Are you excited for any of the dozens of high-profile video game remakes, remasters, and reimagingings that will come out in 2023? Perhaps you're a hardcore Dead Space fan who's been enjoying the limb-blasting action of the remake, or you're a Resident Evil aficionado desperate to see how Capcom improves on one of the series' best entries with RE4.

But while it's always nice to see an old favorite revived for a new generation of players, the gaming industry's obsession with revivals has led to a large degree of definitional confusion. Some of us might know exactly what we're talking about when it comes to remasters, remakes, and reimaginings, but it's fair to say that not everyone is on the same page. Thanks to the steady march of technology--and the ballooning of video game budgets at the top end--these once-straightforward terms have "evolved" to the point where no one quite knows what they mean anymore.

It's important to note that these terms are not native to video games--they're loanwords crafted by artists in other mediums. The term "remake" first emerged in the early film industry, where studios would regularly reshoot a similar script with updated technology for an easy payday. Some directors even remade their own movies, from Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much to Yasujiro Ozu's Floating Weeds. Similarly, "remaster" comes from the world of recorded music, where audio engineers use EQ tools that impact loudness and compression to make an old recording sound differently than before.