CEO Stephen Kick tells the eight-year story of his firm’s ambitious reboot of a lost sci-fi horror gaming classic
“Anxious. Excited. Terrified.” That’s how Stephen Kick, chief executive of Nightdive Studios, was feeling when I spoke to him last week, before the launch of System Shock. A remake of the 1994 cyberpunk shooter that inspired lauded games from Bioshock to Deus Ex and Dead Space, System Shock was announced in 2015, but was delayed again and again; at one point it was started again from scratch. So Kick is justifiably nervous. “We don’t yet know how this is going to be received,” he says. “Because it took so long … financially, it was the most expensive project that we’ve ever done.”
Happily for Nightdive Studios, when System Shock was released this week, it became an instant top seller – and critics liked it, too. But this was never a sure thing. Even though video game remakes are enormously popular, as demonstrated by the success of this year’s reimagining of Resident Evil 4, spending eight years rebuilding another studio’s game is a considerable commitment. For Kick and Nightdive, System Shock is more than just money-spinning digital necromancy. It is one of the reasons for the studio’s existence.
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