Demake / Demaster

About

Demake, sometimes referred to as Demaster, is a phrase used to describe a genre of memes in which the effects and quality of various forms of media are purposely degraded. The term "demastered" is a play on the word "remastered," indicating that these will make the subject look as if it is from an earlier generation of audio and/or visual standards.

Origin

On August 20th, 2007, TIG Forums^[3] user fish posted the thread "de-makes." In the post they described the term as "relatively new 3d games being remade for lesser platforms.
like that guy who ported ocarina of time to SNES, or turning doom into a cellphone RPG."

On August 1st, 2008, the website TIG Source^[4] held a "demake" competition, asking participants to submit demakes of their own. They described the genre as "The term "demake" was most likely coined by one Phil Fish, to describe a remake of a game on older-generation hardware (or, more likely, a remake that is made to look as though it were running on older-generation hardware). The most obvious demake is, of course, the 3d-to-2d demake."

The earliest know usage of the phrase "Demastered" comes from a YouTube video by YouTuber Jesselejohn, who, on December 10th, 2011, posted a Chiptune variation of the theme for the Captain Murasa from stage four of Undefined Fantastic Object. The post received more than 5,300 views in less than 10 years (shown below, left).

Over the next decade, other YouTubers would use the phrase to describe lo-fi versions of pop culture properties. For example, on July 14th, 2014 Vince Moravek posted "Star Trek – The Doomsday Machine – Demastered – Part 2," a sweded version of Star Trek (shown below, right)

On July 19th, NeoGAF ^[1] user plainr_ shared a series of image of the video game The Last of Us styled like a first-generation PlayStation video game (shown below).

Spread

On October 24th, 2017, the video game publisher WayForward released the video game The Mummy Demastered, a Metroidvania-style^[2] video game adaptation of the 2017 film The Mummy. That day, the company released a trailer for the game, which received more than 100,000 views in less than four years (shown below).

The following year, on April 15th, 2018, YouTuber Joseju posted "Dark Souls Demastered," a degraded version of the video game Dark Souls. The video received more than 464,000 views in less than three years (shown below, left).

On June 27th, 2019, YouTuber Bearly Regal posted the video "Death Stranding – PlayStation 1 Demake Gameplay Trailer." The video, a version of the trailer for the video game Death Stranding made to look like PlayStation game, received more than 400,000 views in less than two years (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References