Nightdive Studios has made it their bread-and-butter to be the team you want remaking and remastering older games. If there’s any game you loved when you were a kid that’s currently trapped on aging hardware and not easily playable on modern machines, Nightdive is the team you’d want remastering that game.
So far, Nightdive has remastered and remade a number of classics, including its excellent System Shock Remake, The Thing Remastered, the Turok franchise, and Star Wars: Dark Forces Remastered, to name a few. The studio has no intention of sticking to games from a certain era, though, and it is looking to take on games from the seventh generation consoles, namely PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 games.
Speaking to VGC, Larry Kuperman, director of business development at Nightdive Studios, said, “We stand ready,” on the subject of remastering and remaking seventh-gen games. However, both Kuperman and Stephen Kick, chief executive officer at Nightdive, added that there are plenty of considerations for remastering seventh-gen games.
“I would begin asking a couple of questions,” said Kuperman. “Was it Xbox 360 exclusive, or was there a PC version out too? Because that also changes things, the little preservation that’s available. Do we have source code? If so, what’s the quality of the source code? How about the assets? Those are the kinds of considerations that we have there. That being said, there were some really good games that came out in that era that shouldn’t be lost.“
Kick then used the 2008 first-person shooter Haze as an example of a game that he and the team at Nightdive believe should be remastered.
“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, I’m sure you’ve had a lot of time to ruminate and to think about what you would have done differently.“
Kick added that, specifically with Nightdive’s remaster of System Shock 2, speaking to the original developers solved many of the issues they were working on, as they could hear directly from the original creators what steps Nightdive should take to properly recreate the original vision.
When it comes to remastering seventh-gen games, the big hang-up has never been games that were available on Xbox 360 or PC in that era. The PlayStation 3’s unique CELL architecture has been the infamous roadblock that’s kept plenty of PS3-exclusive titles landlocked on Sony’s old grill-looking console.
Despite the challenge, Kick is certain that Nightdive is up to the task.
“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 […] 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.”
Kuperman also added that part of Nightdive’s advantage is their internal engine, which has helped them remaster and remake games from multiple eras of consoles. Hopefully, it turns out to be the ace up Nightdive’s sleeve to make them the go-to studio for bringing PS3 games into the modern gaming landscape.
