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Games

This Video Series Imagines PS1-era 'Dark Souls' and 'Far Cry 5'

A reminder of how hard early 3D games tried to achieve what we now take for granted.

Have you ever wanted to play some of your favorite modern games with all the jagged polygons, awful draw distances and 240p glory of the PS1 era? Probably not! But if you're curious to see what it might be like, then the videos of 98DEMAKE on YouTube can give you an idea.

The channel has been creating these what-if scenarios for a number of contemporary games, including The Last of Us, Fallout 4, Red Dead Redemption and more. Some of the videos are simply graphical showcases that recreate a scene from a game using mockup assets in a nostalgic engine, which is a neat idea on its own. But some of the newer videos have been fully animated and also feature some wonderfully well-made fake box art and cases.

Most recently, 98DEMAKE recreated part of the Far Cry 5 trailer from E3, complete with a grainy recording of a physical disc used to play the trailer at "E3 1998". I got a kick out of watching the real trailer and the de-make trailer side by side, and 98DEMAKE is promising to release more of these hypothetical new-games-turned-old videos on a weekly basis.

For me, these videos recall the feeling of bringing a new game home in the late 90s, jamming it in my PlayStation's disc drive and being amazed by the 3D visuals. The Dark Souls video in particular evokes the clunky controls and clumsy combat of a time when the industry was still getting a grip on the third dimension in video games. Seeing it transplanted to the PS1 gave me some powerful nostalgia for King's Field—I'm still hopelessly craving a remake of that game. But for now, videos like these will hold me over.