Opinions.
When you play as a woman, Shodan has to refer to you as human instead of insect. Re-recording those lines costs a lot of money. They also have to hire a gender equality consultant.
It was in the game last time I played it. Think she said it whilst I was walking down a corridor or whatever.
Not if the bathrooms are gender neutral.
That's identity erasure, shitlord.
Dev Spotlight - Stephen Kick
Hey Backers! My name is Stephen Kick and I’m the CEO and Founder of Nightdive Studios- I’m responsible for the day to day operations around the studio and making sure our developers have everything they need to do their job to the best of their abilities. I’m also part of the team that negotiates the licensing rights to the many games in our catalog, meets with our many partners, and ensures that we revive and re-release as many classic PC games as possible.
My Career
I remember looking at college applications during my senior year of high school and not being particularly motivated to spend another 4 years in school. It didn’t help that at the time I really didn’t have an idea of what I wanted to study but like many people my age I found myself completely infatuated with gaming. After seeing an ad in PC Gamer for a school in San Francisco that offered degrees in Game Art & Design, I decided I’d go and give it a shot. After completing my 3rd or 4th 200 page game design doc I decided I’d have more fun working on Character Art and refocused my efforts. After graduation I quickly found a position as character artist at a local indie studio, and shortly after that employed at Sony Online Entertainment. I worked on a few MMO’s including Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures and PlanetSide 2 before deciding to quit and spend about a year traveling.
This is where Nightdive Studios was born
My journey took me through Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, and finally Panama over the course of 9 months. During that time I revisited a few of my favorite classic games, Full Throttle, The Curse of Monkey Island, Fallout 2, and many others. It was when attempting to install and replay System Shock 2 that I discovered there was no legal way to purchase the game, or play it on modern operating systems. The fact that one of the greatest PC games of all time was no longer available concerned me, so I set out to discover what had happened to the franchise. My quest led me to discover the rights were being held by an insurance company in the midwest, and after speaking with their legal counsel, I negotiated a deal that would grant me to rights to redistribute the game. On February 13th 2013 I launched System Shock 2 on GOG.com - and Night Dive Studios was born. This November will mark our 4th anniversary, and with almost 100 games published on Steam and multiple development teams currently working to bring back forgotten classics, we begin our most ambitious project yet, a faithful remake of the original System Shock.
My Life
I grew up an only child in a small town in Massachusetts just South of the New Hampshire border. Consoles weren’t allowed in the home so when my family purchased a personal computer, my life was forever changed. My first two games were NHL 95 and LucasArts’ Dark Forces, but many more would follow. After work my dad would come home and we’d play adventure games together for hours. We’d solve the puzzles, print out screenshots, and paste them in our own detailed guides that read like journals from some mythical quest. Video games were rapidly consuming my attention and often times in class instead of homework I’d be planning the perfect base layout for a future MP game of Command & Conquer: Red Alert, or using Red, Blue, Yellow and Green Crayola markers to lay out my strike pattern for an upcoming mission of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six.
With Chris Avellone
I remember going to my local Electronics Boutique for a midnight release of Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II and being the only person there, going home, installing the game and becoming so distraught at the poor performance that I spent the next 3 weeks mowing every lawn in the neighborhood to save up and buy my first 3D accelerator, a 6MB beast that blew my mind. It made the newly released N64 look like a kid’s toy. When Quake was released I started getting into creating custom levels and my interest in game development started to grow. When I wasn’t gaming, I was playing sports. I played soccer, basketball, lacrosse, ran cross country, and competed in track and field. If gaming hadn’t been such a strong influence on me there’s no doubt I would have pursued a professional career in athletics.
Other Thoughts
My favorite part about this journey I’ve taken has been hearing from you, the fans of classic games who have reached out and shared their love for the medium. Everyone has such wonderful stories of how they were introduced to video games and your appreciation for what we do is what makes it all worth it. Our goal from the very beginning was to scour the depths of PC gaming history and recover and restore lost classics for all to enjoy once again, and with your help we’re able to take it to the next step. I can’t thank you all enough for your support!
- Stephen Kick
System Shock Remix Album: Celldweller & Blue Stahli; New Backer Missions
Hey everyone! Jonathan (audio) here again. I am really excited to talk more about the System Shock remix stretch goal; it’s been my passion project during development. Just a recap: the $1.9m stretch goal for the project is to have the soundtrack from System Shock 1 remixed by a roster of fantastic musicians to be released along with the game. There is also an achievement (more on these later in the update) in which we will implement these remixes as an alternate soundtrack for the game, perhaps in an unlockable mode. We've still got a little ways to go, but if you help get the word out, I'm confident we can get this remix album goal met and begin getting some awesome remixes sent to your earholes! Now let me get the thrill of telling you a little about two of the artists that we will be working with when this stretch goal is reached:Celldweller and Blue Stahli.
Celldweller
Celldweller creates a fusion of digital and organic textures: intricately designed soundscapes constructed from Drum & Bass, Electro and Modular Synths, woven together with aggressive Rock, Metal and Orchestral elements. Celldweller ignores genre boundaries and creates a pioneering vision of the future of electronic music. His focus on space themes and Sci-Fi, his fantastic synth sounds (his modular setup is beautiful), and his dark aesthetic make him a perfect fit for System Shock. His Transmissions albums have been a huge inspiration to me for System Shock’s synthetic sound.
Klayton, the multifaceted producer behind Celldweller, not only creates artist albums that have garnered an intense cult following, but is well known in the media industry for his music appearing in hundreds of major Film, TV, Video Game & Trailer projects, from Killer Instinct Season 3 to John Wick, Lucy, Robocop, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows to Dead Rising 2 & 3, Deadpool and more.
Klayton (Celldweller) in the studio
For more information on Celldweller, visit: http://facebook.com/celldweller
Blue Stahli
The music of Blue Stahli is a roller coaster ride derailed mid-journey, landing on another track, only this time rolling backwards. Just when you think you know what Blue Stahli has in store for you, the floor drops out from under you and sends you straight into a cacophonous amalgamation of sounds you never imagined could be combined. Sometimes aggressive, artistic, and full of piss’n’vinegar, other-times vividly cinematic and wildly epic. He covers a huge variety of sound in his music; check out his Antisleep albums for a taste of what’s in store.
The sole member of Blue Stahli, Bret, comes from a background of fetish burlesque troupes, drag queen fronted punk bands and believes that he is visited in his dreams by the ghost of William S. Burroughs. Blue Stahli’s music has been heard in Film/TV/Game Projects like: Taken 3, X-Men, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Star Trek, Expendables, Call of Duty, American Horror Story and more.
Blue Stahli in the studio
For more information on Blue Stahli, visit: http://facebook.com/bluestahlimusic
And for those of you who aren't already fans, Celldweller and Blue Stahli have put up some free tracks for you guys to listen to! Go ahead and download them here:
Celldweller and Blue Stahli free mp3 pack [bit.ly]
New Backer Missions (Achievements)
We are now including more ways for you backers to earn achievements! We really want you guys to unlock some of these higher tier achievements, so we have included some really easy ways for you earn points. These come in the form of helping spread word about this Kickstarter campaign toward the end here. Use this chance to retweet our tweets, share and like our Facebook posts, and tweet with the #SystemShock hashtag; you’ll earn some neat unlockables and you’ll help us keep word about the game going, so that we can make the game as good as we possibly can! You're also up to 10 achievement points, so we are going to open a public channel on the Nightdive Studios Discord server for you guys! Keep posted for this, and keep spreading the word to unlock more!
Nightdive Studios Facebook
Nightdive Studios Twitter
System Shock Twitter
Feedback
Just a reminder that we have a ton of feedback to sort through on Kickstarter! If you want to make our jobs easier when it comes to tracking and answering feedback, though, feel free to post on Reddit! Things are much easier to track and respond to on there.
System Shock subreddit
