‘We never give up’: Remaster kings Nightdive on saving gaming’s past

In its first decade, Nightdive Studios has built a reputation as one of the games industry’s leading developers of remakes and remasters.

Thanks partly to its internally-developed KEX Engine, Nightdive’s output of remakes and remasters of early 3D games has been simply prolific, with notable releases including System Shock, Doom + Doom II, Star Wars: Dark Forces, Turok and its two sequels, Blade Runner, Shadow Man, and more.

Now under the umbrella of Atari, alongside another preservation legend in Digital Eclipse, Nightdive’s studio head Stephen Kick and director of business development Larry Kuperman claim the studio’s future is “so bright, you’ve got to wear shades”.

But behind the scenes, video game preservation is writhe with challenges. In its day-to-day, Nightdive has to solve decades-old license disputes, deal with crumbling source code discs, and the existential debate over which retro video games deserve to be brought to modern platforms, and which should be left to the past.

Because if you glance through Nightdive’s releases so far, not all its games are well known to players today, – or even back then. Recently, for example, it remastered PO’ed, a niche FPS release for the 3DO in 1995. This was followed by another 3DO remaster, of horror comedy Killing Time. Kuperman told VGC that these games were important to members of Nightdive’s team, and that was enough to justify bringing them back.

“Look, if we’re going to talk about game preservation, we’re going to talk about games as art,” he told VGC. “I don’t want to be the person who’s going through the Louvre and saying, ‘OK, we’ll keep this one, those paintings we throw on the fire and let them be gone’. I don’t want to be that person.

“PO’ed was important to certain people. It’s how we came to the title; it was important to Sam. But a whole bunch of people said, ‘I hadn’t even known about the 3DO era, and I didn’t know that there were all of these games’, when we had PO’ed and Killing Time in relatively rapid succession. I didn’t know that there was this whole genre out there. And I loved doing that. I loved turning people on to, ‘well, this is great’.”

VGC recently met with the pair to discuss the challenges behind video game remasters, and what lies ahead for preservation in the games industry.

Before we kick off, as a fan, I have to ask: What happened with your proposed GoldenEye 007 remaster?

Stephen Kick: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was a real heartbreak, just because we had put in a lot of effort into pitching that. We had a dream team all set up, and we got by the MGM/Eon side of things. That took a year. And then it was: “Ok, we’re ready to go.” “Well, did you guys get the rights from Nintendo?” “Wait a minute, we thought you had that.” And then Nintendo was like, “yeah, no third party’s ever going to touch any Nintendo stuff, ever”.

Have you guys tried to work with Nintendo in the past?

Larry Kuperman: Well, oddly enough, we were the very first company to have an N64 game on the Nintendo Switch with Turok, so that got their attention right away. But it didn’t really lead to a partnership or anything. I think that they have – and I’m going to be a little bit more fair than Steve is – a very successful business philosophy that’s worked well for them.

That said, it’s very hard for them to deviate from that. It’s very hard for them to make an exception. And I don’t know whether they knew that it was going to – how should I put this politically correctly – that it was going to leave something to be desired in there. What they put out was kind of minimal. And I’m trying to be fair about it, but I don’t think that they could say, “well, we’re going to make an exception”.

But I can hypothesize that they found themselves in a position where someone was going to do it, and so they had to step up, and they did it. That seems the most likely to me, that there was someone on the horizon, whether it was Nightdive or somebody else, and that they just said “we’re going to do it”.

The thing is this – it’s about our stuff, but it’s about games in general – you can’t do everything well. Look, when they asked us why we didn’t make System Shock 3 from the very beginning – that’s now become complicated – one of the reasons that we didn’t was because we do remakes and remasters. That’s what we do. We haven’t done a new game completely from a whole work.

Can you give me a sense of the scope of Nightdive and your teams? How many projects are you working on at one time?

SK: I’d say there’s probably no less than three at any given time. And we have a really great system now, with multiple teams working together and sharing resources. So when one team is kind of at the art stage, the art team is just coming off their project, and we can kind of move teams around.

How long’s the typical turnaround on a project for you, on a remaster versus a remake?

SK: I’d say typically it’s probably about a year.

LK:  Yeah, I’d say about 14 months on there. I mean, we’d be about right on that. But every game is different.

Obviously, you’ve had two surprises already this year. What does the rest of the year look like? Is it going to be busy?

LK: The future’s so bright, you’ve got to wear shades!

“Look, when they asked us why we didn’t make System Shock 3 from the very beginning – that’s now become complicated – one of the reasons that we didn’t was because we do remakes and remasters. That’s what we do.”

We’ve discussed GoldenEye, but what are some of the other most painful games that you’ve missed out on securing after getting close?

LK: We’ve done pretty well on getting the ones that we’ve sought. We have a couple of major titles coming out in the next couple of years that have been years in the making. So I’m not going to say that we’ve missed out on a whole lot of stuff. And there are always games that we wish we had. But there are two things, there are two parts to that answer.

If you asked me if I would want every old game ever made, the answer is yes. I want them all. I want them all. If you asked me, would I be able to do anything with them in a reasonable time, the answer is no. Between three and five games coming out a year is a pretty awesome pace. Our three teams can only do so much.

We’re all very dedicated at Nightdive. All of us, every person on there, the temptation is to ask people to do stuff that they just can’t do. We don’t want to burn people up. Here’s the thing that nobody ever talks about:  Our turnover rate at Nightdive for this past year was a nice round number: zero. We added people on, but no one left the company. Think about that. Think about what gaming company doesn’t have people running out every year, screaming.

That’s something that’s really important to us. I was employee number three. We brought on Sam Villarreal for the Kex Engine – he’s still with the company. Sam said he needed help, so we brought in James Haley. James Haley said, well, we know this guy, Edward Richardson. They’re all still with the company. They’re all people that have been there for more than 10 years, or 10 years or so.

As much as we talk about the games and the restoration of those things, we’ve made a home for people, so that people join Nightdive with the expectation that this is what they’re going to be doing for however long. And that’s something that’s equally important to me.

So when you have a bunch of potential project options on the table, what determines which one you’re picking up?

LK: We kind of have the ability to pick and choose our projects now, which is great. It wasn’t always that way. But when we go back to the team, we ask, which of these would you like to work on? Who is a fan of this game? Who would like to have a hand in bringing it back? And that weighs into the process.

Just as equally, we consider how financially viable is it going to be? Because ultimately, I think we’ve built up our name at this point that, again, like anything that we do, there are people who are going to buy it.

To refer to PO’ed, for example, as a deep cut is very charitable. As I’ve said a couple of times today, PO’ed is the first game that made journalists ask me, ‘why?’ But PO’ed was profitable for us within the first week. Whether it was because people didn’t believe that we’d actually made the game, people bought it and enjoyed it.

I haven’t even checked our Steam ratings or the Metacritic, because I don’t care about that stuff. But people were having fun playing it. And in the comments I didn’t see any, ‘I’m never going to buy another Nightdive title’ coming from them. People either loved it, or said, ‘yeah, not my cup of tea’, but were content that we had made it.

And our fans really understood that, look, if we’re going to talk about game preservation, we’re going to talk about games as art. I don’t want to be the person who’s going through the Louvre and saying, ‘OK, we’ll keep this one, those paintings we throw on the fire and let them be gone’. I don’t want to be that person.

“I don’t want to be the person who’s going through the Louvre and saying, ‘OK, we’ll keep this one, those paintings we throw on the fire and let them be gone’.”

PO’ed was important to certain people. It’s how we came to the title; it was important to Sam [Villarreal]. But a whole bunch of people said, ‘I hadn’t even known about the 3DO era, and I didn’t know that there were all of these games’, when we had PO’ed and Killing Time in relatively rapid succession. I didn’t know that there was this whole genre out there. And I loved doing that. I loved turning people on to, ‘well, this is great’.

Compared to the early days, have you seen an increase in studios coming to you?

LK: Absolutely, without question. And that’s been a lot of fun.

SK: One of the fun things about our developers do is we’ll go, ‘hey, here’s a list of stuff that we could potentially do’, and sometimes, we’ll get a video a week later like, ‘hey, I’ve got that game running on Switch already’. And I’ll be like, ‘I was just asking you! When did you do this?!’

What’s the current situation with System Shock 3? The last time we spoke, you said it was complicated. Is there any update for fans on that?

LK: Not as yet, not as yet. I don’t know when it’s going to clarify, but it could potentially be within a year. It could be, or it could take longer. That said, what I can say is that we have visions of what we can do within what we control. So you’re going to see a remaster of System Shock 2.

I’ve been asked twice earlier today why we didn’t do a remake, and I said, ‘are you somehow under the impression that because we do a remaster that we won’t be able to do a remake in the future?’ That might be something that I can neither confirm or deny. But there’s going to be content coming out.

So, will there be a future for System Shock with you? Previously, you said the third was outside of your control.

LK: We’ll see what happens. I mean, there’s stuff that we can do within the first and the second [game].

You’re now in the same family as another big remake/remaster studio in Digital Eclipse. They focus mainly on 8-bit and 16-bit titles, whereas you guys focus on more polygonal games. Now that you’re both in the same family, are you interested in working with them on a similar kind of Gold Master series in the future?

LK: I think that the two companies have clearly delineated spaces. I don’t think we’re going to do a mash-up. I’m not planning on anything in the immediate future. Whether it could happen down the road, possibly, I wouldn’t preclude that. But I think we do similar things, but differently.

SK: We do share a lot of resources internally. And there may be some opportunities in the future where they’ll do a collection of games where that particular franchise has evolved to the polygonal 3D kind of thing that we specialize in. We might jump in and do that game, and that will be part of the collection.

LK: While Steve is right, I mean, that’s something that could happen, but we don’t have any plans for it.

It’s all very theoretical at the moment, right?

SK:  Yeah, it’s only been a year. Has it been a year? Or has it been longer than that?

LK:  We’ve been part of the Atari family for, it’s coming up to two years, and Digital Eclipse has only been there for the past year or change. Now, we were aware of them, and we were friends with Mike in particular over at DE. But that was an informal relationship.

“What I can say is that we have visions of what we can do within what we control. So you’re going to see a remaster of System Shock 2.”

One of the questions that I’ve been asked earlier today is how successful we’ve been under the Atari umbrella. And again, we have a third company there that does things that are somewhat different. But we’re all playing within the retro space. Our works are certainly complementary. We probably serve this probably considerable overlap in terms of our fan bases. But we’re never going to do a collection the way Digital Eclipse does. We’re just not cut out for that.

We certainly know what the other person is doing. We keep each other abreast of it. And as Steve started to point out, we share resources. There are people that have done art for both Digital Eclipse and for Nightdive, there are people that have done programming for both Digital Eclipse and Nightdive. If we have somebody that fills a need for them, or if they have somebody that fills in our need, there’s obviously that kind of synergy. Same thing with Atari.

The other thing is that in terms of under the hood stuff, of business stuff, a lot of the marketing sales, our stuff is on sale more regularly, with better outcomes, with more science behind it, because that’s now managed by the team at Atari.

GDC is naturally full of AI talk, and various game publishers pushing their AI products. How are you using AI and how could it help in game preservation in the future?

SK:  Just on the art side of things, if we don’t have the original source asset for a texture, that type of thing, we’re experimenting with the use of AI and filling in the gaps when we’re upscaling things. But we’re not purely using AI. It’s also at the hands of an artist who’s hand-painting and kind of helping them along.

LK: And when we say AI, there are many things that fall under the AI umbrella. We’re not using generative AI, which is what people think of. But filling in pixels to have a higher res, that’s stuff that AI is good at.

SK: When in combination with our normal tools like Photoshop, that type of thing, yeah.

What do you think is the biggest challenge today for game preservation? And what challenges do you see coming down the road?

LK: Well, we’re going to have a big problem just because people have only recently started saving their source code. It’s gotten a lot better, but the two single biggest challenges that we have are from the era prior to digitalization. And when I talk about digitalization, code wasn’t saved. It was saved on physical media.

There’s a game, I can’t reveal the title, that we’ve been struggling to get the source code for. We would love to remaster this game. Absolutely, it would be ‘drop everything, let’s get a remaster of that’. The source code for it, we were able to track down where it is. The source code was saved on magnetic tape, which has since decayed and is now unusable.

That’s on the code side of things. On the legal side of things, documents were preserved by being stuck in boxes. The documents only existed in a physical form. They weren’t digitized. You couldn’t search for a PDF of the contract. So there are games that may not see the light of day, because parts of the paperwork are missing.

What happens in that situation?

LK: Depends on who the client is, but some of them get hung up because they don’t know who owns it. Let’s talk for a moment about ownership of the game. Well, when we talk about ownership, we’re talking about the complete game itself, right? Except that’s not the way it works. Because you may have hired somebody for the music, and maybe you don’t have complete rights.

“We’re going to have a big problem just because people have only recently started saving their source code. It’s gotten a lot better, but the two single biggest challenges that we have are from the era prior to digitalization.”

Maybe you had rights to use that person’s music for a one-year, or a two-year, or a five-year contract that is now since expired. How about the voices in the game? So when you look at those things, there’s a complex paper trail that goes with it. And when that paper trail gets disrupted, Megacorp is very leery of doing any kind of deal. Because who knows who might come out of the woodwork?

So ironically, many preservation issues these days are caused by physical releases?

LK: The big challenge is that records are going to be lost, and people relied on physical media with no sense that the contract that you stored in a box, well, where did you put that box? It’s in a room with a whole bunch of other boxes. Maybe the company was sold three or four times. Where did that room end up?

The other thing is that I think we have more confidence because we can hold something in our hands that we somehow own it when we’ve, in fact, signed an EULA that says we don’t own it. The downer to the PlayStation Network is that all of these people who put disks in their drive realise, ‘oh, it doesn’t work either because the network was down’.

And now, of course, you have Microsoft putting Xbox games on PlayStation that require potentially two networks to be available.

SK: I will say that for the future, though, I think that most of the bigger developers have seen the value of having access to source code for even current games, so that they can remaster with them later. And that’s probably a trend that only started about 10, 15 years ago, probably around the time we got started.

LK: And I remember, I spent a lot of 2011 digitizing contracts that had only existed on paper. The only place the contract existed was in a box in my office. And so we spent a lot of time converting those to PDF and uploading those to the cloud, where they can be.

SK: Typically, too, when we’re, or any developer is making a game, they’re building their assets at double or sometimes quadruple resolution. And now they have a really good reason to just hang on to those source assets, because five, 10 years later, they can just ship the game again as a remaster with the unoptimized assets, because now the hardware can handle it.

Which company in your 10 years has impressed you most with their preservation? And who do you think could do better?

SK: Man, that’s a really tough one. I really love that Capcom has been definitely a lot more open to re-releasing some of their classic games in their original states, as well as doing remakes. All the Resident Evil remakes have been excellent. And then I think GOG got the exclusive release of RE 1 through 3, I believe, the PC version, which is just great, because the more versions of the game that you can play and have access to, the better it is for preservation in general.

LK: I’m going to come up with a somewhat different answer to somebody that we work with pretty closely, Bethesda.

SK: Oh, yeah, that’s true. We should give them a shout-out.

LK: Anything that we’ve asked for from Bethesda, they’ve had at hand on PC. And we’ve done Doom 1 and 2 for them, so you know that it goes back a ways. They’re very serious about that.

One other company that deserves a shout-out for that, although it wasn’t necessarily a game house, is Disney / Lucasfilm. They’ve been an absolute joy to work with, and opened up their libraries to us. They’ve just been great on that.

Last year, you were quite public about your desire to get the rights to No One Lives Forever. In light of Monolith closing, does that change the situation?

LK: I don’t think we really know how that’s going to shake out. I think that’s too recent an event. So I’m not sure.

“I really love that Capcom has been definitely a lot more open to re-releasing some of their classic games in their original states, as well as doing remakes. All the Resident Evil remakes have been excellent.”

But does it make it frustrating that you’ve not been able to preserve one of their titles, and now they’re just gone?

LK: There’s a certain challenge to that, but again, I’m not sure how that whole thing is going to shake out at this point, but I’m still optimistic on that.

SK: That was the word I was going to use too, because any time that there’s just a general kind of shift in the industry, it does open some windows every once in a while for that kind of stuff. So optimism is kind of where we’re at. I think that there’s at least a potential for something good to come out of that, but I don’t know. It’s too recent. I don’t want to keep on falling back on that.

But it’s certainly not something that you guys have given up on, then.

SK: Never give up. We don’t give up.

Nightdive has so far been mainly working on early 3D games. This year, the Xbox 360 turns 20, unbelievably, so how long before we start seeing remasters of that era from you?

SK: The first time I saw the Xbox 360 was in San Francisco. I was going to school down the street at the Art Institute for game design. And one of our classmates was like, ‘I got an Xbox 360. Everybody come over, we’ll check it out’. And it was the launch title, PGR3. And I remember we’re all huddled around the thing, going, ‘oh my god, it’s never going to get better than this!’

And then we ended up going to a studio down here called Secret Level. They did an Iron Man game and a Golden Axe remake at one point, years and years ago. But they invited us to their studio, and we played Gears of War for the first time on that. So yeah, Xbox 360, it’s like, I think it’s prime for remaster territory.

LK: We stand ready.

What considerations would you put into that? That generation felt like a turning point in terms of how many independent developers closed in the transition to HD and how many resources were required. Presumably, remastering those games isn’t a small task. Just last night, I was speaking with somebody who worked on Haze at Free Radical, a great independent studio which struggled in the HD era and didn’t last long.

LK: So I would begin asking a couple of questions. Was the game Xbox 360 exclusive, or was there a PC version out also? Because that also changes things, the little preservation that’s available. Do we have source code? If so, what is the quality of the source code? How about the assets? Those are the kinds of considerations that we have. That being said, there were some really good games that came out in that era that, again, shouldn’t be lost.

SK: To your point, though, with a game like Haze, let’s say hypothetically we had access to that, and that was our big title for 2028, right? We would go to the original designers, and we would say, ‘It didn’t do as well as you had hoped, and I’m sure you’ve had a lot of time to ruminate and to think about what you would have done differently. ‘

Because we’ve had these discussions before with OG developers on some of these games, and we’ve given them an opportunity to come back and say, ‘this is what I would have done differently’.

In the case of System Shock 2 Remastered and a lot of these other games that we’ve been looking at, as soon as you bring them and import them on a newer hardware, some of the problems start to clear themselves up, like frame rate, refresh rate, texture resolution, streaming, loading times.

PS3 is another system that’s also going to be 20 years old in a year. Preservation for that has been not so good, due to the system’s unique architecture. I think there are a lot of fans out there who would love to see Nightdive work on some of those games. Does that present a more challenging prospect?

SK: Yeah, definitely. I think that architecture… I mean, I remember the talk when the system was first released, of how difficult it was for developers to get it. And that’s a big problem with backwards compatibility.

This is a little bit of a different thing, but when the PlayStation 3 first came out, it was backwards compatible with PS2. And after a while, they’re like, ‘well, it’s really expensive, because we’re literally putting in the hardware for both systems in order for that to happen’. Again, there wasn’t an elegant solution where the PS3 hardware could run PS2 games; it just was not compatible.

So yeah, if we get to that, or I should say when we get to the PS3 era games, it will be a challenge that we have to face. But I think that we’ve had enough experience to where we can do a serviceable job on a PS3 remaster.

LK: The other part is the advantages of having our own engine, and that’s a really big part of the Nightdive story. There are things that we can do because we have our own engine. So I’m going to guess that were we to go down that road, that Sam might figure something out that he could do with Kex.