I find myself in an interesting position I wasn't looking to be in, which is that for fun and curiosity, I started downscaling Adventure Island into a single sprite sheet (as best I can) usable by Pico8 to, with clever coding, reproduce everything from the original game, down to multiple bosses, etc. knowing full well I'd have no intention of actually trying to figure out how to stuff 32 levels, many that are 2-3 screens tall and 32+ screens long, far larger than the built in MAP() memory, blah blah blah list of things i can't do trails off into the distance

And then I stumbled into PicoMap, and was like, 'Oh snap, the thing that sucks trying to figure out and get working, the bane of every designer, the engineering portion, has been basically swept off the table of problems?' So that got me interested in actually completing ALL of the graphics at the very least and probably the music too and map out all the stages, but THEN...something struck me...a position of great power...and thus great responsibility...

I have all of the maps of the original game, the ROM I can hack to start at any stage I need to in order to preserve enemy placements, movement, etc...and yet...I don't actually have to. I could take all this stuff and make a completely different game maybe even in the style of it's Now Productions-produce sequels which play basically nothing like the original. Or I could make an endless runner instead, etc. What I'm saying is that..one, this is a 'fan' project (in quotes because I wouldn't call myself a 'fan' of any incarnation of this game...it's good...but I'd rather play something else) and to some degree, there's historical reference on the line here, especially for a Hudson game and the history of that company's Bee and the odd persistence of trains in the company, but on the other hand, we're in do anything space...

Some of the things I considered while toiling away at the pixels were things like making look like the NES when not in motion but the scrolling is more like the arcade Wonderboy, with some parallax, the stages would be like the NES...or like only using half the stages, ditching ones that repeat too often and hand picking for variety, etc. All things that wouldn't be 'accurate' to the original. I even thought about adding a feature that would sort of egg the player into 'finding the line', making it more obvious. By the way, 'the line' is basically a path through the stage in which you can hold the run button and keep the dpad/stick held to toward the goal, catching every moving platform and enemy at just the right angle so that everything misses you in a dazzling display of early videogaming parkour...basically it's the precursor to platformer speedrunning as a staple of the core gameplay...it's kind of important for that reason, more so than mario, which emphasized a different style of play in which speedrunning was emergent of the community, not a design principle of the developers...of course this is my conjecture. I didn't interview anyone at Hudson or Westone for that matter. I'm just inferring things based on the design decisions in the game that force forward momentum even harder than SMB and the fact they got a 'pro gamer' as the protagonist, who'd be the guy who'd be speed running games at that time before the AGDQ basement party invites went out.

That brings me to something I never even considered as someone who definitely enjoys ports that deviate from the original as much as ones that the authors pride themselves on being accurate as much as they can in one way or another (i.e. the transcode ports of Williams games to the Tandy Color Computer, where they painstakingly changed lines of assempbly from the original source to get it to compile over to a different system) which is what path to take? And the more I think about it with the assets I have, I'm like, 'I've played Adventure Island. It exists, anyone can go check it out...I should do something different because then what is the point of it other than saying 'well, i did that' and getting the 'oh, that's so cool you squeeze that into pico 8 and it's just as annoying as the original blah blah' (assuming, of course, I could even pull of said accuracy).

Going through all of the ports/demakes/inspirations that I can find in the Pico8 library, there's a TON of 'what consitutes a port' discussions to be had. Also, personally, I'd love to retire the word 'demake'. That along with a slew of other 'cutesy gamer jargon', but that's another blogpost I reckon. But back to the ports, there's some that...for instance, I recently commented on a SmashTV port in progress that appeared to be abandoned long before I stumbled into it (which, sadly, is true of a lot of projects i thought look promising I keep finding) and they were going to add a reload mechanic into it. I made joking fuss about it because frankly it's a fun project someone's doing and their instincts and ideas are not universal, nor mine. It did, however, come after I was already sort of having mild anxiety about what to do with all the Adventure Island stuff as the more I played with the map editor and saw how crazy it could morph the assets I made, it was hard not to start doing wildly not-original-game stuff. And I stopped and went, "This isn't adventure island anymore if I do that..."

So what is all this meandering about ports and stuff all about? I don't know. It's just...I find it a weird spot in game making culture where...on the player side, you have folks that swear by a certain 'version' amonst many that all tried to be exactly like one another...but then you have deviations sometimes which players will say is the definitive revision...then on the programming side, you have folks that do ports as an exercise to study solving certain kinds of problems and really the game is just a side effect of that to the other end where maybe the programmer is really tired of copying things all the time and tired of other people doing it to, so they're going to add a little spice to the bland pasta sauce. Of course, obviously I speak not of the copyright issues surrounding this whole thing, just assume that everyone is fine with the aesthetics/naming in general, even if it's WAY in left field comapred to the original (i.e. like a cyberdemon flapping through BFG blasts instead of flappy bird flapping through pipes)...and I'm wondering about folks that seek out ports and play them as well as make them what their reasons and criteria are. This isn't for my own decisions at all, but really is more like...a discussion starter on people's thoughts about this whole slice of games.

For what it's worth, again I hate the term 'demake', just port the game let your choices of the limits be what they are. Demake is like a low key psychological back door to the developer AND PLAYERS to not expect a good or complete game. It's basically saying, 'lulz jokez shitpost gamez' by that term and truly a disservice to some brilliant works that should be called proper ports.

Anyway, some that I think captured the essence of the original game well, but do so in different ways:
Thegder (plays like Thexder almost to a fault, but randomizes levels Rogue Thexder, neat!)
Amadar (Has a nifty title screen, extra music, but otherwise is like a smoother feeling version of the original)
PicoDriller (One of those 'kinda of hard to mess up if you can program the core elements well enough' games done well)
etc.

Also, of note, there's a version of Elite that looks really nice...but I can't play Elite to save my life due to the vicious cycle of 'too opaque to get into and by not getting into it becomes boring and being boring makes it opaque to get into etc.'.

Well...for those who like reading, there's some shit to read. There's a comment button down there if this topic is interesting. I don't have shit to hawk or a game in production to show off. It's just something I think there's enough folks around here with an opinion enough to prod some of them out into the open for my own curiosity's sake.--

(also, I didn't go back and proof read any of this...do point out errors or weird wordings that dont make sense or sound offensively clumsy)

I guess I've done 3 "ports" of Atari 2600 games now, some more accurate than others, some better executed than others:

• Word Zapper is mostly faithful to the Atari 2600 game - the colors are slightly different, the ship sprite is a little different, the sounds are definitely different, and the side laser and letter laser are separate buttons (obviously not a thing on the 2600). The gameplay is nearly identical though.

• Apparitional Abode is a port of Haunted House with a different room layout, definitely a less basic look (was made using assets from Toybox Jam), and is honestly a lot jankier than the 2600 game. I think this is my least played game!

• PopeyE.T. is a port of E.T. that stars Popeye instead of E.T. and was purely done as a funny gift for my brother-in-law. Not super well done, but it is pretty funny. Randomly, I saw someone play it for like 90 seconds on a Twitch stream and it made them laugh too, which is pretty much all the validation I need that it was a good idea. This would probably be my least played game except my brother-in-law loves it and still plays :).

There are some devs here (Heracleum, ChristopherD and pahammond immediately come to mind) that do ridiculously wonderful and accurate ports of games (and other software!) from the good ol' days. When I do one, I kinda just want to get the essence of the thing, I'm not super concerned with accuracy (though my love of Word Zapper made me take accuracy more seriously than I did with the others). I have a few other WIP 2600 ports, but I abandoned one because pahammond did it better already (Carnival, though his is not the 2600 version), one I'm still puzzling through how to implement effectively, and one I just started after playing the game for the first time, so that needs more time to cook for sure.

Anyway, I think if you have no real fondness for Adventure Island, that doesn't mean you couldn't do a straight port, but you probably have some perspective about things you think are more "meh" in the game that you could veer away from accuracy and turn your port into a game you enjoy more, whether that's a gameplay mechanic, quality of life improvement, etc.

The way I've understood the terms "port" and "demake" seem to be a bit different than you, OP. I've always taken "port" to mean an as-accurate-as-possible version of something from another platform. And I've taken "demake" to mean a not-necessarily-accurate-but-in-the-same-spirit version of something from another (typically better spec'd) platform. I disagree with your take on the term being anything derogatory or quality-related. Sure, some demakes are joke shitpost games, but IMO that's due to the looser definition of the term "demake" when specifically compared to "port", IMO.

That said, I'm not going to argue that my way of interpreting the terms is right and yours is wrong. If I cared that strongly about language, I wouldn't have time to write this comment since I'd still be commenting on some corner of the internet about how "roguelike" is being misused all the time now. :)