Demakes, where somebody creates a mock-up of a recent game that makes it look like it was built for some old, crappier system than what we have now, have been a Cool Thing To Do lately, and now there’s an app for that.
Retrospecs, a recent iOS photo app, will take your pictures and make them look like they were rendered on computer hardware that’s older than your mum, and our cousin Leon at Kotaku UK tested it out on some game screenshots, and also his cat. The fun thing about the app, Leon notes, is that it has filters for stuff you probably have never heard of, which is how you know it’s good aside from the more obvious ways you know it’s good, like from using it.
The reason this is cool is because those old systems had pretty distinct display styles that weren’t dictated by developers, unlike today. So even if you don’t buy these as true demakes, you mean person you, perhaps you can simply enjoy the strange novelty of the filters.
In any case, here’s what UK Cousin Leon came up with.
Destiny: Intellivision Edition
Gears of War: Sinclair ZX Spectrum Edition
Watch Dogs: IMD EGA Edition
The Last of Us: Amstrad CPC Edition
Minecraft: Apple II Edition
Uncharted: Game Boy Edition
I also briefly dabbled in demakes this week, if you want to take a look at mine.
Comments
3 responses to “A Cat Rendered On A Game Boy, And Other Sweet Demakes You Can Do”
pfft, not having an Android version is Retro enough.
Monkey Island demake kind of. Bit more than just a still image
That’s not “Demaking”. That’s just changing the colour depth and palette of an existing image. It’s the same as converting an ARGB 32-bit image to have a 256 colour palette or changing it to greyscale. True demakes are taking the core colours, concepts and symbols, then rebuilding them in the palettes and resolutions of older machines.
Yeah, I agree. There’s been no effort to make these read properly on the older systems, if you came to the images cold you’d have no idea what they were representing.