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 ," 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."
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