I suspect their original videos were far too small to be really usable, even with visual tricks (the original size of the edited videos must have been absolutely tiny, as they were “postage stamp” videos even on a 640x480 screen…), and finding the videos (edited or original tapes) would have required a lot of work, assuming they still exist and assuming the developers were even in a position to ask for or access them. They probably would have had to re-film the videos, so going 3D was significantly easier. Apparently it has a huge install size on the Quest (which is weird for a game with non-cutting edge graphics and such a small environment), which suggests they generally didn’t spend a lot of effort, neither on building the 3D heads nor optimizing in general.
I suspect some third-party developer was given a tiny budget and tasked with doing the remake, and they did it in the way that required the least time and labor (and it shows).
