System Shock Q&A – The Difficult Journey of Remaking a Classic, from Guatemala to Atari

wccftech.com:

In an age where remakes and remasters dominate much of the game release schedule throughout the year, one of the most seminal games of all time, System Shock, is finally about to come back to the market as a whole new product.

Despite the May 30th launch date on PC, there's not much fanfare around it, perhaps due to the project's known problems and delays (it was first announced in 2015). In a 45-minute-long conversation over Zoom, I recently had the opportunity to go through the whole behind-the-scenes process of remaking System Shock from its very inception with Stephen Kick, Game Director and co-founder of Nightdive Studios, and Larry Kuperman, Director of Business Development.

It was a long and interesting chat, during which we also touched upon the current schedule for the console ports, some possible post-launch additions like New Game+, what's next after this remake, the impact of the recent acquisition by Atari, and even a brief update on the live action TV adaptation. Strap in.

Let's begin by addressing the elephant in the room. People have been waiting to play this System Shock remake for a very long time due to multiple delays. What happened?

Stephen Kick: System Shock has been in development not for seven years but closer to 11 years. Back in 2012, I was still working at Sony as a character artist and my girlfriend at the time, who was also a character artist, decided that she was pretty much done with the video game industry after a pretty short stint and convinced me to pack up everything we owned into a Honda Civic and drive across the border in Mexico.

It was cool. It was really scary. We spent the next ten months going through the entirety of Mexico and Central America. One night, when I was in Guatemala, I