Nightdive Studios is ready and willing to start remastering Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games, its bosses say.
Nightdive specialises in taking retro polygonal games that are no longer easily playable on modern hardware, and releasing HD remasters on PC and console – recent releases have included The Thing, the Turok trilogy, System Shock, Forsaken, Doom 64, Quake, Quake 2, Shadow Man, Blade Runner, PO’ed, Rise of the Triad and Star Wars: Dark Forces.
For the most part, the studio focuses on games that originally had PC versions, then ports those to modern systems using its proprietary KEX Engine.
However, in a recent discussion with VGC, Nightdive studio head Stephen Kick and director of business development Larry Kuperman said they were keen to start looking at potential remasters of games that were only released on Xbox 360 or PS3.
“We stand ready,” Kuperman said. When asked how they would handle each game given how many studios from that era have closed down, he then noted there were numerous aspects to take into account.
“I would begin asking a couple of questions,” he explained. “Was it Xbox 360 exclusive, or was there a PC version out too? Because that also changes things, the little preservation that’s available. Do we have source code? If so, what’s the quality of the source code? How about the assets? Those are the kinds of considerations that we have there. That being said, there were some really good games that came out in that era that shouldn’t be lost.”
Kick added: “To your point, though, with a game like Haze – let’s say hypothetically we had access to that, and that was our big title for 2028, right? – We would go to the original designers, and we would say: ‘It didn’t do as well as you had hoped, I’m sure you’ve had a lot of time to ruminate and to think about what you would have done differently.’
“We’ve had these discussions before with [the original] developers on some of these games, and we’ve given them an opportunity to come back and say ‘this is what I would have done’. In the case of System Shock 2 Remastered and a lot of these other games that we’ve been looking at, as soon as you bring them over import them onto newer hardware, some of the problems start to clear themselves up, like frame rate, refresh rate, texture resolution, streaming, loading times.”
Specifically regarding the PS3, VGC asked if the console’s unique system architecture could make it more difficult to remaster games that were exclusive to Sony‘s third console. Kick replied that it would be a challenge, but he was confident Nightdive could get the job done.
“Yeah, definitely,” he replied. “I think that architecture – I mean, I remember the talk when the system was first released, of how difficult it was for developers to ‘get’ it – and that’s a big problem with backwards compatibility.
“This is a little bit of a different thing, but when the PS3 first came out, it was backwards compatible with PS2. And after a while, they were like ‘well, it’s really expensive, because we’re literally putting in the hardware for both systems in order for that to happen’. Again, there wasn’t an elegant solution where the PS3 hardware could run PS2 games. It just was not compatible.
“So yeah, if we get to that – or I should say when – we get to the PS3 era games, it will be a challenge that we have to face. But I think that we’ve had enough experience to where we can do a serviceable job on a PS3 remaster.”
Kuperman added: “The other part is the advantages of having our own engine, and that’s a really big part of the Nightdive story. There are things that we can do because we have our own engine. So I’m going to guess that were we to go down that road, that Sam might figure something out that he could do with KEX.”
Elsewhere in their discussion with VGC, Kick and Kuperman said they were 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.
