STUDIO PROFILE
NIGHTDIVE STUDIOS
Remaster at arms: the studio preserving gaming’s most treasured – and esoteric – relics
BY PHIL IWANIUK
Unexpectedly, we have rogue AI SHODAN to thank for the brightest luminary in the game industry’s remake and remaster space. If founder and CEO Stephen Kick hadn’t felt the urge to play System Shock 2 on his netbook while travelling through Central and South America and discovered it was nigh-impossible to buy and run the game on modern systems, there would be no Nightdive Studios.
“After I couldn’t get the game to install myself using the usual tricks, trying to brute-force 64bit functionality, or find fan patches – there weren’t any – I went to GOG, because I just assumed a game like System Shock 2 would be on there,” Kick remembers. “And what I discovered was, it wasn’t on there, but it was the most requested title on site.”
Scrolling through comments on the GOG site, Kick discovered a link to an old G4TV article, using the Wayback Machine. The game’s rights had been split between EA and a company called Star Insurance. “That’s what really sparked my intrigue and made me want to discover a way to kind of bring those two pieces together and bring the game back.”
When Kick reached out, it was assumed he was trying to make System Shock 3. “I’m in the middle of the jungle in Guatemala at the time, with about $5,000 to my name – I’m not really in a position to start a triple-A development. But I pitched them: ‘Hey, let’s do System Shock 2 – we’ll just rerelease it’.”
The timing couldn’t have been better. Star Insurance had just acquired the trademark from EA itself because it had lapsed. In IP law, you need to prove you’re making use of a licence rather than squatting on it, so Star needed to find a way to quickly commercialise the IP. In that moment, Nightdive Studios and the System Shock 2 rerelease were born.
Founded 2012
Employees 40
Key staff Stephen Kick (founder, CEO), Larry Kuperman (director of business development), Alix Kick (financial officer), Daniel Grayshon (producer), Samuel Villarreal (senior programmer)
URL nightdivestudios.com
Selected softography System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition, Doom 64 Remastered
Current projects The Thing, SiN Reloaded, Killing Time: Resurrected
Founder Stephen Kick’s love of night swimming informed the studio’s name, seen here at the nearest thing it has to an HQ
Just as the unruly AI was bested by a hacker, many an unruly piece of software from gaming’s bygone age has been tamed by Nightdive Studios since its formation in 2012, including both of SHODAN’s showings. And in order to preserve gaming’s past, Kick’s team has had to operate at the cutting edge of modern studio practices, working in remote teams without a centralised office space well before the events of 2020 forced the rest of the industry to follow suit.