LESS T_T
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Nightdive Studios, SNEG, Ziggurat, Piko Interactive and others rereleasing classic games
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LESS T_T
Arcane
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I remember reading about that game in Geoff Keighley's (yes, the Doritos guy) classic article about the rise and fall of Trilobyte: http://victorianrobot.tumblr.com/post/13326107595
Astral Rag
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INB4 they rerelease Plumbers Don't Wear Ties.
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Puff piece at VentureBeat: https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/25/nightdive-turns-games-of-the-past-into-a-bright-futurevirtually/
Nightdive turns games of the past into a bright future…virtually
Many game companies open up an office space, get a development team together to work in that office, grind away for a couple of years to create a new intellectual property (IP), then put the product up for sale through retail outlets and digital-distribution sites, such as Steam. Hopefully, profit follows, so they can do it all over again.
Nightdive Studios, on the other hand, took a drastically different path, and its website reveals that core mission: “Bringing lost and forgotten gaming treasures back from the depths…”
By acquiring the rights to already-released games, updating them to work on contemporary platforms, and offering the revamped games through direct-distribution outlets, Nightdive can avoid having to lease office space, and it doesn’t need to employ dozens of local employees to facilitate the work. The development company operates a virtual office environment, which means the people involved in updating and coding the games don’t need to move from their respective countries, or even their homes. All of that contributes to Nightdive’s profits, which the studio uses to, indeed, do it all over again…and again…and again.
A shocking trip
Nightdive was founded in late 2012 by Stephen Kick, now Nightdive’s CEO. Back then, Kick was a character artist with Sony Online Entertainment, but was getting a little tired of making games for others. He decided to embark on a world trip to find new inspiration, and, like many travelers, he brought some games with him — in this case, some classics from his youth.
Above: Stephen Kick
Image Credit: Nightdive Studios
“One night, I was playing — or attempting to play — System Shock 2, and I couldn’t get the game running,” Kick explains. “I went online, attempted to purchase the game (on GOG.com), and I discovered there was no legal way to commercially buy the product. So, I did some digging, and discovered that the IP had been transferred to an insurance company after Looking Glass Studios had gone out of business. I approached [the insurance company] about digitally re-releasing the game on GOG, Steam, and other digital platforms, and that was pretty much the birth of Nightdive Studios.”
Kick says the success with the System Shock 2 re-release was the first step for the newborn company, but it quickly led to “finding other games that were lost to time,” and following the same procedure to bring them back to market. As the classic song goes, “Everything old is new again,” and Nightdive is proving that to be quite true with its retro games. The studio has over 100 products in its catalog — available on Steam, GOG, and Humble Bundle’s Humble Store — including, The 7th Guest, Shadow Man, Space Rogue, and the Wizardry series.
“Our inspiration really lies in all the games that we grew up with and that we remember fondly,” Kick says, “and our desire to replay those games, preserve them for future generations to enjoy, and just to continue, I guess, the stewardship of making sure these games are available for everybody to play again.”
Out of the fog
In March 2017, Nightdive brought out its latest release: Turok 2: Seeds of Evil. This first-person shooter debuted in 1998 on the Nintendo 64 console, courtesy of Acclaim Entertainment, and ported to Windows a year later. Nightdive has already released its Turok 2 update on PC, and is also working on a port to the Xbox One console.
Above: Split-screen multiplayer action in Turok 2
Image Credit: Nightdive Studios
One of the features Nightdive has included is for Turok 2 to be playable on almost any PC. That enables players on a wide variety of systems to still be able to enjoy a stable game with high visual fidelity.
“It’s interesting…we worked in cooperation with Intel, using their toolsets; Intel provides a variety of different software tools to optimize your game performance,” says Larry Kuperman, Nightdive’s director of business development. “One of the things we found with the Intel set, we were able to make sure that [Turok 2] would play on the widest spectrum of computers available, so that if you wanted to fire up Turok on your laptop on the way home, it would play smoothly.”
Another change Kuperman points out has to do with the game’s viewing distance. Because of the constraints of the processors in the late ’90s, the original game-developers used fog to limit the distance the player could see ahead, which enabled them to provide highly detailed graphics at a relatively short distance. However, nearly 20 years on, with the increase of CPU power and video cards, distance-limiting fog wasn’t needed.
Above: Larry Kuperman
Image Credit: Nightdive Studios
“We were able to roll back the fog, and give the game a whole new visual treatment,” Kuperman explains. “These are not games that are intended to compete with the highest-end, highest-requirement games out there, but, visually, they’re certainly appealing.”
Another Nightdive development team is working on a reboot of System Shock. Nightdive has managed to acquire full rights to the game, so the studio is rebuilding it from the ground up using the Unreal Engine.
“The ultimate goal for us acquiring the license,” Kick says, “is to be able to reintroduce the franchise to the current generation of gamers. That really kicked off around the end of June [2016], when we launched our Kickstarter. We were able to raise 150% of our goal for a total of $1.35 million in order to faithfully reboot the first game in the series.”
Their virtual reality
Nightdive’s virtual office environment means that the studio has people all around the world working on projects. As Kick explains, this means that development happens on pretty much a 24/7 basis, with tools (such as GitHub, JIRA, and Slack) enabling collaboration and communication across the team. Software enables managers to track each person’s contribution to make sure everyone is generating what they need to for the project. Kick bemoans some of the tradeoffs — such as the lack of in-office socializing and camaraderie — but Kuperman counters that the distributed office means there are no complaints that a co-worker cracks his knuckles or plays her music too loudly.
Kuperman feels that this is a great time to be in game development, with changes to the creation process enabling end-to-end benefits. With crowdfunding platforms, such as Kickstarter and Fig, it’s easier for a studio to work on a project without needing to make a deal (and share future revenue) with a publisher. Game engines, such as Unity and Unreal, are incredibly powerful, but also free to use until you start selling the product you’ve created. And there are a bunch of digital-sales platforms on which to retail a product, so a developer can self-publish quite easily. Even if the developer opts to work with a publisher to bring a product to market, Kuperman says there are still benefits from those tools.
“A developer can be relatively self-sufficient and come to the publisher, saying ‘Look at what I’ve produced so far. Is this something that you’d be interested in?’ So you have all those things out there — you have a very robust ecosystem for games development now.”
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pippin
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INB4 they rerelease Plumbers Don't Wear Ties.
And they should!
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http://www.gameinformer.com/b/featu...htdive-studios-brought-back-system-shock.aspx
The Tomb Raiders: How Nightdive Studios Brought Back System Shock
The recently released Prey is heavily inspired by System Shock, a series that's making a comeback after years of laying dormant, with both a remake and third entry on the way. This is the story of how a small company is responsible for bringing back a classic from the dead. This feature originally appeared in issue 281 of Game Informer.
In 1994, a Cambridge-based developer named Looking Glass Technologies released System Shock, perhaps one of the most influential games of its time. The game combined first-person shooter with role-playing systems, encouraging the player to proceed with caution through a space station’s dangerous corridors and think carefully about their every move. In 1999, Looking Glass released a sequel shortly before closing its doors; Irrational Games, which worked on System Shock 2, carried on the design of the series with the critically acclaimed BioShock. Now nearly 13 years later, a Kickstarter for a remake of the original System Shock has raked in over a million dollars, and a third game in the series is being developed by a team made up largely of developers who worked on the original.
The roads behind the series’ sudden resurgence lead back to Nightdive Studios, a small and dedicated team that has, up until this point, dealt solely with acquiring older games, like Turok and The 7th Guest, and making them playable on modern PCs.
Four years ago, Stephen Kick and Alix Banegas were on a trip of self-discovery in Mexico and close to broke. Now not only do they have the keys to the System Shock franchise, but they’re remaking the original from the ground up. How they got there is quite the story.
In Search Of Something New
Both Kick and Banegas had been working as character artists for Sony Online Entertainment for a few years before deciding to head off in a new direction. “Alix quit and started her own plushie business,” says CEO Stephen Kick. “She did like video game plushies and ended up doing stuff for DOTA 2. During that time I was kind of like a higher up for the character design on Planetside 2 and we just had so many ambitions and wanted to make our own games, and just didn’t want to be in a corporate environment anymore because it just sucks it out of you after a while.”
The pair quit their jobs and packed up the car before heading down to Mexico with no concrete plan except to just wander for a bit. “We crossed the border into Tijuana and just kept on going, all the way across Mexico,” recalls CFO Alix Banegas. The two were in Guatemala when Kick tried to play System Shock 2 on a notebook laptop he had brought along to revisit some of his favorite games, but quickly encountered obstacles.
“I was carrying the CDs and installing the game, and I’m getting all these errors right off the bat,” he says. “So immediately I go on the internet and start looking for fanmade patches, just anything I can get to get the game running again. I go on GOG.com, it’s gotta be there, and it’s not. There’s no legal way to purchase this game. There’s no way to play it on anything newer than Windows XP. And the whole experience just opened up this sort of mystery trail: This is one of the best games ever made. How is there no way to play it?”
That question eventually led Kick and Bane gas to form their own business dedicated to letting customers play games thought to be lost to the ravages of time.
Taking The Plunge
Kick spent some time researching why System Shock 2 was unplayable on modern systems. He discovered both a growing demand for a playable version of the game as well as the identity of the company that owned the rights to the series. Star Insurance Company had obtained Looking Glass Studios’ assets after the company closed its doors in 2000. Curious about the status of the series’ rights and whether Star had any plans for them, Kick sent them a cold email. Surprisingly, he received a reply the next day. “They wrote me back asking what I wanted to do, if I wanted to make a third game,” he says. “I’m in the middle of the jungle at the time [with] no money, and Star Insurance had me on a phone call with their head council.”
According to Kick, Star was wary about doing anything with the rights due to how expensive it would be to create a sequel. Kick went another route, pitching them on re-releasing System Shock 2 in a playable state on Steam and GoodOldGames.com (GOG). He showed them the sizable wishlist for the game on GOG as evidence that there was a demand for such a re-release. He eventually persuaded Star with the potential profit and borrowed money from friends and family to pay for the licensing fee.
Around the same time, Kick discovered an anonymous modder had created a patch that made System Shock 2 playable on modern systems. “I had already been in contact with friends and programmers to create a team to make this work, and this person in France had basically released this file so that all you had to do was stick it in the system directory of System Shock 2,” Kick says.
Controversy struck when Kick and Bane gas launched their version on Valentine’s Day, 2013. “It was kind of strange when we released because the System Shock 2 community was like ‘How dare this company come out of nowhere and take the work from modders and claim ownership of this stuff?’ It was a big mess,’” Kick says. “I didn’t intend for any of that to happen, and we did not claim that we did the work. We tried to reach out to this person, but they wished to remain anonymous.”
According to Banegas, the first sales report revealed good news in spite of the controversy. “At the end of the month, it was abundantly clear from our first sales report that this was a viable business, a sort of niche that we could hit the ground running with and that’s what we did,” she says. “So here we are.”
After System Shock 2’s success, the venture quickly became a business, one that Kick and Banegas named after one of their shared passions. “During our trip we did a lot of diving, particularly night dives, going down to the bottom of the ocean where it’s completely dark and only having this cone of light from your torch and there’s just so much to see down there, so much treasure and you just never know what you’re going to find,” Kick explains. “So we kind of made that analogy. We go out and look for places where people haven’t been in a long time to bring back these forgotten classics to polish them and clean them up and make them playable again, available for everybody. So it all kind of fell into place. We reached out to other people through various sources who might have connections and we just started accumulating these licenses.”
Moving Forward By Going Backward
The newly formed Nightdive started focusing on acquiring adventure staples and cult classics from the ‘90s. Four years later, the studio has touched up and released nearly 100 titles including Turok, The 7th Guest, and Sword of the Samurai. Kick says they ended up using the studio’s profits to purchase the rights to Sys tem Shock from Star Insurance in August 2015, fully intending to remake the original game.
“We had such a wide network of artists, programmers, developers that we could light the Flame of Gondor and everyone would come,” Kick says. “It was just a matter of these pieces falling into place so we could get started.” It turns out he wasn’t wrong. The Kickstarter campaign boasts recognizable talent from across the industry, including Chris Avellone, a designer who worked on Baldur’s Gate and Fallout: New Vegas, as well as the concept artist for the original System Shock, Robb Waters. The majority of the development team is remote, with members working from San Francisco and New Zealand, while Banegas and Kick continue to run Nightdive out of their home in East Vancouver.
“This is basically the entirety of Nightdive Studios,” Kick says, introducing a small office, filled to the brim with artwork from H. R. Giger, comic books, and model lightsabers. He opens a closet to reveal shelves upon shelves of boxed copies of PC games from the ’90s; several of them have signatures from developers like Tim Schafer scribbled across them in sharpie. “I like to get a boxed copy of every game we try to acquire, even the ones that don’t work out,” he says, flashing a copy of Bad Day on the Midway, a game that Nightdive was close to closing the deal on before the original programmer revealed that he had accidently thrown away the source code. “Now this game just might never come back, might never be playable again,” Kick says, sliding the box back onto the shelf. “Unless you just happen to have a Windows 95-era PC. That was really…that was heartbreaking, you know? We were so close.”
Bad Day on the Midway isn’t the only game lost to time, as Nightdive has also been unable to acquire the rights to other classics, though Kick refuses to say that these are lost causes. “Part of my whole mission is to just not be indiscriminate with which games we bring back, to give everything a fair chance,” he says. “But if it’s too cost prohibitive, we kind of have to put it on the back burner for -a -while.” Though Kick and Banegas plan to keep on touching up and re-releasing games, right now the company’s priorities lie with making the System Shock remake a reality. A great deal of anticipation and expectation both fuels the project and creates unique obstacles, but the duo are excited and ready for the challenge of bringing series back to the spotlight – in more ways than one.
In December 2015, Otherside Entertainment (formed by Paul Neurath, the creative director of Looking Glass Studios) revealed it was developing System Shock 3. This sent ripples of confusion throughout the community, since it was well known that Nightdive had purchased the rights to the series. The answer’s pretty simple: Nightdive gave Otherside Entertainment permission to make the game. “Our relationship with Otherside is amicable,” Kick says. “We licensed them the rights to do the third game. That was just a conscious choice, like it had to be done, right? It’s the majority of the original team. Who better than them to make the next one? “I think ultimately when I look back on it, there was a seed that had been planted in my head from the beginning that we would get this license and eventually be responsible for doing System Shock 3. We’re going to work with the original creators, all this sort of stuff that was pipe dream at the time, and now that it’s all happening and all these pieces are in place, more than anything I’m thrilled to see that Shock is coming back. It deserves it.”
Nightdive Studios has carved out a strange, unique path for itself, one that could have only happened with the opportunities offered by the era of digital distribution. While the developer has proven itself as an outfit capable of preserving games thought to be lost, whether or not it can create a quality game from the ground up is still a question yet to be answered. However, the studio’s passion for revitalizing the past for a new generation to enjoy is unmistakable and a necessary foundation for pulling off the Herculean task of not just restoring a masterpiece but making it as shockingly good as it was all those years ago.
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What I'm concerned about are the copycats. If nu-System Shock and System Shock 3 turn a profit, there's nothing to stop someone with a bigger budget than Kick to start rounding up licenses and try to milk them for those last few drops.
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That somebody is GOG itself
https://www.gog.com/games?devpub=gog_ltd&sort=bestselling&page=1&as=1649904300
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No, I'm thinking of much bigger entities than Night Dive and GOG combined.
I know for a fact that GOG operates on a "path of least resistance" approach to what games they release (i.e. anything that requires effort on their behalf is a no-no), I'm thinking what if there's someone with the finanical and legal clout to just cut through pretty much every legal wrangle regarding any old game?
I know for a fact that GOG operates on a "path of least resistance" approach to what games they release (i.e. anything that requires effort on their behalf is a no-no), I'm thinking what if there's someone with the finanical and legal clout to just cut through pretty much every legal wrangle regarding any old game?
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There aren't really that many lucrative abandoned licenses out there waiting to be snatched up. Most of what Nightdive sells is forgotten shovelware.
But in a larger sense, what you're saying is already happening, and has always happened. What do you think all these Hollywood remakes are?
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Why are you comparing apples and oranges all of a sudden?
I am specifically talking about old games, and the rights to them, that have more often than not been shoved into a drawer somewhere and forgotten, with next to no one giving a toss about them for many years.
The "larger sense" in other fields of media is old hat and well-known, I don't see what that's got to do with this.
I am specifically talking about old games, and the rights to them, that have more often than not been shoved into a drawer somewhere and forgotten, with next to no one giving a toss about them for many years.
The "larger sense" in other fields of media is old hat and well-known, I don't see what that's got to do with this.
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Shoved into a drawer, but for most games you care about, it's a drawer already owned by a publisher who isn't interested in selling.
Like, maybe somebody with more money and connections than Nightdive could have convinced Warner Brothers to give up NOLF or something, but you're talking a handful of things here.
It's all old hat. I don't understand what unique point you're trying to make here really. If somebody salvages an old license and makes a decent-selling game then the money men will stand up and take notice? Of course they will, that's how it works, always has. Might & Magic X happened because of Grimrock and so on.
LESS T_T
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Nightdive opened their own merch shop: https://shop.nightdivestudios.com/
Apart from usual things like T-shirts, they're selling copies of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream signed by Harlan Ellison himself...: https://shop.nightdivestudios.com/products/i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream
...and No One Live Forever poster?: https://shop.nightdivestudios.com/products/no-one-lives-forever-poster
Yeah, leftovers from the time before the re-release plan was squashed by Warner Bros.
Use 10% discount code SCUBASTEVE if you're interested in buying anything.
Apart from usual things like T-shirts, they're selling copies of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream signed by Harlan Ellison himself...: https://shop.nightdivestudios.com/products/i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream
...and No One Live Forever poster?: https://shop.nightdivestudios.com/products/no-one-lives-forever-poster
Yeah, leftovers from the time before the re-release plan was squashed by Warner Bros.
Use 10% discount code SCUBASTEVE if you're interested in buying anything.
pippin
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Mynon
Dumbfuck!
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Surprised that so many folks are clamoring for Turok 2008 re-release... It isn't even a notably bad game per se, it is just as generic and forgettable as Xbox 360 era shooters get. Just proves that every game becomes "better" the older it gets, at least in minds of some people. I bet that Haze has its share of admirers nowadays too.
Blood spiritual successor from Flying Wild Hog would be glorious tho, so here's hoping that there's some substance behind that particular tweet.
Blood spiritual successor from Flying Wild Hog would be glorious tho, so here's hoping that there's some substance behind that particular tweet.
Mynon
Dumbfuck!
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I rate this post "It is a mystery"...
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