Talking to Nightdive founder Stephen Kick and VP of enterprise improvement Larry Kuperman at this 12 months’s Sport Builders Convention, I used to be inquisitive about the way it felt to be returning to System Shock 2 for the studio’s upcoming remaster. In spite of everything, I had a free understanding that Shock 2 is the sport that kicked off Nightdive within the first place.
Kick recounted the unlikely story of how he discovered himself making offers to revive a useless franchise, and in addition provided a element I would by no means recognized earlier than: For the longest time, the rights to System Shock have been within the fingers of an insurance coverage firm that had no thought 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 a while 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 one issues I may get to run on it have been traditional PC video 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 Previous Video games.”
“I began casually making an attempt to determine what occurred to Trying 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 Trying Glass went out of enterprise, the rights went to an insurance coverage firm within the Midwest known as Star Insurance coverage.
“I seemed them up and despatched an electronic mail to their normal counsel, which is simply listed on the web site: ‘Hey, you guys nonetheless have the rights to System Shock.’ And so they wrote me again virtually instantly, however they requested me if I wished to do System Shock 3. I may need, like, a pair thousand to my title, and I am in Guatemala, so I wasn’t actually in the most effective place to start out a triple-A undertaking, however I pitched the thought of re-releasing the unique video games.”
Initially, the rights to the collection had been cut 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 may do a System Shock undertaking,” 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 coverage firm had simply attained full possession, however lacked an apparent path ahead to benefit from it.
“I got here to them with a enterprise concept that was fast, low-cost—by comparability to creating a brand 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 imagine me after I advised them I had acquired it.”
“[Former GOG SVP Oleg Klapovskiy] did not imagine that Steve had the rights. Steve had gone in by means of the help electronic 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 stuffed with shit. It is in all probability all bullshit.’ That will get forwarded again to Steve. Oleg is a person of few phrases. Most of them are obscene.”
“He nonetheless does not imagine me to this present day that I simply emailed and requested,” Kick stated. “He thinks that I’ve 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 coverage, and the System Shock collection has been present process a little bit of a renaissance below Nightdive.
Along with the upcoming System Shock 2 remaster arriving on June 26, the studio’s ground-up remake of the primary recreation was one in every 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 am champing on the bit to listen to extra.
