Nightdive Studios has become the go-to developer when it comes to revitalizing classic FPS games. Over the last three years or so, it’s cranked out an impressive number of enhanced ports, remasters, and even full blown remakes of iconic shooters. Nightdive has rejuvinated Doom, Turok, Blood, and several other notable games in recent years, but one name that is now synonymous with the studio is System Shock. The Unreal Engine 4 remake of the 1994 original finally arrived in 2023 after roughly eight years of turbulent development, and while it may not go down in the annuls of FPS history as an all-time great, it’s certainly an enjoyable experience that rewards Nightdive’s tenacity. In a new interview, System Shock’s director and Nightdive’s CEO, Stephen Kick, has discussed the pressures of the game’s tumultuous development, including scathing criticism from Kickstarter backers, threats of lawsuits, and even getting reported to the IRS and FBI.
Work on a System Shock remake began all the way back in 2015, with Nightdive initially trying to build it on the Unity game engine. It was positioned as a reboot that would keep the story, characters, and locations of the original in tact but implement modern gameplay systems, and it attracted a lot of attention and funding through Kickstarter. However, around two years later, Nightdive decided to make the switch to Unreal Engine 4, and a move that big is always going to push a project back significantly. Then, in early 2018, Kick announced that Nightdive was pressing the pause button on the project, but pledged to return to it and fulfil the promises it made to backers. Later that year, he confirmed work had resumed.
It was then pushed back a couple more times – first from a 2021 release window, and then from a 2022 window – before the System Shock remake finally dropped on May 30, 2023. As you can see, it was not a straightforward development cycle at all.
Around the time of its 2018 hiatus announcement, cynicism around the game really began to grow. With not much to show for three years of work, and now the news the project was on hold, System Shock fans and those that financially backed Nightdive became hostile.
“That was a really rough point in my life,” Kick tells FRVR. “I took a lot of that very personally because we had built up a considerable amount of just community respect and admiration, so much so that many people were willing to risk a not-insignificant amount of money on a project that I knew we were capable of doing.”
“When things started kind of going south and the writing was on the wall that the money was gone and we were going to be left with nothing, I just had to dig in,” he adds. “And a lot of that involved just removing myself from Kickstarter, mostly because every time we put out an update, it was [met with] almost all negative comments.
“That’s one thing I would like to say is, if you see somebody struggling, especially a developer, and you’ve invested money in them, and they’re doing something that you wanted and you wanted to support, the [last] thing you should do is put them down. Leave words of encouragement, leave some words of faith, some optimism, something that the people behind the screens can read to encourage them and inspire them to finish what they started. Because when you leave that kind of vitriol, the thing that it does is make them care less. It makes them wonder why they’re even doing it in the first place if the people who initially supported them are willing to turn on them so quickly.”
Receiving hateful messages and disproportionately harsh criticism is one thing, but Kick and Nightdive were also subject to much more than that. He says that he was personally “threatened with lawsuits” and that the studio “got reported to the IRS and the FBI.”
“It was awful,” Kick recalls. “There was probably a good month and a half where I could not sleep at night because of the weight of everything.”
However, work continued and the game did eventually launch, thanks to a combination of funds generated by its steady stream of remasters of other shooters and “a lot of extra time and a lot of effort” put in by employees. “I’m just amazed that it ever came out,” Kick concedes.
While there are plenty of examples of games getting stuck in long, bumpy development cycles, a happy ending like Nightdive’s is sadly never guaranteed – especially in the current climate. My mind immediately turns to the Perfect Dark reboot, which also aimed to reimagine a classic shooter with dazzling, modern graphics and gameplay, but was axed last year as part of a brutal cost-cutting round by Microsoft. Seven years of work had been poured into the project, but we’ll sadly never get to play it.
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