While simple on the surface, remastering a game can sometimes be anything but. Not only must one preserve the original work as much as possible, but also decide how much of it to bring up to modern standards. There’s also the question of whether to add anything new for those fans who’ve already mastered the old version.
Member Dead Rising?
Or perhaps one ends up having to rebuild the whole thing in a new engine because the old one is just not usable anymore. The team that worked to bring Dead Rising back to life dealt with all of these things and more over the course of the project and Hardcore Gamer recently had the chance to ask them all about it atTGS 2024.
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster’s director, Mr. Ryosuke Murai, was more than happy to discuss some of the ins and outs of the project, and two of its producers, Mr. Kei Morimoto and Mr. Masachika Kawata, were also on hand to lend additional insights over the course of our conversation.
To start, we talked about what aspects of Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster (referred to as DRDR from here on) the team enjoyed most as well as what they felt had been the most challenging. Director Murai took the lead, sharing with us the time when the team had first gotten a real playable build set up.
“For me, it was when we first got the game up and running with basically Frank and [his new guise] and having zombies running on the stage. The first time we got that running, and I was able to grab different weapons and just, you know, slaughter hordes of zombies. Even though I’m, you know, a grown man who’s already played the original game so many times, I just find myself lost for 30 minutes in the fun of taking zombies down in the classic Dead Rising style.
And that was a moment where I was really excited for the potential of the project. And also, it gave me the confidence to feel that we were on the right track and that this game held up well enough for us to be creating a remaster of it.”
It wasn’t just a simple matter of porting the old version into RE Engine and calling it a day.
As for what was the most challenging part of the project, it seems that distinction belongs to their efforts to bring the game over to RE Engine.
“The most challenging part was we were taking a game that was originally built on our former engine, the MT framework, and we were recreating it completely in our current in-house engine: RE Engine.” This meant that we had to not only sort of translate the entire coding language on the back end, but the things like physics modeling were completely different from the original game.”
From the sound of it, a great deal of development time was spent on simply getting the game working in a way that first resembled and then, eventually, more or less matched the original. As one might imagine from the above comments, it wasn’t a simple or easy process either.
“[…] it didn’t feel like Dead Rising [at first], and [we’d] just go down the list and just take care of everything and fix it up so that you feel like you’re having the same experience that you had back in the day on Dead Rising. And there’s no getting around that. It’s just a long, arduous road of development. So it certainly was challenging, but I hope players will agree that it was worth it in the end.”
The zombie game cycle, somehow, still continues no matter how many years pass.
The conversation then turned to the Dead Rising series as a whole and what they thought about it coming into this project, having mainly experienced the series as fans until now. Was there something special about the original Dead Rising that set it apart from the rest or did it actually do certain things better than its sequels? Director Murai had this to say:
“I think every game has something to recommend about it, and the sequels built on the original’s design and added their own unique elements as well. But I also know what you mean when you say that the original has got an elevated position in the hearts of players because it was such a unique proposition and was not really like any other game that had come out before. I feel that way too. A sequel is inevitably just not going to hit you quite as hard as the first game.”
There was also the question of the zombie game cycle we’ve been seeing over the past nearly two decades, where zombie games seem torise back up in popularityevery few years. We asked Director Murai his thoughts on why this is, as well as about Dead Rising’s place in it:
“I think zombies have a certain uncanny valley aspect to them, where they look human but, as a character, we treat them as not human anymore, and therefore they’re an acceptable target of extreme violence in a way that lets people enjoy and even laugh at and find funny, especially in Dead Rising, where that’s one of the intentions.
[For example] the idea of cutting them down with lawn mowers or whatever else is, on the face of it, a very violent, gory expression on screen, but you’re being given permission to enjoy it in a way that you might not if it were not a zombie. […] I think that the zombie as a kind of pathway to let players let loose with that kind of gameplay is probably what makes people keep coming back to them.”
Finally, it was time to talk about Dead Rising’s most popular and enduring character:Frank West himself.There’s definitely something about him that was (and is) special, something that has helped him stick around all these years. We made sure to get Mr. Murai’s take on him before concluding our conversation.
“Frank [is the kind of person who] just wants the scoop. You know, he’s a paparazzi journalist. He’s more flippant in his approach to the fact that he’s been thrown into this situation, and he, you know, just doesn’t take the whole situation seriously like a lot of other games' protagonists do.
[…] I think it puts a different spin on it that lets people relate to Frank’s humanity in a different way than the slightly more heroic survivors that a lot of other games might put as the protagonist. I think we all can see in Frank something of ourselves that just thinks, “Oh, I have to deal with this now?”. That’s something that I think lets him unlock something in a lot of players.”
While such might not be the case for many remaster projects in gaming, it sounds like the team behind DRDR put about as much time and effort as anyone could into it. It was the first time to be working on the series for several team members, Mr. Ryosuke Murai, Mr. Kei Morimoto and Mr. Masachika Kawata included, but many of them are longtime fans and so were very much invested in making something fans would enjoy.
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is currently available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Those who are at all interested should make sure tocheck out our reviewand see how well Director Murai’s team’s efforts paid off.
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Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster
Dead Rising returns with modern graphics!More than just a remaster, this Deluxe Remaster is a full graphical overhaul of the first game in zombie-slaughtering action game series “Dead Rising.“This remaster has also been fully voiced, supports auto-saves, and has various other quality-of-life features.Witness the unmatched mayhem and freedom for yourself!Story:One day, the peaceful town of Willamette, Colorado, found itself put under quarantine by the U.S. army.Frank West, a freelance journalist, smells a scoop and finds his way into the only shopping mall in town.Unfortunately, the mall had turned into a living hell, crawling with countless zombies.Help will arrive in 72 hours, so it’s up to him to find out the truth behind this incident before it’s too late!Realistic graphics reborn through RE ENGINE!All of the graphics, including the characters and environments, have been renewed, and greatly improved over the original.Character’s facial expressions, material textures, and blood spatter all look much more realistic.Overwhelming hordes of zombies fill the screen with completely remade graphics!
