Fiction Doesn’t Need to Be Real
- Dr. Snap
- Aug 30
- 3 min read
"It needs a remaster!" ...but why?
I was rewatching a classic: The Polar Express. Specifically, that scene where the train is stuck on an ice plain and has to “drive” it’s way back unto the track before the ice fully melts.
For some reason I was reminded of that one scene in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where CJ suddenly finds himself stealing a jetpack from the military base.
Now, don’t ask how my brain came up with such a connection - but I think it went something like this:
It’s okay when fiction is silly.
The problem is, we’ve crossed that threshold long ago where fiction is comfortable with being silly.
In the current age, we need everything to look real. Every old game needs a remaster. Every old movie needs a remaster. We need every texture to be in 4K resolution. We need our games to be 200 gigabytes for all that realism and detail. Every game needs to look the same. It needs to look like real life.
People can’t stand when something looks old. It’s a mind virus that’s taken both the movie and game scene by storm. I see it all the time on social medias – the moment someone reminisces of an old game, they go “This needs a remaster ASAP!”
Does it really? What’s stopping you from just… enjoying it the way it was meant to be enjoyed? Why can’t we just accept that it’s okay that it has old graphics and it feels silly? Is that not what a game is, at the end of the day?
Of course, make no mistake: I believe in a remaster if it means bringing that work to a modern medium with quality-of-life improvements that was only detrimental to the original experience.
BUT there comes a time when you’re replacing art style with anything goes, just because it’s shiny… just because it looks real.
But moving beyond the remaster are new installations that use all the modern tech from the get-go. For video games, its 4K textures across the board. Anti-piracy measures that claw their way into your motherboard so harshly, you can hear it lighting a cigarette. Your CPU and GPU temps heat up to a hundred degrees Fahrenheit the moment you reach the main menu, which is really only presenting itself as a glorified jpeg.
You have all this realism in place. Every blade of grass is a unique 50MB texture. Lighting that has been perfect (at least for the next six months). Every animation perfectly blended from thousands of hours of motion capture.
We made Arthur Morgan from Red Dead Redemption 2 so epically realistic – down to every skin cell…
…but you’ll never see Arthur Morgan flying a jetpack. And if you do, it’ll look dumb as shit.
There’s just something inherently wrong when media tries to present itself as “real” and then takes a turn into the realm of goofy.
It didn’t feel wrong when GTA:SA did it because GTA:SA felt like a game.
It didn’t feel wrong when Polar Express did it because Polar Express felt like fantasy.
But the more realistic a game tries to be, the harder it clashes with the “fantasy” and “game” elements.
It feels wrong when GTA V suddenly gives you flying bikes and UFOs and the like. It’s like an old man trying to appeal to a young audience - it’s not funny, it’s not cute, it’s an identity disorder... and it's sad to watch. It's no joke, man.
