In 2021, Nightdive and Australian streaming service Binge announced a System Shock TV show. Five years later, it appears that the show, at least in that incarnation, won’t be happening, but there’s hope that a TV show or film based on the IP can still happen one day.
Speaking to FRVR for next week’s episode of our ongoing FRVR Podcast series, Nightdive Studios founder and CEO Stephen Kick explained that the System Shock TV show simply fizzled away. At the time of its announcement, Kick served as executive producer on the show, but five years later the show is no longer going forward.
“The company we were working with, they had also licensed the rights to a number of other video game properties,” Kick explained. “I don’t believe that company is still around [in that form]. So that won’t be happening through Binge.”
While Kick didn’t say when production on the System Shock TV show fell through, they did reveal that scripts were completed for a first draft of the series. Additionally, the show wasn’t going to be a usual 22-minute episode affair, but something more akin to short stories within the world of the games.
Kick, who is extremely protective of the System Shock IP, explained that the team at Nightdive didn’t enforce any rules on the creatives behind the series. Even so, back when the show was still in the works, early scripts were promising.
“We did get the preliminary scripts for the show,” he said. “I think that the way it was going to work was there was going to be, I think, six-to-eight fifteen minute long kind of shorts. They wouldn’t be like half-hour long episodes.”
Kick explained that the premise of the show was “interesting”, and they kept in touch with the screenwriter over the course of its short-lived production. “It was really interesting, the direction is was taking. I remember just reading them over and having conversations with the screenwriters. But that’s really as far as the whole thing went before it basically became vapour.”
Despite this, Kick still believes that System Shock as a property is ripe for a TV adaptation with a unique premise and a dense universe to pick from. “It’s my hope that, maybe one day, somewhere else, I would love to see System Shock adapted to either television or streaming or a movie. I think that would be the perfect vessel for that. And there are so many unique and creative ways that you could approach it.”
Kick recalls watching the infamous 2005 DOOM movie with The Rock and Karl Urban during college, and watching in awe as the film switched to a first-person set-piece that actually felt like the games.
“When that scene started playing, we all just started cheering in the theatre and it was like, ‘that’s what we wanted to see!’It was so cool. They could’ve done the whole movie like that, and it could’ve been an art film at that point!… But I think about System Shock in that way. What if you had the viewer take on the role of the silent protagonist? Or like SHODAN or the security cameras?”
Right now, it seems that there is no System Shock adaptation in the works for live-action. However, with the rapid rise in video game adaptations, and similar Cyberpunk stories such as Apple TV’s Neuromancer, there is a hope that the series can make its live-action debut one day in the future.
