As the CEO and founder of Nightdive Studios, a company that was built on the restoration of the System Shock franchise, I let things get out of control. Ultimately the responsibility for the decisions rests with me. The more that we worked on the game, the more that we wanted to do, and the further we got from the original concepts that made System Shock so great. As the budget grew, we began a long series of conversations with potential publishing partners.

With the switch we began envisioning doing more, but straying from the core concepts of the original title.Īs our concept grew and as our team changed, so did the scope of what we were doing and with that the budget for the game.

We shifted engines from Unity to Unreal, a choice that we don’t regret and one that has worked out for us. We moved from a Remaster to a completely new game. We put together a development team and began working on the game. It was tremendously successful with over 21,000 backers contributing over $1.3 million to the campaign. In June of 2016 we launched a Kickstarter campaign to make the vision into a reality. Done in Unity it was an immediate hit with almost a half million views on YouTube. In March of 2016, Nightdive Studios released our video of our vision of System Shock Remastered. Kickstarter Update from Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios Sometimes You Need To Take a Step Back In Order To Take Two Steps Forward

System shock kickstarter failed