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Although my mental conception of time is convinced it came out perhaps three weeks ago, Nightdive's System Shock remake is three years old. The game released in 2023 after a long and winding road through development, consisting of various course corrections and reboots. All in all, it was eight years between the game's announcement—originally as a remaster—and players getting their hands on it.
Which is a long time, but it could have been longer! In the latest issue of PC Gamer magazine, Nightdive producer Daniel Grayshon revealed that, for a while there, odds were decent we would never get the System Shock remake at all.
By 2018, Grayshon had already been at work on various iterations of System Shock for a while, crafting and recrafting areas in accordance with whatever the project's direction was at the time. "I did feel like maybe some people—who were then with us—were trying to focus more on selling the game to a publisher to get more funding rather than actually build the game," he recalls, and after several years of wheel-spinning, things came to a head.
"The project had run out of money [in 2018]," says Grayshon. "I remember being so devastated internally. This was the big project that I was working on." But the devs weren't going to let it lie there—some of them formed La Résistance—a "small Discord group" of guerillas dedicated to getting "this game out come hell or high water."
Which wasn't the easiest gig in the world, especially for Grayshon. He was tasked with building System Shock's Citadel Station—its entire setting—in an engine he had no experience with: Unreal Engine 4. "I was going onto websites, finding tutorials, finding whatever I could just to get a foot in the door."
Not to spoil the story, but he pulled it off in the end, and the System Shock remake came out to much acclaim, albeit with a few tweaks from the original game to make things make sense in a modern engine, like doors that were no longer "paper-thin" or staircases that, well, made sense in physical reality. "It’s still very faithful to the original game," says Grayshon, "but it has a lot more staircases in it, and lot more of a spaced-out feel to it … because it just mathematically wouldn’t work [otherwise]." But it nearly wasn't anything. Thank god for that band of Nightdive System Shock die-hards, eh?
