In video gaming parlance, a conversion is the production of a game on one computer or console that was originally written for another system. Over the years, video game conversion has taken form in a number of different ways, both in their style and the method in which they were converted.
History
The earliest video game conversions were almost exclusively home versions of popular arcade games.[citation needed] The first examples were conversions of Atari's Pong in the form of consoles with this one game built-in, as well as consoles that included a number of variations on the game. Atari produced their own "official" conversion of the game for home use, but a number of other imitators such as Sears' Telegames Pong IV were also on the market.
With the beginning of the video game era, Atari released their Atari 2600 console for which they licensed and produced a number of home conversions of popular arcade titles, including Pac-Man by Namco, Space Invaders and Defender. Later, other third-party developers and publishers such as Activision and Coleco produced games like Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600.
The mid-1980s and the mid-1990s saw a flurry of conversions of popular arcade games to home computers[citation needed] such as the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. These games were mostly developed and published by groups who were not involved with the original developers, but who had bought the rights to create reproductions of these games.[citation needed] Console versions of these arcade games, however, were often produced by the original developers of the arcade title.[citation needed]
Types of conversions
Direct conversions
Direct conversions of video games can take several forms - those created by the original developers, or those sublicensed to a third party developer. Historically, conversions of titles performed by the original developer tended to be more accurate, but this was due to third parties not having access to the original source code. While licensing issues were indeed a factor, technical issues were also prevalent - most games pre-1995 were produced in assembly language, and source-based conversions could not be reproduced on systems with other processors, rendering the original source code useless. Also, while most third-party developers had access to the original graphics and audio, they could not be faithfully reproduced on older home computers such as the ZX Spectrum and developers were forced to recreate the graphics and audio from scratch.
In recent years, source-based conversions of games have become more feasible and one-to-one pixel perfect conversions are commonplace. In examples of open source games such as Neverball, BZFlag and The Battle for Wesnoth, this conversion has literally been one-to-one - the game has been precisely converted from platform to platform (usually Linux to Windows) thanks to the free availability of the source code, and differences between the versions are negligible or non-existent.
Imitations/clones
Imitations of popular arcade games were common, particularly in the early days of video gaming when copyright violations were treated less severely. While the game was fundamentally the same, the title, names, graphics and audio were usually changed to avoid legal challenges. Most imitations were of titles such as Space Invaders and Pacman. As video games became increasingly sophisticated, clones of games began to deviate from their source material in varying ways.
It has been known for a developer to create a "clone" of one of their own games. Escape (now Westone) produced a clone of Wonder Boy for the NES by the name of Adventure Island to circumnavigate a number of legal issues surrounding the Wonder Boy name and character.
Remakes
Particularly in recent years, developers have been remaking older video games with modern technology. Usually, this has been by the development firm themselves or companies sub-licensed by these developers. This was a particular phenomenon during the late 1990s with numerous 3D updates of games such as Frogger, Missile Command, Asteroids and Space Invaders. Sega have also been active in reproducing a number of their older 16-bit era titles with 3D graphics for the 5th generation of consoles (PlayStation 2, Xbox, Nintendo GameCube)
Retro/Emulation
Advances in technology and a rising interest in retrogaming have incited a trend whereby collections of "classic" games, usually arcade games, are re-released on modern gaming systems in their original forms. The original "retro pack" is widely thought to be Namco Museum Volume 1, and many similar packages have since been released by Sega, Midway, and Taito among others. This is usually carried out by means of custom emulators, which reproduce the activity of the original arcade ROMs.
Nintendo's Game Boy Advance is often considered to be a retro gaming console, which has led to hundreds of conversions of older games being reproduced for the console, including games originally written for the SNES, the hardware of which forms the basis of the Game Boy Advance.