Nightdive Studios’ System Shock Remake is one of the best video game remakes of all time, bringing a brilliant-but-clunky classic back to modern gamers while maintaining the core of the original experience.

While the remake is a fantastic way to play the original System Shock, the game suffered through a tumultuous development cycle. Originally started in 2015 on the Unity engine, the game was delayed, engines were switched, and development was put on hiatus as the team started over a second time to create the fantastic game available today.

Development of System Shock Remake took eight years, which felt like an age for backers of its original 2015 Kickstarter, but for director Stephen Kick, it was a rough decade. After scrapping the Unity version, the studio’s first Unreal Engine 4 version deviated heavily from the original game and suffered from feature creep as development continued.

“That first iteration of the Unreal version after we had moved from Unity… it really started to feel, relatively quickly, that everybody on the team, despite whether or not they liked System Shock or not, had a game that they wanted to make,” Kick told FRVR. “And it wasn’t System Shock. It would have been System Shock in name only, and it was becoming very apparent very quickly.”

Kick explained that the decision to start development over again a second time was a “really tough decision” for Nightdive Studios, a team that made its money from smaller-scale releases of classic game remasters. “At that point, we had invested a considerable amount of money,” he said. “In fact, pretty much all of the money we made from Kickstarter [went] into that, and we were left with essentially nothing.”

In February 2018, Kick announced that System Shock Remake would enter hiatus as the team refocused. The original Kickstarter announcement, which is still available here, urged fans that Nightdive were “NOT ending the project” and that the the game “is going to be completed and all of our promises fulfilled”. However, the internet being the internet, fans assumed the project was cancelled, that their investment was wasted, and labelled Nightdive as scammers.

“Yet another scam project and wasted money,” one still-available comment reads. “Thieves never liked to be called out in public,” reads another. “Nightdive, shut down this page. The corpse is starting to smell,” a third.

“Leave words of encouragement, leave some words of faith, some optimism, something that the people behind the screens can read to encourage them and inspire them to finish what they started.”

Nightdive Studios’ Stephen Kick encourages fans to stop being so hateful towards developers.

The online vitriol was prominent with a large amount of it focused directly on director Stephen Kick as the face of Nightdive Studios and the current steward of the System Shock franchise. “That was a really rough point in my life,” he told FRVR. “I took a lot of that very personally because we had built up a considerable amount of just community respect and admiration, so much so that many people were willing to risk a not-insignificant amount of money on a project that I knew we were capable of doing.”

“When things started kind of going south and the writing was on the wall that the money was gone and we were going to be left with nothing, I just had to dig in,” Kick said. “And a a lot of that involved just removing myself from Kickstarter, mostly because every time we put out an update, it was almost all negative comments.

“That’s one thing I would like to say is, if you see somebody struggling, especially a developer, and you’ve invested money in them, and they’re doing something that you wanted and you wanted to support, the latest thing you should do is put them down. Leave words of encouragement, leave some words of faith, some optimism, something that the people behind the screens can read to encourage them and inspire them to finish what they started. Because when you leave that kind of vitriol, the thing that it does it make them care less. It makes them wonder why they’re even doing it in the first place if the people who initially supported them are willing to turn on them so quickly.”

Alongside the barrage of comments across Kickstarter, Twitter and Discord, Kick was attacked personally by so-called fans of System Shock. “I was threatened with lawsuits, um any matter of things you could do to somebody. We got reported to the IRS and the FBI. It was awful. There was probably a good month and a half where I could not sleep at night because of the weight of everything that had some down on the company.”

“The people I didn’t want to disappoint were, obviously, the people who invested in the project or backed the project on Kickstarter, but I also didn’t want this team of developers that I had put together that were working on KEX Engine projects and stuff to have to think about maybe losing their jobs,” they continued. “That was the worst thing that could have happened.”

System Shock Remake’s eventual release was largely due to the fact that Nightdive continued to support their developers working on other projects. While the Kickstarter money was gone, the revenue generated from remasters of Turok and other projects were put right back into the remake project with Kick “running Nightdive during the day and directing as much as I could on the System Shock project at night”.

“A lot of people put in a lot of extra time and a lot of effort to see this thing through,” Kick said, “and I’m just amazed that it ever came out.” The director described the day of release as “a blur at this point” after almost a decade of working on the project came to a close, and the game launched as a critical success.

“I couldn’t ask fr anything more,” the developer said. “It was, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. For better or worse, a lot of people are not going to get to experience… of being basically at Ground Zero and finding their way at the top. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

System Shock Remake has just received two new ports to Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, the latter of which is currently in the midst of a series of patches to bring performance up to snuff for the handheld. While Kick wouldn’t confirm if news on the announced System Shock 3 would rear its head sometime this year, Nightdive has teased that fans should hear more about the game in the future as the game isn’t dead.