Nightdive’s studio head says he’s optimistic that one day the studio could remaster classic shooter The Operative: No One Lives Forever, despite the recent closure of its developer Monolith Productions.
No One Lives Forever is a first-person shooter originally released on PC in 2000 and PS2 in 2002. The game earned a cult following for its humorous take on the 1960s spy genre, with players controlling a secret agent called Cate Archer who’s armed with a series of gadgets designed like perfume, hair clips, lipstick, and other fashion items.
Nightdive – which specialises in modern-day remasters of polygonal games from the late 1990s and early 2000s – has previously indicated that No One Lives Forever is on its list of games it wants to tackle, but that rights issues have made securing the deal complicated.
These complications could have been furthered by the announcement last month that Warner Bros Games had closed three of its internal studios, including Monolith Productions.
However, in a recent discussion with VGC, Nightdive studio head Stephen Kick and director of business development Larry Kuperman said they were still hopeful they could one day remaster the game despite recent developments.
“I don’t think we really know how that’s going to shake out,” Kuperman said. “I think that’s too recent an event, and I’m not sure.”
When asked if he was particularly frustrated that Nightdive hasn’t yet been able to preserve one of Monolith’s games now that it’s been closed down, Kuperman stressed that the situation wasn’t yet unsalvageable.
“There’s a certain challenge to that, but again, I’m not sure how that whole thing is going to shake out at this point, and I’m still optimistic on that,” he replied.
“That was the word I was going to use too, because any time that there’s just a general kind of shift in the industry, it does open some windows every once in a while for that kind of stuff,” Kick added. “So optimism is kind of where we’re at. I think that there’s at least a potential for something good to come out of that, but I don’t know. It’s too recent. I don’t want to keep on falling back on that.”
When asked if this meant they weren’t giving up on their attempt to remaster the game, Kick replied: “Never give up. We don’t give up.”
Nightdive Studios specialises in remastering retro games that are no longer easily playable on modern hardware.
Previous HD remasters released by Nightdive include The Thing, the Turok trilogy, System Shock, Forsaken, Doom 64, Quake, Quake 2, Shadow Man, PowerSlave / Exhumed, Blade Runner, PO’ed, Rise of the Triad and Star Wars: Dark Forces.
