I didn't really 'play' Dungeon Master when it first came out - I was too young (for me), like 9 or 10 I guess, and the basic puzzles like 'press the button to open the door' really tested my patience at the time.
I do remember DM2 though, and actually properly played that, to an extent. Until I realised you could grind the big cows for beef which you could sell for gold and so I just saved up for some nice sword or something. Because the puzzle that amounted to not much more than 'press the button to open the door' really tested my patience.
A big part of this kind of 'remaking' / 'reimagining' games is making them how you THINK they played (It's mentioned in the article, and I thought it was and interesting point I hadn't necessarily thought about) . If successful you get old people who saw them first time round going "YEAH IT'S JUST LIKE I REMEMBER IT!" (it's not) and kiddies saying "THIS IS REALLY FUN!" (always was). like unpicking what the intent of that game was and presenting the intent in a successfully put together modern game.
As a design commentary context is everything, I guess. There's no way 512kb of RAM and a 7.2MHz processor can do what we can do today, in the detail - but it can give all the same feelings. I vividly remember chatting to my brother about our kind of dream, open-world game where you could do whatever you wanted (that was pretty much as far as we talked about). But this was when our expectations were to achieve graphics and an interface something like this:
https://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/hobbit/screenshots/gameShotId,193997/We would have been delighted.
(Slightly unrelated point but I think some things game publishers / marketing departments can do really well is create the context / expectation for games to be perceived as successful design endeavours, which actually can be effectively independent of any of the mechanical design decisions. i.e. hype - but hype is context, expectations, a relationship and, eventually, memories.)
I've recently been playing Bloody Rally Show, which is really evocative to me of the kind of early 90s top down Amiga racing games which still carry a massive place in my heart (Skidmarks, Iron Man Offroad, Supercars 1 & 2). And I think does the same sorts of things Grimrock does with respect to Dungeon Master - face value it's the same game; seemingly no more or less simple but in reality it's a different ball game. But this is still the game I was playing in my head in 1992 or whatever.
