System Shock Q&A - The Difficult Journey of Remaking a Classic, from Guatemala to Atari
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.
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