Nightdive Studios: "If we want to say games is an art form, then we have to respect our past"
Christopher Dring
Head of Games B2B
Thursday 10th February 2022
"We just want to make the kinds of games we'd like to play."
Work in the games media long enough, and interview enough studio directors, and you will have encountered that phrase. It's a simple notion: We're not interested in the trends, we just want to make the things we like.
Yet I've never encountered a studio where that sentence is so undeniably true as Nightdive, the team behind popular remasters such as Quake, Shadowman and Turok. It was a company born out of a developer who wanted to play a game but couldn't.
"My background is in character art," begins Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick.
"I was working at Sony Online Entertainment for a number of years, along with my girlfriend at the time, and I got burned out creatively. So we quit our jobs, packed up everything into this little Honda Civic and we drove across the border into Mexico, with the intent that we would travel for as long as we could afford to.
Nightdive started because one man wanted to play System Shock 2
"I brought a little netbook with me, and I put a whole bunch of classic games on there. Six or seven months in the trip when we were in Guatemala, I had this urge to play System Shock 2. I went to go boot it all up... and I just couldn't get it to run. I went to [retro games digital retailer] GOG.com, and they didn't have it, but it was one of their top requested games of all time.
"That led me in this rabbit hole of trying to find out what happened to [original developer] Looking Glass. Where did the rights go? At the end of the night I had an email address for the general counsel of an insurance company in the Midwest, who wrote back to me almost immediately."
The licence holder was interested in Kick
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