from Quest for Glory games III, IV and V redone in EGA style of the first two games.
• A good portion of this Cracked collection.
• Fictional Bad Games series by Penney Pixels are 2-3 minute videos of games from late 1980s as tie-ins for 2010s films:
  • Gravity arcade game for NES.
  • Stranger Things: Point-and-Click Adventure styled after Maniac Mansion for Atari ST.
  • Stranger Things 2 as a buggy NES platformer.
  • Rogue One: Scarif Beach Resort Building Simulator — a Star Wars-themed SimCity ripoff.
  • Stephen King's IT: The Hide & Seek Adventure as a glitchy NES platformer by people who neither saw the films nor read the novel.
  • Jurassic Quest: Jurassic World as a Sierra EGA SCI game (Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon, Codename: ICEMAN and such) with Everything Trying to Kill You.
  • Mamma Mia! Kart Racer for NES.
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as an early SCUMM game (like Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders).
  • California Games for NES with a 2018 facelift — now with spinners, self-balancing scooters and Facebook likes. One of 2 videos not based on a film.
  • Creed for NES.
  • Joker (2019) in the style of the original Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards. Staircase and taxis included.
  • The Dark Knight for Commodore 64. With unclear goal and a lot of bugs — even breaking YouTube.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean for NES with glitching anti-piracy protection.
  • Cyberpunk 2077 for Sega Mega Drive glitching after being ported to previous generation Sega Master System. Another non-film video.
• The Retro-spective Trailer for Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII re-imaines Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2 as SNES games.

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