That there System Shock remake sure seems to have had one of the weirdest developments on any game around. There’s the fact it took so long (almost eight whole years) having been delayed numerous times, but also the fact that at one point the FBI was called in on developer Nightdive. And now, it turns out that a group of devs within the studio banded together to form a sort of secret group to actually get it made.
This tidbit comes courtesy of Nightdive producer and System Shock remake co-director Daniel Grayshon in the latest issue of PC Gamer. The story starts in 2018, three years into development and multiple versions of System Shock having already been cycled through. “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,” Grayshon said.
As he explains it, the remake had run out of money in 2018, saying that he remembers “being so devastated internally. This was the big project that I was working on.” This, however, didn’t stop anyone. Instead, a group within Nightdive formed La Résistance, a “small Discord group,” of devs that were making sure they would get “this game out come hell or high water.”
For Grayshon, that meant he ended up with building Citadel Station, as in the whole thing, in Unreal Engine 4. Grayshon, unfortunately, had no experience in Unreal Engine 4, leading him to go to “websites, finding tutorials, finding whatever I could just to get a foot in the door.” Luckily all of that web-hunting bore fruit, as he managed to get the work done, even with the small changes the remake made here and there.
“It’s still very faithful to the original game, but it has a lot more staircases in it, and a lot more of a spaced-out feel to it … because it just mathematically wouldn’t work [otherwise],” Grayshon said. It all paid off too, as Jeremy was quite a fan of the remake in his review.
