In a new interview, the developer of the Enhanced Edition of the original 1994 game System Shock, Night Dive Studios, has announced that not only are they working on a full remake of System Shock, but they’re in talks to make System Shock 3.
Night Dive’s Stephen Kick is responsible for updating and re-releasing games such as Sid Meier’s Colonization, The 11th Hour, and The 7th Guest.on Steam. He went through a long journey to bring two other games to Steam: System Shock Enhanced Edition and System Shock 2.
When Looking Glass Studios was shuttered, all of the rights to the games went to Meadowbrook Insurance, a Michigan-based insurance company. While they weren’t interested in doing sequels or even full remakes, they were amenable to re-releasing updated versions of the games. However, Kick had no access to the original System Shock 2 coding, but an anonymous French modder calling himself Le Corbeau released a patch for it to work on modern systems, which Kick appropriated (legally) for free, and the modern update re-release for System Shock 2 was born.
Kick is currently working on a full remake of System Shock, and is working with the game’s original concept artist Robert Waters to bring the game back to life for modern PCs and consoles. ”Seeing the difference between his artistic abilities back then compared to now, and his ablity to reinterpret those ideas, it’s just been really exciting for us,” Kick enthused.
The producer is now negotiating tooth and nail to develop System Shock 3, but it will require backing from a publisher. According to Night Dive’s head of business development Larry Kuperman, ”To really do another game in that series is going to take resources and time and commitment that we don’t have, and it’s really not our core business.”
Not all of Night Dive’s remakes have been successful. An attempt to release an update of No One Lives Forever crashed in a legal quagmire in 2014.
