Talking to Nightdive founder Stephen Kick and VP of enterprise improvement Larry Kuperman at this 12 months’s Recreation Builders Convention, I was curious about the way it felt to be returning to System Shock 2 for the studio’s upcoming remaster. After all, I had a unfastened understanding that Shock 2 is the recreation that kicked off Nightdive in the first place.
Kick recounted the unlikely story of how he discovered himself making offers to revive a lifeless franchise, and likewise provided a element I’d by no means identified earlier than: For the longest time, the rights to System Shock have been in the palms of an insurance firm that had no concept what to do with them.
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“Initially it was simply because I could not get it to run proper,” Kick stated of his System Shock 2 quest. After some time spent working for Sony On-line Leisure, he and his girlfriend give up to go on a driving tour of Central America. “I introduced a netbook—simply small, compact—and the solely issues I might get to run on it have been traditional PC games.”
However he could not get his bodily copy of System Shock 2 to work, whereas a digital model was absent from the GOG storefront, then nonetheless spelled out as “Good Outdated Games.”
“I began casually making an attempt to determine what occurred to Wanting Glass, the place did the rights find yourself,” Kick stated. “And the search led to a G4 TV article that I discovered on the Wayback Machine, about how when Wanting Glass went out of enterprise, the rights went to an insurance firm in the Midwest known as Star Insurance.
“I regarded them up and despatched an e-mail to their common counsel, which is simply listed on the web site: ‘Hey, you guys nonetheless have the rights to System Shock.’ And they wrote me again virtually instantly, however they asked me if I wanted to do System Shock 3. I might need, like, a couple thousand to my title, and I’m in Guatemala, so I wasn’t actually in the greatest place to begin a triple-A venture, however I pitched the concept of re-releasing the authentic games.”
Initially, the rights to the collection had been break up between Star and EA, with Star getting the IP copyright, and EA the trademark. “That was a strategic factor carried out by Warren Spector in order that no person might do a System Shock venture,” Kick defined. “He would inform us that a few years later.”
Fortunately, EA’s trademark had simply lapsed from lack of use when Kick reached out to Star, so the insurance firm had simply attained full possession, however lacked an apparent path ahead to take benefit of it.
“I got here to them with a enterprise concept that was fast, low-cost—by comparability to growing a new triple A recreation—and that may permit them to personal the rights of System Shock,” stated Kick. “They agreed, and I despatched the contract to GOG, as a result of they did not consider me when I instructed them I had received it.”
“[Former GOG SVP Oleg Klapovskiy] did not consider that Steve had the rights. Steve had gone in by the assist e-mail,” Kuperman defined. “That will get forwarded to Oleg, saying, ‘Hey, this man says that he has the rights to System Shock.’
“Oleg writes again, saying, ‘He is in all probability full of shit. It is in all probability all bullshit.’ That will get forwarded again to Steve. Oleg is a man of few phrases. Most of them are obscene.”
“He nonetheless does not consider me to at the present time that I simply emailed and asked,” Kick stated. “He thinks that I have household working at Star, or that there was some form of conspiracy, as a result of [GOG] had been making an attempt to get the rights for years.”
Subsequently, Kuperman would be part of Nightdive and go about securing the remaining rights to the collection held by Star Insurance, and the System Shock collection has been present process a bit of a renaissance beneath Nightdive.
As well as to the upcoming System Shock 2 remaster arriving on June 26, the studio’s ground-up remake of the first recreation was one of our favourite releases of 2023—we gave it a “greatest remake” award even going up in opposition to the likes of the Resident Evil 4 remake. Nightdive hasn’t spoken definitively about what’s subsequent after Shock 2, however I’m champing at the bit to hear extra.
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