“Alix quit and started her own plushie business,” says CEO Stephen Kick. How they got there is quite the story.īoth Kick and Banegas had been working as character artists for Sony Online Entertainment for a few years before deciding to head off in a new direction. Now not only do they have the keys to the System Shock franchise, but they’re remaking the original from the ground up. The roads behind the series’ sudden resurgence lead back to Nightdive Studios, a small and dedicated team that has, up until this point, dealt solely with acquiring older games, like Turok and The 7th Guest, and making them playable on modern PCs.įour years ago, Stephen Kick and Alix Banegas were on a trip of self-discovery in Mexico and close to broke. Now nearly 13 years later, a Kickstarter for a remake of the original System Shock has raked in over a million dollars, and a third game in the series is being developed by a team made up largely of developers who worked on the original.

In 1999, Looking Glass released a sequel shortly before closing its doors Irrational Games, which worked on System Shock 2, carried on the design of the series with the critically acclaimed BioShock. The game combined first-person shooter with role-playing systems, encouraging the player to proceed with caution through a space station’s dangerous corridors and think carefully about their every move. In 1994, a Cambridge-based developer named Looking Glass Technologies released System Shock, perhaps one of the most influential games of its time. This feature originally appeared in issue 281 of Game Informer. However, it's actually another company called Nightdive that's responsible for bringing the franchise back from the grave.

Otherside Entertainment just revealed a new look at System Shock 3 at this year's GDC.

Nightdive system shock scandal