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Nightdive Studios is doing what very few companies out there do, taking a good old retro game and making it accessible to the current gaming audience, while adding in modern enhancements to them.
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Be it the fan-favorite System Shock series getting QoL changes, the ID classic DOOM 64, Quake 1 getting remastered, or even the classic build engine shooter Blood enhanced and remastered, Nightdive Studios is working to ensure the dormant old games are back to the gamers and not lost in the annals of the time.
The team has been working hard on the much-awaited remake of System Shock 1, a remaster of PowerSlave Exhumed, and point-and-click adventure game Blade Runner. I got on my email and tried to get in touch with the team at Nightdive Studios for a possible interview, and after some back and forth, got some questions answered by Stephen Kick, the CEO of Nightdive Studios.
Asking Nightdive Studios the questions I always wanted to ask
After a day's worth of digging, I finally emailed Larry Kuperman, the Director of Business Development at Nightdive Studios with a request for an interview, which he was kind enough to help out with. On top of that, he helped me send my questions to Stephen Kick, the CEO of Nightdive Studios.
Q. Thank you so much for this opportunity, can we start by having you tell the readers a bit about Nightdive Studios? Not many know about its origin and the early days of the studio, and they might find tentacles reaching for a scuba helmet with a skull inside it a very interesting choice for a studio logo.
[Kick]: I had been working in the industry as a character artist for a number of years and was feeling that my own creativity and love for games was beginning to wane. I decided I needed to have an adventure to reignite my passion for the medium so I quit my job, packed up everything I had in my Honda Civic, and drove across the Southern border of the United States into Mexico.
I traveled through the entire country and further south to Central America when on one particularly stormy evening in Guatemala I had a sudden urge to play System Shock 2. I had brought a laptop loaded with classic games with me on the trip, but when I went to install it I couldn’t get it to run. I tried numerous methods, but it just wasn’t compatible with the modern hardware on the laptop.
I visited GOG.com and discovered it was missing from their catalog despite it being the most requested title on the site. Intrigued, I decided to do some detective work and attempt to uncover what had become of one of the most revered games ever made.
My search led me to discover that after Looking Glass (the original developer) had gone bankrupt, the rights transferred to an insurance company in the Midwest. I sent out an email to their legal counsel inquiring about the rights and to my surprise they replied back the next day asking me what I wanted to do with it. I pitched the idea of re-releasing the originals and after a few weeks of negotiations I had secured the publishing license. Shortly after I reached out to GOG and on February 14, 2013, System Shock 2 was released.
The reception was overwhelmingly positive, and from that moment on I dedicated myself to untangling the legal issues surrounding my favorite classic games and re-releasing as many as I could for fans to enjoy once more.
Since then, Nightdive has released over 125 titles. The studio name and our logo evoke our sometimes perilous efforts to dive deep into the darkness, in hopes of uncovering treasure once believed to be lost to time.
Q. When you and your team sit down to decide on a game to try re-releasing or remastering, and in System Shock’s case, remaking the whole game, what things do all of you keep in mind?
[Kick]: When we first started, we took what we could get! Back then we could also afford to work on obscure titles that had little commercial promise. As an untested studio with only a few releases to our name, it was a challenge to convince potential partners [that] we could deliver what was promised.
After we re-released Turok, which utilized our own engine, we were approached by publishers asking us if we wanted to work on their catalogue. Each new success has enabled us to take on bigger properties like Blood, Doom, and most recently, Quake.
When we decided to work on System Shock we evaluated the reception we received on the Enhanced Edition and determined that there was something really special about the game that could benefit from rebuilding it for a modern audience.
Personally, I believe that System Shock is one of the greatest games of all time and we had the unique opportunity and responsibility to pay tribute to a game that would directly influence titles like BioShock, Deus Ex, Dishonored and countless others. I think when players experience it for the first time they will be...for the lack of a better word, Shocked!
Q3. Back in 2012 when you were trying to acquire the System Shock IP and eventually set up Nightdive Studios, not many publishers or developers focused on making their old catalog easily accessible. What challenges did your team face at that time, and how far do you think, compared to 2012, has the current retro gaming landscape changed?
[Kick]: Like I mentioned before, the early years were tough because we were unproven as a developer and publishers did not see value in their retro catalogue and were hesitant to put any effort into a revival of any kind. I would like to think that our success over the years has had something to do with the current retro gaming landscape. It’s truly wonderful to see classic games get the attention they deserve.
Q4. Game preservation and game collecting have been a very hot topic among the gaming community in recent years. Being a game collector, and someone who has been actively involved in resurrecting and preserving old video games, what do you think the future for game preservation will look like in the coming years?
[Kick]: Personally I’d like to see more of the bigger publishers start to dig deeper into their catalogues and work together when necessary to revive long lost classics.
We’ve recently seen EA take a wonderful approach to their Command & Conquer remaster and it’s exciting to see what is possible when no expense is spared in bringing back a revered classic.
Q5. Let us now focus a bit on the upcoming retro-shooter PowerSlave: Exhumed. I myself have never tried the game because of the inability to either track it down and simply because I had zero exposure to it. So, will there be anything new added to the upcoming re-release that might make newcomer players excited about it, as well as make the existing PowerSlave fanbase happy?
[Kick]: PowerSlave is a really interesting game for a number of reasons, one of which is that all three versions of the game were different from one another. The PC version was more or less a linear shooter while the PlayStation and Sega Saturn versions were metroidvanias, though also not completely identical.
What we’ve done is combined all of those versions into the definitive experience while also taking full advantage of the unique features found in our KEX Engine which powers that game. It’ll run at 4K at 60fps and come with a ton of options for customizing the experience. We’ve even included a CRT filter, various lighting modes, checkpoints, remixed level designs, updated art and so much more. PowerSlave is a classic and we’re thrilled that so many more people will be able to experience it for the first time.
Q. Speaking of retro shooters or “boomer shooters”, the genre has seen a very successful resurgence among the indie development and publisher circle, and new and old players alike are enjoying the vast plethora of options available there. Is Nightdive Studios at some point thinking of making a retro shooter themselves or if not a shooter, an original IP?
[Kick]: We’d love to develop an original IP in the future and I’d imagine it’d most likely be a shooter as that’s what we’re most familiar with. After working on Turok, Blood, Doom 64, and Quake, I feel like we’d be able to develop something memorable and unique that’d draw from our knowledge and experiences.
Personally I’d want to create a spiritual successor to Blood that draws inspiration from horror movies, books and games all while making jokes and references along the way.
Q. Moving on from all these topics, I am sure the journey of resurrecting dormant videogames has not been a very smooth walk. I am still rooting for you guys to someday re-release the No One Lives Forever video games. Is there any game the team personally wants to resurrect or has tried to resurrect in the past?
[Kick]: I think we’re all big fans of Hexen and Heretic and we’d love the opportunity to bring those titles back.
With so many deserving titles it’s hard to choose but, my short list includes NOLF (of course) Myth, Dark Forces, Chasm The Rift, Soul Reaver, The Thing, AvP2, Condemned! Tons of Monolith titles, that team was really something special.
Q. To wrap things up, what does the future look like for Nightdive Studios? A few years down the line, what do you think the studio will be like?
[Kick]: I believe Nightdive will continue to have two teams, one that remasters the classics with our other team remaking games from the ground up or potentially making something original. My only hope is that we have more opportunities to get together in person - we’ve been remote for over 9 years and I still haven’t met many of the great people I get to work with.
You can find out what Nightdive Studios is currently working on by clicking here. Make sure to follow Stephen Kick's Twitter, he's got a really beautiful physical collection of video games; Larry Kuperman, the Director of Business Development at Nightdive Studios Twitter here.
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