Stephen Kick is having a decent year so far.
In May, Kick’s company Nightdive Studios, headquartered in Vancouver, Wash., finally completed a 7-year journey by releasing a new version of the ground-breaking 1994 PC game System Shock.
System Shock, exhibited on the show floor at last year’s Penny Arcade Expo, was funded through a successful campaign on Kickstarter. It recreates the original game, a notoriously difficult dungeon crawler, as an immersive first-person shooter like its 1999 sequel.
This marks a sort of full-circle moment for Nightdive Studios, which got its start back in 2013 — just over a decade before it released the new System Shock — by digitally re-publishing System Shock 2 for modern computers.
SS2 is one of the most influential video games in modern memory, but its original developer, Looking Glass Studios, went out of business in May 2000. Its assets subsequently ended up in legal limbo, caught between SS2’s original publisher Electronic Arts and the insurance company that had ended up with Looking Glass’ IP rights.
As a result, both System Shock games had ended up as “abandonware.” They were cult classics and well-regarded by a generation of game fans and designers, but like a lot of older video games, had been allowed to go out of print.
By 2012, the only legal way to play either System Shock was to buy a used copy, then use fan-made patches and old hardware to run it. That same year, Kick decided to quit his job as a video game character artist due to burnout, and went on a long trip into Central and South America.
“I quit,” Kick told GeekWire. “My girlfriend at the time and I packed everything into a Honda Civic and we drove across the border into Tijuana.” They spent the next nine months traveling, but one night in Guatemala, they were stuck indoors due to a tropical storm.
“I [had] brought a netbook with me and loaded it up with some classic video games, like Full Throttle, Fallout 2, The Curse of Monkey Island, and the System Shock games,” Kick said. “I got the sudden urge to play System Shock 2, and tried to install it, but couldn’t.”
After unsuccessfully searching for a fan patch or a way to legally purchase SS2, Kick learned that SS2 was out of print, but was also the single most requested game by users of the PC gaming digital storefront Good Old Gaming.
“I reached out to the general counsel of this insurance company,” Kick said, “and sent them an email asking them if they still had the IP. They said they did, and asked me if I wanted to make System Shock 3. I instead proposed that we re-release the games digitally, so people could play them again.”
Kick subsequently returned to North America and co-founded Nightdive Studios in Portland, Ore. in Nov. 2012 with his now-wife Alix, with funding they’d borrowed from friends and family. Nightdive later moved to Vancouver, Wash.
“I didn’t really have a plan at the time, aside from maybe getting some of my friends together from my previous job at Sony and figuring out a way to get [the games] to work,” Kick said. “The only issue was that the trademark that EA had was just about to expire. I came along at the perfect time where I could commercialize the games, and then [the insurance company] could apply for the trademark and secure it.”
Nightdive re-published SS2 on Valentine’s Day 2013. The game immediately sold well, which gave Kick the capital he needed to go out looking for more out-of-print games he could re-publish.
Since then, Nightdive has brought back “at least a hundred” abandonware ‘90s PC and console games via modern digital storefronts. This includes Quake, Forsaken, Doom 64, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and The 7th Guest, as well as a big bundle of educational games from Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert’s Humongous Studios.
Kick’s current focus is on delivering additional content patches for System Shock, including several promised features from its Kickstarter campaign like being able to choose the player character’s gender. He’s still looking for more retro projects for Nightdive, however.
When I asked what Nightdive’s biggest “white whale” was, Kick said the biggest one “is probably No One Lives Forever.”
NOLF, a spy-themed first-person shooter developed by Kirkland, Wash.-based Monolith Productions, has the most famous case of tangled IP rights in the modern video game industry.
The short version is that due to several successive high-profile mergers and acquisitions, no one knows exactly who owns the NOLF IP. It could be Warner Bros., which bought Monolith in 2004; 20th Century Fox, which originally published NOLF through its Fox Interactive label, which means Disney now has the rights; or Activision Blizzard, which absorbed the company that used to be Fox Interactive in 2008.
Kick has been trying to untangle this for nine years now. “We’ve done so much work on that,” he said. “We’ve met with the original developers. We’ve talked to every conceivable party that might be involved, piecing together the chain of title. We have a pretty clear understanding of who owns what; it’s just a matter of getting the various parties to care. Everybody’s doing their own thing right now. It’s a real shame.”
In the meantime, Kick and Nightdive will continue looking for more games that they can put back into print. One of the benefits of Nightdive’s initial success with re-releasing System Shock 2 back in 2013 was that it let Kick go full-time on the company. He now spends “every ounce” of his time on game preservation through Nightdive, in order to continue keeping dozens of older games in circulation and playable on modern systems.
“Are you going to lose a lot of what we’ve learned collectively as an industry if these games aren’t preserved, and are our games going to suffer as a result of that?” Kick said. “It’s wonderful to do this type of work, and it all pays off when someone leaves a comment that says ‘Wow, I never thought I’d play this again.’ That’s the measure of success for me.”
