It was this initial conversation that eventually led to the formation of Nightdive Studios in November 2012 and later resulted in the successful release of System Shock 2 on GOG.com in June 2013. And for whatever reason, I decided to send out an email to the insurance company asking them what their plans were and having them write us back almost immediately, ‘Yeah, we don’t have a plan. And kind of going on a search for it at that point and discovering that the rights had been split between Electronic Arts and some company in the Midwest. Speaking to Time Extension over a video, he tells us, 'I distinctly remember being in the middle of the jungle in Guatemala trying to boot up the game and having it not being able to run on my laptop. System Shock 2 Cover - Image: Looking Glass Studios It was during this trip that at one point he tried to load up System Shock 2 on his laptop - a title that had inspired him to pursue a career in games in the beginning - before realizing there was no way to actually run the game on his modern machine.

In 2012, after leaving his character artist job at Sony Online Entertainment, Kick found himself travelling through Mexico and Central America with his partner before deciding what was next. For him, it's been a long and winding road, with the connection between the System Shock series and Nightdive going all the way back to the studios' roots and his reasons for starting the company in the first place. Kick spoke to Time Extension recently, as part of a series of interviews with the press leading up to the game's release, and in that conversation, he was surprisingly candid about how its development has impacted him over the last few years and the various twists and turns he has experienced along the way. Now, almost seven years have passed since the Kickstarter was originally launched and it is finally available to the public (via Steam), with Nightdive founder Stephen Kick hoping that all the effort over has paid off as players are now able to get their hands on the game and form their own opinions on it.

Originally reaching its goal on Kickstarter back in 2016, the modernized recreation of Looking Glass Studios' influential immersive sim about a hacker on a ruined space station and a rogue AI named SHODAN was initially targeting a release in late 2017, before being put on hiatus in 2018 after the company ironically let things 'get out of control'. It’s safe to say the development of Nightdive’s System Shock Remake hasn’t exactly been the easiest.

System shock remake kickstarter