In an age where remakes and remasters dominate much of the game release schedule throughout the year, one of the most seminal games of all time, System Shock, is finally about to come back to the market as a whole new product.
Despite the May 30th launch date on PC, there’s not much fanfare around it, perhaps due to the project’s known problems and delays (it was first announced in 2015). In a 45-minute-long conversation over Zoom, I recently had the opportunity to go through the whole behind-the-scenes process of remaking System Shock from its very inception with Stephen Kick, Game Director and co-founder of Nightdive Studios, and Larry Kuperman, Director of Business Development.
It was a long and interesting chat, during which we also touched upon the current schedule for the console ports, some possible post-launch additions like New Game+, what’s next after this remake, the impact of the recent acquisition by Atari, and even a brief update on the live action TV adaptation. Strap in.
Let’s begin by addressing the elephant in the room. People have been waiting to play this System Shock remake for a very long time due to multiple delays. What happened?
Stephen Kick: System Shock has been in development not for seven years but closer to 11 years. Back in 2012, I was still working at Sony as a character artist and my girlfriend at the time, who was also a character artist, decided that she was pretty much done with the video game industry after a pretty short stint and convinced me to pack up everything we owned into a Honda Civic and drive across the border in Mexico.
It was cool. It was really scary. We spent the next ten months going through the entirety of Mexico and Central America. One night, when I was in Guatemala, I decided to play some classic video games. They were what originally inspired me to become part of the industry and are still a big love of mine. I tried to boot up System Shock 2 and I couldn’t get it to run, so I went, like any normal person would do, to GOG.com. I figured it’s one of the best games ever made; it’s got to be available for purchase.
I discovered that it was the most requested title in GOG’s catalog. So, I decided to do some digging and found that the rights had been transferred to the Meadowbrook Insurance Group. I reached out to their general counsel and discovered that they had not only the rights but had recently acquired the trademark and were looking for some way to commercialize the game so they could hold on to those rights.
At first, they asked me if I wanted to do a System Shock game. But, being miles into a jungle with $5,000 to my name, it was out of the question. I recommended that we just re-release the games on digital storefronts like GOG and Steam. There was a very quick back and forth with the contract. I had to convince friends and family to lend me enough money to pay for the license and the game went on sale on Valentine’s Day 2013.
It was a smash hit, and it opened up the possibility of going out and spending my time doing the same for other games you can no longer commercially purchase or run on modern machines.
Larry Kuperman: That starts off Nightdive Studios. A year later, right after GDC 2014, I joined the company. My first task was to acquire the remaining System Shock rights so we could do more with the games. That took well over a year of working with that insurance company’s attorneys.
I will tell you that for a long time, I have had weekly phone calls every Friday. I kept calling the attorney, saying, are we ready to do business? Finally, we acquired the remaining rights.
The next question is, what do we do with it? That takes us up to the point where we announced that we would do a remake of the original System Shock game. In order to do that, we needed to do a Kickstarter.
That was quite successful, right?
Larry Kuperman: Yes, and one of the reasons it was so successful was we had a clear vision. We put together a team and we created a demo running in Unity. The fact that we were showing what people were backing and what we hoped the finished version would look like led to the success of Kickstarter’s success. We reached and exceeded our goal on that and then began the work of actually creating the game.
People from that original team were called to other things, so we had to put together a new team to fulfill that vision. The first thing that we did not anticipate happening was we had really come up against the wall for what Unity could do at the time. We always knew that we wanted the game to be on PC, but also on Xbox and PlayStation consoles. We wanted to have a consistent frame rate across all devices. At that time, I know it’s improved since then, but at that time, that really was pushing Unity beyond the limits of what it could do.
That was the first change. We transitioned over from working in Unity to working in Unreal, which would be able to help us realize that vision. That also was a setback and there was some delay, but we eventually had a team in place again after hiring some new people. Throughout all of that time, we were posting updates to the System Shock community via the Kickstarter page.
As the team was working on the game, there was a temptation that I think is universal when you work on remakes of classic IPs, which is to put your own signature and imprint on the game to make things work according to your vision.
That’s when it began to drift off from what we had shown originally and what we had promised to people. The feedback that we began to get was that this isn’t what people wanted, that it was something different from what we had shown and promised. That led to a number of heated discussions with the team.
We were also quickly burning through the money we had raised on Kickstarter, so there was a financial concern about it. At any rate, at that point, we knew that things were not working the way we wanted them.
I guess that was in early 2018 when you announced System Shock would go on hiatus.
Larry Kuperman: Correct. It’s funny, I thought everyone knew that that hiatus meant a pause, not an ending. But the news came out that we were abandoning the game, that we were terrible people and had squandered everybody’s money. None of that was accurate.
The team had gone off in a direction that we did not want them to. We took responsibility for it and ultimately, we probably should have been more hands-on than we were at the time. We learned a lesson from that. Very quickly, we put together a new team and by GDC of that year, we actually showed off a demo running in Unreal that was much closer to and very true to the System Shock vision of what we had originally shown.
Time goes on; we’re continuing to work on the game. It was not only Nightdive, certainly, it was worldwide and industrywide, but of course, then came COVID. There was social unrest, there was a pandemic, there were acquisitions, and people were being hired away by other companies who had allowed them to work on our project as well. Then that company was bought by somebody else. There was a lot of that during the COVID period. That said, our team continued to be productive and it continued to work forward on the game, but by that time, it was taking longer than our fans wanted.
It’s natural for gaming fans that they want every game to be done today if not yesterday, right? The other thing that people perhaps were not aware of is where was the money coming from that was paying this development team.
Nightdive was funding all of the development by that point. Fortunately, we have a successful business, and we were doing other things. We have multiple teams, and so we were producing the games that are perhaps best associated with Nightdive, like Turok 1 and 2, we had Strife, we had multiple other titles and the revenues from that were funding the continued development of System Shock. That brings us up pretty close to where we are today.
Along the way, we began working with a publisher, Plaion. That has been a very positive relationship for us. The game is now in the final stages of being polished. Much of the work that is going on behind the scenes now has to do with localization.
This is a big stretch for us. Typically, we have only supported the European languages, EFIGS as people say, English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. We are supporting System Shock with something like 14 languages. We’re planning on having worldwide distribution and we want as many fans regardless of where they live regardless of their language, to be able to play and enjoy the game.
Once the PC version is finished, we’ve already had prototypes of the console versions, those are already in testing. But we want to make sure that the game is as close to perfect as we can make it for all versions so that people can play it on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.
Just a quick follow-up on that. Are you still planning to release System Shock on last-generation consoles or will it be just PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series S|X?
Larry Kuperman: It’s going to be on both generations, particularly with our audience which is retro gaming enthusiasts. That’s our core audience. Although of course, this game will certainly expand Nightdive’s audience, many of them have not upgraded and we want people to be able to play it regardless of how they want to play it.
What are the odds of a Nintendo Switch port?
Larry Kuperman: It’s probably a bit early to talk about that, but it’s certainly something that has been discussed. The only thing that I can say at this point is to stay tuned.
Fair enough. It was a long development phase, for sure. Can you discuss what kind of changes you have made compared to the original game and maybe also which ones were inspired by the community’s feedback through the Steam demos you have released over the years?
Stephen Kick: We implemented a number of changes from the original just to make the game more user-friendly. One thing that kind of inspired this whole project was the addition of mouse look in the original. It didn’t have that when it initially came out in 1994. Instead, you had to drag the mouse to the edge of the screen to look around.
We worked with a modder in the System Shock community to inject the ability to have mouse look. We immediately found out that the game had been changed so dramatically that it became accessible to just about everybody at that point. We had new players come in and really enjoy themselves immensely. That kind of sparked the initial idea of, wow, that’s all that it took to make this game more playable and more accessible and just more fun.
Well, what if we did this, what if we did that? The next iteration was getting the source code of the game and porting it to our test engine and adding even more features to make it more accessible. High-resolution support, widescreen support, stuff that would normally be pretty standard in any remaster. Then from there, our discussions went well, this game is really underrepresented. It inspired so much that we owe it to the legacy of not only System Shock but of Origin and Looking Glass and Irrational to bring this game back for people to truly appreciate it. That’s when we brought on, like Larry said, the initial Unity team and we did the prototype. That’s when we knew that we had something very special.
Aside from just adding mouse look, one of the other major things that we changed was the overall user interface and the user experience. In the original, it was very obtuse and made it hard to understand what was going on.
If you weren’t savvy or you weren’t aware, you wouldn’t notice that certain panels that had vital information would kind of switch around on you and just be all over the place. That was by design, but again, that was something that we wanted to standardize. We took the lessons that were learned between System Shock 1 and 2, which came out in 1999, 5 years later, and we brought that back to the original game.
Now we’ve got more or less a hybrid of the two inventory systems. We feel like we’ve struck a really great balance between a modern game and something old-school that’s reminiscent of those old games. What we have now is essentially something more like the Resident Evil remake where you’ve got a grid-based inventory and everything is clearly visible and you can move things around.
Long answer to your short question, but the user interface, the inventory system, all those have changed.
I think you also introduced the dismemberment system, correct?
Stephen Kick: Yeah. There wasn’t any dismemberment or anything like that in the original, but there were graphics, let’s just say to suggest that some really gory, nasty things had happened to the people on Citadel Station.
We wanted to pay homage to that by implementing a dismemberment system so that corpses and enemies reacted accordingly when subjected to explosives.
Can you talk about how you’ve modified Cyberspace?
Stephen Kick: This goes back to your initial question too about things that we changed. Cyberspace was definitely the subject of a lot of upgrades and changes from the original, which while a very novel and very fun mini-game, was just hard to control and hard to understand where you were going and what the objective was.
Again, we looked to games that came out well after the original System Shock that did it differently and, you know, better. We brought that back to the original. Now you’ve got something more akin to Descent where you’re controlling like a ship and you have six degrees of freedom to move around in the space, to navigate it. The objectives are clear, the directions and where you can go are clear and it’s proven to be much more than just a mini-game. It’s a major part of the critical path for the remake.
We’ve touched on things that we’ve changed. There’s a lot we didn’t change on purpose, as old-school games did a lot less hand-holding than many modern games. You’re gonna be challenged, you’re going to have to figure things out.
The only I’ll give is listen to those audios. One of the things that I’ve enjoyed is that people miss things or they go past something, they don’t know what to do, they’ll die in the game but then they immediately restart to go back. That’s what we want; the game has to be challenging. It has to have that right level of frustration that makes you want to try another time to overcome obstacles.
Do you think the length will be the same as the original System Shock?
Stephen Kick: It’s definitely a lot longer. One of the things we had to change was the placement of the audio logs because in the original the movement speed and just the pacing are much slower due to how cumbersome the movement was. We had to adjust the spacing of all the audio logs because in this modern game, you’re moving at a quicker pace and you’re able to explore a lot more easily, so you’re picking up a lot more logs all at once and the player is just sitting there listening to something instead of playing the game.
We had to spread that out quite a bit, but a new player can expect somewhere between 16 to 20 hours of gameplay if they want to explore and do everything. There’s even difficulty modes that we’ve implemented where if you want a real challenge, there’s a timer that has a real-time effect in the game where you’ll lose the game if you don’t beat it within like eight hours.
There’s some variables that we’ve introduced that are going to either elongate your playtime experience or make it artificially shorter to add to the challenge.
Will there be something like a New Game+ mode?
Stephen Kick: There may be a New Game+ that we introduce after launch. As it is right now, just like the original, there’s a difficulty mode that you can alter.
You’ve got variables for the four parts of the game. There’s combat, hacking, puzzles, and cyberspace. Each of those has three levels of difficulty that you can change at the beginning of the game, depending on the kind of experience you want.
Larry Kuperman: We’re concerned that the users can customize it to how they wish to play. I think that that also adds a whole new level of replayability.
Speaking of replayability, what about PC modding? Is it something you will support, or just leave it to the community?
Stephen Kick: It’s something that we would like to support in the future. System Shock is not gonna be moddable out of the box due to using the Unreal Engine, but I’m sure some individuals will find a way to modify the game not long after launch.
Larry Kuperman: Let me give you a slightly different answer to that. We’re not going to be doing that at launch, but if some of our fans would choose to implement that that is not something that we would in any way stop or impede.
Fair enough. I’ve read some feedback from the forums, Reddit, et cetera. A few people weren’t too happy about the pixelated look. Is there any chance you’d make it optional in the settings?
Larry Kuperman: The art style was a very deliberate choice on our part. We brought back Rob Waters, who was the original artist. In terms of the pixelated look, Nightdive is all about the preservation of classic games and the way they looked and felt. It was a very deliberate choice.
We want players to recognize that at the core, this is a homage to the great games that have influenced so much of today’s gaming environment.
We listen very closely to our backers, particularly our Kickstarter backers and people on all the forums. We’ve seen that on Reddit as well. We understand if you’re purely a modern gamer, if you’re somebody who has never played any of the classic games, the art style is going to appear unusual to you.
On the other hand, if you are somebody who has come up through those games or has familiarity with the way classic games looked and felt, you’re going to look at the art style on it and go, I get it. It’s a recognition that this is a remake of a title that originally came out in 1994, and we don’t want people to forget that.
On that note. Do you believe remaking this story about Shodan in this age where AI is really close to entering every aspect of our lives is a particularly good time to introduce the classic IP to the newer generations?
Larry Kuperman: I think that’s very accurate. It would be great if I said that the timing of this game, which is about a rogue AI, coming out at a time when half the universe is concerned about the development of a rogue AI, was intentional on our part. It wasn’t, but this is certainly the right game for this time.
Will you support NVIDIA DLSS and/or AMD FSR and Intel XeSS?
Stephen Kick: We are gonna support DLSS 2, that’s already available in the demo out there now. We are evaluating DLSS 3. As for ray tracing, that is something that we’re gonna have to look at a little more closely, Due to the art style that we’ve got, ray tracing is not gonna have any noticeable improvement over the lighting that we’ve got.
You’re also making System Shock 2 Enhanced Edition, right? Some people would like to know if you will add the controller support from this remake to that game as well.
Stephen Kick: That’s the plan. The idea is that System Shock 2 Enhanced Edition will be cross-platform, so you’ll be able to play it on Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch like all of the other remasters we do on that team.
Is the controller support going to be available on PC as well?
Larry Kuperman: Yes, absolutely.
Going back to the System Shock remake console ports, will they be out this year?
Larry Kuperman: That’s something that we’ve been working very closely with our publisher to achieve. We expect them to be on the shelves for the holiday season.
I’m hoping you can discuss the news of Nightdive’s $10 million buyout from Atari. How does this affect System Shock and your future as a studio?
Larry Kuperman: We’ve had a long relationship with some of the key people at Atari. People should be aware that Chairman and CEO Wade Rosen, for example, has been involved with Nightdive Studios for years, in a very hands-off capacity, for the reason that he’s a big supporter of what we do.
There was a lot of thought that went into this partnership. One of the motivations on our part was we’ve now partnered with a company that wants us to keep on with what we have been doing only to do more of it, to put that on a bigger stage.
Does this acquisition take off a bit of pressure on the success of System Shock?
Larry Kuperman: It both takes off some pressure and since this will be the first title that will be coming out under the new banner, so to speak, it adds another layer of pressure as well.
Let’s say that the System Shock remake launches as you hope, as a success. What’s next? A lot of people are already doing wishlists for a System Shock 2 remake. Have been thinking about it?
Larry Kuperman: We have. I’m not ready to make that commitment. Our team is really heads down focused on the System Shock game that we have to get out.
But of course, the question about what will be the next game has come up a couple of times. We currently have three other titles in production from our other team. We’re gonna have a very busy 2023.
We have our calendar set for 2024. That said, the success of this game will in many ways dictate what the future is for other titles in the franchise or other titles outside of that franchise.
One last question – is there any news on that System Shock live-action TV adaptation announced a couple of years ago?
Larry Kuperman: It did not pan out as intended. We are currently working with a team, but nothing is final as of yet.
Thank you for your time.
