I have several games on modern console (PS5) which were originally released back in the 1990’s. Many of these games were originally released on a few floppy disks which, from memory, I believe only held a few MB of data each. The PS5 versions are not massively upgraded. They have the same basic graphics style as the 1990’s, though “upscaled” for modern TV or whatever. Looking at the storage on my PS5, I notice that some of these games take up multiple GB of storage. Why would there be such a vast difference in size for a game which used to fit on a few floppies back in the day?
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The fact is, if you were to just take those games as is and show them on a modern console, they would look *hideous*. The textures would be seriously blocky and low resolution, and the character models would have about three polygons in them. I mean, seriously, look at screenshots of the original Tomb Raider!
So, unless you’re Atlus and really into doing minimum effort game remasters, you need to make the textures bigger and use better models, all of which take up more space.
Also, I think the games in the mid-90s were bigger than you give them credit for–CD-ROMs were starting to come online then and those can store about 650Mb of data.
If those are PC games running on a modern console, they don’t just have to contain the games themselves, but also some kind of emulator or even a Virtual Machine (a computer program that simulates a computer) and operating system.
If the original soundtrack was MIDI-based, it may have been re-recorded as wave files, but that would only account for a few megabytes if compressed.
Maybe there are also some higher-resolution assets, but I doubt it. Especially for games that came on diskettes: 3D engines weren’t a thing, and graphics were either generated or basically bitmaps, and nobody is paying artists to redraw bitmaps or sprites for old games in high res.
Mostly it basically comes down to nobody really spending any time, money or effort to keep things small. It would certainly be possible.
There’s a few reasons. The first is that the game likely is bigger because of some upgrades, they have likely made the textures better, made tweaks and upgrades to sounds and things that do increase the size even if you barely or don’t really notice.
The second is that, in many cases, you need what is known as a virtual machine for these remakes. A PS1 game was made to run on a PS1, which is a very old console that is very different from a modern one. So in some cases you need to re-create a version of the original console for the game to run, that takes up space.
The third reason, and likely the largest, is that the developers don’t really care about the size, so they don’t bother to keep files small or compress them. For example the original Xbox had an 8GB hard drive, so if a game was 6 GB that would be a huge problem, you needed to keep it small. However the Xbox Series X has a 1 TB drive, so 6 GB isn’t really that much, as a result they don’t really bother to keep stuff as small.
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