The Last of Us Part 1 Remake was released recently and that’s got a lot of people talking about what makes a video game a remake. A lot of similar words get thrown around when a new iteration of an older game comes out: Remake, Remaster, and Rerelease and it can confuse what each of them means.

To help clear up some of this confusion, let’s take a look at each of these terms and what kind of games fall under each of them.

Let’s start with what’s probably the easiest of these to understand. A rerelease is when a company publishes and releases a pre-existing game that they’ve already released before. This is usually to port the game to another console. An example of this is when Dragon Ball FighterZ was originally released on the PS4, Xbox One, and PC and later rereleased on the Nintendo Switch.

The assets and contents of the game are usually exactly the same as how it was the first time although sometimes you can get “enhanced ports” which are still the same game but may have some extra content. A lot of the Wii U ports to the Switch are like this, offering new content to incentivize players to buy an older game like the new Bowser’s Fury section added to Super Mario 3D World. If you’d like to read more about the difference between remake, remaster and rerelease, consider subscribing to our newsletter so you can read more about it. You can read it for free by putting your email address in the box below:

Give it a read and let us know what you think! New newsletter feature articles are released weekly every Wednesday at lunchtime regarding various topics surrounding video games and the greater entertainment industry as a whole.