"It Just Felt Like We'd Come Full Circle" – Nightdive Studios' Stephen Kick on System Shock 2, Switch 2, Preservation, and More

RPG Site: For those who aren't aware, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Nightdive Studios?

Stephen Kick: I am officially the studio head at Nightdive and I've been doing this for probably about 13 years. Do you want a little bit of background on how the studio got started?

RPG Site: I wanted to ask you a few questions specifically about that, so yes.

Stephen Kick: I'll try to summarize it. It's a story I love to tell because it's a fun story that not many people have had the opportunity to experience and just kind of how I got here is pretty wild. I was in the uh in the video game industry for a number of years. I worked at Sony as a character artist. My fiancee at the time, we got kind of burned out working in the industry so we decided to take a break and we drove our Honda Civic across the border into Tijuana, Mexico and basically traveled through Mexico and Central America for 10 months. During that time I was rediscovering my love for PC gaming and so I got to replay a lot of my favorite games on an old laptop. Fallout, Full Throttle, curse of monkey island, and one night i tried to play System Shock 2 and i couldn't get it to run. and i also couldn't find a way to legally download it or at least a working version of it.

RPG Site: This was on a Chromebook right? 

Stephen Kick: Yeah it was just a little Google Chromebook. We tried to pack as lightly as we could because the goal was to be able to fit everything that we had into the trunk of the Honda so that nothing would be left out in the back seat for obvious reasons. The laptop we brought was just this little underpowered machine that was only good for text documents and 90s era PC games.

Anyways, I decided to try to figure out what happened to the rights of the game. So that night, I'm in the middle of Guatemala in the jungle, and I came across an old article from G4TV about the history of Looking Glass. How the rights to their games were split up between an insurance company in the Midwest and EA which published a lot of their games. So I reached out to the general counsel at this insurance company called Star Insurance, and asked them if they have the rights to System Shock. They wrote back almost immediately saying they did, and if I was interested in working on System Shock 3.

As much as I would have loved to have done that back then, I just knew I wasn't in really any kind of position to do so. I recommended that they just re-release the old games, and that I could facilitate that. It took a couple of months but we agreed on terms and they sub-licensed the rights to me. I then went directly to GOG. I said, "Hey I've got the rights to your number one most requested game. Let's put it out there." and they did it. It was like Valentine's Day 2013, I think, either 2012 or 2013, and it ended up just being a massive hit. From then on, I basically had been devoting my time to going out and trying to find other lost classics or games that have been kind of left to the wayside, and remastering them, porting them to new consoles so that everybody can enjoy them again.

RPG Site: Did GOG actually believe you when you approached them with System Shock? 

Stephen Kick: Not at first. I had to basically redact the licensing agreement that I had with Star insurance Company and send that to them to prove that I did in fact have the rights to do that. I certainly don't blame them. I mean, at that point, I was just like a random guy, and I didn't even have a way to contact them officially. I just went through the "contact us" box on their website, and it got forwarded to somebody in marketing. It kind of went up the chain at that point, and then yeah.

RPG Site: If I recall correctly from other interviews, you said once you had the license, you had to borrow money so you could launch the project. At that time you just had a few thousand dollars and were back from your vacation at that point and you needed to get this project on the road.

Stephen Kick: Yeah, that's a detail for sure. I think that we had like a couple thousand dollars by the time we got back, and what ended up happening, is the opportunity arose. I had the licensing agreement and then I went to friends and family and just said, "Hey would you lend me some money? I think this is a really cool opportunity." What was really great, is that my friends just kind of implicitly gave me the money not expecting anything back. They were like, "Hey you've always been there for us. Don't worry if this goes South. There's no pressure to pay us back." I was very fortunate to be in that situation, and then I covered a lot of it myself because as soon as we got back, we just immediately started working as contractors for various indie companies doing artwork on the side to kind of rebuild some some equity so that we could move out of my wife's parents house.

RPG Site: How did you get into Sony before that and what led you to joining them?

Stephen Kick: When I was 18, I was living in Massachusetts and really didn't have any kind of plan as to where I wanted to go to school, or what i wanted to pursue. I was reading the latest issue of PC Gamer, and there was an ad in there about a school in San Francisco called The Art Institute of California - San Francisco. They were offering a game art and design degree. I applied and got accepted. We would find out 10 years later that these for-profit schools were a really bad idea. The tuition was insanely expensive, but I did learn a lot. There were industry professionals that were giving the classes, and originally I set out to be a game designer. I really loved to write, and come up with the ideas for games and the mechanics, so that's how I got started.

When I got to school, we had to take a number of classes. We took programming classes, animation, art, all kinds of stuff, and I really gravitated towards 3D modeling once I got there. It was all I did. I just ate and breathed Maya and ZBrush, and I built a really strong portfolio. I pretty much got hired right out of school.

My first job was at an indie company called Paleo Entertainment in San Diego, and we worked on one of the very first Crytek 2 Engine games outside of Crytek. It's still on Steam. It went through a number of name changes. It's called Drug Wars. I think it's still on there.

After that, I got an art test at SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) because my fiancee got a job there right out of school. We met at the art institute, and she graduated a bit before I did and got her first job in San Diego at SOE. I kind of cut my teeth at this indie studio and then after probably about a year, I went and I joined SOE. I took an art test and got hired to work on an MMO over there. 

RPG Site: Is it accurate to say that Nightdive Studios formed because of System Shock 2?

Stephen Kick: Yeah, absolutely.

RPG Site: That was in 2012 and now in 2025 you're going to be releasing System Shock 2 25th anniversary edition. This is not only on PC but also on consoles. Does this feel like a full circle moment for you?

It does, and there's been a lot of people that have asked: "Why is this taking so long? This game got announced around the same time as the Kickstarter I believe, which was like in 2016. It initially started off as an Enhanced Edition that was going to be PC only with a number of quality of life improvements beyond what the community had had been graciously offering up to that point, and we've just gotten involved to such a point at Nightdive where we've have the right team, and we've got the experience to really bring this to that next level which is redoing all the cinematics, updating all the art assets, the animations, and completely redoing the multiplayer code so that it actually works. Not only does it work really well, but it works cross-platform through Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and PC so that you can have a really true and stable 4-player co-op experience. 

So it just felt like we'd come full circle. We started from just basically just me releasing games using off-the-shelf emulators like DOSBox and ScummVM to us having our own fully-fledged proprietary engine that we port our games to, and we've really kind of hit that next level. We thought System Shock 2 was the perfect game to showcase that.

RPG Site: Okay, so I want to touch on two topics here. You said redoing all the cinematics. Is this going to be the same as when you did it for Quake or Quake 2, where you hired a bartender, and he helped with the Dark Forces remaster?

Stephen Kick: Yeah, that's him. That's Bren.

RPG Site: The second thing you mentioned is online multiplayer with PlayStation, Switch, and Xbox. Obviously most of the work for the release would be just doing the enhanced edition on the KEX engine, but with your own proprietary engine now, how much extra work goes into getting the game onto consoles in general?

Stephen Kick: I won't speak for the developers. I'm sure porting to consoles is difficult in its own way, but the way that our KEX engine has been built has, I guess, removed a lot of the typical roadblocks you would have if you were starting with just a game engine and trying to port it to consoles without there being like SDKs, that kind of thing.

I would hesitate to call that a challenging thing for our team anymore. I think the biggest lift on this game was essentially rewriting the multiplayer code.

RPG Site: Do you have specific people who do the specialized platform feature implementations like implementing HD Rumble on Nintendo Switch, maybe touchscreen support, DualSense haptics, and also having a game Steam Deck Verified? 

Stephen Kick: Yeah, I'd say the one thing that we're a little bit behind on now, you mentioned, was probably the PS5 DualSense controller. But everything else we're very familiar with like Steam Deck compatibility. There's a couple people on our team that are very passionate about gyro controls and the Switch, so all of our games typically have that functionality.

There's kind of like a checklist when we go per platform as to what features we're going to implement.

RPG Site: At GDC, Adam played System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster and he spoke to Larry and Grover from Nightdive. They explained why this ended up being a remaster project as opposed to a full remake. Right now on console, PlayStation and Xbox owners can play System Shock Remake and they can also play System Shock 2 through the upcoming release. Nintendo Switch owners don't have the option to play the first game right now. Are there any plans to bring System Shock Remake to Switch 1 or Switch 2 just so that both games are available there?

Stephen Kick: Yeah, that's the idea. We haven't announced anything yet in terms of bringing System Shock Remake to Switch, but it's definitely something we want to do.

RPG Site: I brought up Switch 2, but I want to go back a bit to when the Dark Forces remaster came out. John from Digital Foundry showed how the game has some issues when it isn't played at 72hz or 144hz. This basically made it so the Steam Deck OLED set to 72hz would be the best way for me to play that remaster, and I've since played every Nightdive release on that handheld. I've been thinking of how awesome it would be to play Nightdive's games on Switch 2 with 120fps and even potentially mouse controls. This isn't me asking you to reveal new ports, but just to express interest in how I'd happily pay for upgrades if possible for older Nightdive releases on Switch 2.

Stephen Kick: Okay, well you know what? I'll write that down really quick. One second. When I saw the mouse support for Switch 2, that was kind of what went through my mind as well. It was like, oh boy, a lot of our games, that's how they were originally intended to be played. So it would be great just to even have that option.

RPG Site: I want to go back to the KEX engine now. It was made for Turok right?

Stephen Kick: How the KEX engine kind of came to be was, we had been, again, doing off the shelf re-releases of games that didn't go beyond that Windows 3.1, Windows 95 kind of border just because we just had no programmers. We didn't have any engineers working at Nightdive at the time. When we started to look at possibly getting the license for Turok, we knew that we were going to have to kind of reach that next stage in our development as a studio. So I initially started searching on the internet to see if anyone had done any mods for Turok. Were there any compatibility fixes and was there anything to make this game playable on modern PCs. That's when I came across Sam's website, and he was working on a full port of the game using his own engine. 

So I reached out to him, and just asked him if he'd be interested in doing something like that full-time and making it official. That's basically where it all started. Sam Villarreal joined on and then he had a bunch of friends in the DOOM community that he liked to work with who he recommended we bring on, and we brought them on. Suddenly we had an engineering team and Sam was able to officially release Turok with the KEX engine.

Since then it's gone through a lot. I think they're like on version four or something like that now internally. But yeah, that's how the KEX engine came to be.

RPG Site: Is it much easier for you to work with older games thanks to the KEX engine, or are there still big issues for say spaghetti code? I'm curious if just having the engine is a big headache out of the way now for these releases.

Stephen Kick: Well, the engine allows us to basically take the original code for a game and implement all the high level rendering features that are required for porting the game to consoles and it allows us to use controllers and different inputs and all kinds of things.

So really, having access to that original code is the biggest obstacle that we face these days and that anyone faces when they're looking at bringing back an old title. Sometimes, we get lucky and the code base is clean, it has comments, it builds on maybe an old version of Visual Studio, and it can be upgraded and basically plugged into the KEX engine.

Other times it may not be in as good of condition as the programmers would like, and it requires them to go in and update things accordingly. Then the worst case scenario is that we can't find code at all, and we have to spend a tremendous amount of time reverse engineering things. Going back to System Shock 2 25, that's what we had to do there. We could not find the original source code. So the game had to be more or less reverse engineered.

RPG Site: So you mentioned how with the KEX engine you ended up having an engineering team. How many people are now at Nightdive full time?

Stephen Kick: Over 40. We're a pretty decent sized studio. 

RPG Site: With that many people onboard, can you say how many projects you have on at once? 

Stephen Kick: I'd say no less than three at any given time. You've seen our release schedule. Last year, I think we did five games. We like to keep up that pace. It's a lot of work. But as we get bigger and bigger games, I think that it'll slow down a little bit, but the games that we do release will be much grander in scope and scale.

RPG Site: I think it does feel like that because you have some smaller scale projects, but you also have some huge ones. I wasn't familiar with The Thing: Remastered before you announced it. I had no idea this game existed, but when I played the remaster, it felt like a big step up in terms of what I'd expect from a Nightdive release at that point. It was also a big success for the studio. What do you think contributed to its success?

Stephen Kick: I think the licensed component of it was a big reason why it was successful. I mean the movie has gotta be in my top three favorite movies of all time. I think there's a lot of people out there that feel the same way, and there's a lot of people that played the original. I think the original version that was released in the 2000s sold over a million copies. There's a lot of fans kind of built in. You couple that with the strength of the IP, people still talk about the movie. There's still projects being made with that name and it gets referenced a lot. So there's just that familiarity that people have with it. I think it really helped propel The Thing: Remastered to be one of our best selling games.

RPG Site: I also hadn't heard of or played two other Nightdive projects until the remasters. They are Killing Time: Resurrected and PO'ed: Definitive Edition. Should we expect more projects like these in the future? I feel like these are passion projects because I'm glad they've been preserved and brought to modern platforms, but I don't know how much the general public wants them. 

Stephen Kick: The real benefit of our business model is that we can kind of pick and choose what we want to work on. The monetary side, as nice as it is, is not the factor that kind of goes into choosing these things.

For PO'ed, which is basically, it's like you're pissed off. I think that's the moniker. Sam asked that I track the code down for him for his birthday as a gift and I did. I found the guys, the original developers, and they still had the code. We were able to do a licensing deal to get the code in hand and Sam basically did that title from start to finish because it was one of his favorite games.

It was a big surprise for a lot of people. I think one, because not many people knew of it, and then two because, "You guys just did a Star Wars game. What is this?" That brings a lot of joy to me personally because I hope that, and I would guess that probably more people have played PO'ed now than when it originally came out. 

There's just a piece of gaming history that we plucked, that we've preserved, and it's there whether you like it or not. Who are we to say what constitutes art, right? Somebody might say that's one of the best games ever made and that's all that matters to us.

RPG Site: A friend of mine will never let me go if I don't ask you about two specific games. So let me just get that out now. One of them is Blood II and the other one is No One Lives Forever. Do you have any comments on either of them?

Stephen Kick: (Laughs) Well, Blood II is just, it's an interesting prospect to us because we've, we've talked to the original developers of Blood II and, you know, they themselves said, "We didn't have enough time. We didn't have enough money and this is not the game that we wanted to release."

To me, that's the perfect game for us right now, because with titles The Thing: Remastered and Shadow Man Remastered, and even a few others, we've had the privilege of working with the original developers, and we've asked them that same question, "Hey, now that we can do whatever we want, what would you have done if you had the time with the resources to see this through as you wanted?"

In regards to Shadow Man, there were entire levels that were cut. There were voice lines, there was music, there was all this supporting data that we found alongwith some design documents and with those, and with the help of the, again, the original developers, we were able to recreate those levels as best to our ability so that the game was finally finished after all these years.

The Thing: Remastered was the same way. We added a lot of stuff. We cleaned up a lot of mechanics, given the 20 some odd years that it's had to kind of percolate and, and get the feedback, from all the people who have tried it. I think Blood II would be the perfect thing for us to go in and treat the same way.

RPG Site: Back to No One Lives Forever, didn't you get it as a gift at DICE last year?

Stephen Kick: How did you know that?

RPG Site: I do my research.

Stephen Kick: It's funny because people gift me that game all the time. It happened at DICE, and one of the guys that we met had worked at Vivendi and 20th Century Fox or Fox interactive and he's like, "Hey, if I see you at DICE, I've got something for you."

When I showed up, he had a brand new sealed copy of the game. Then of course, I've got that sitting on the table and everybody at DICE is a game developer. They all came over and were like, "Oh are you finally working on this?"

I was like,"No, no, it's just a gift."

The latest copy of No One Lives Forever I got was like two weeks ago. A friend of mine sent me a graded copy of the PS2 version and said, "This could go in your collection so when you finally do it, you know". That's all I can say. It would be a dream come true to work on it. I'll always fight to make that happen.

RPG Site: How have things changed for you under Atari?

Stephen Kick: It has freed us up considerably to work on the games because with every studio, you've got a lot of ancillary parts of the business that require a lot of attention like human resources and finance and everything else that goes into supporting a business. Now, we don't have to really worry about that stuff as much, because Atari has brought their team in to handle a lot of it. That includes legal as well which is a big weight off of our backs.

Myself and my head of operations and even our lead biz dev guy, Larry, we're a hundred percent focused on the games and the developers now, and we don't have to put as much energy into those other facets of the business. It's really been wonderful.

RPG Site: How has it been working with New Blood?

Stephen Kick: Dave (Oshry) and I go way back. I met him at one of the last E3s and we were doing an event for GOG actually. He was demoing the remastered version of Rise of the Triad (the 2013 version) and that's where I met him and we've been really good friends ever since. Any time that we have an opportunity to kind of cross over and work together we'll do it. Rise of the Triad Ludicrous Edition was a great example.

RPG Site: In past interviews, you've mentioned how Nightdive, which is now 13 years or so old, has seen a few people who have moved on, but a lot of them come back with everyone else sticking with the team thanks to the work culture being good. When you started the company, did you ever think things would reach this stage where you have dozens of people who are still with you, and have huge companies that want to work with you? 

Stephen Kick: I had no idea where this would lead. I was just overwhelmed by the response of just System Shock 2 coming out that to me, it was like, I get to be in this world of classic games, the world that I grew up in, and help support the artistic vision that the original developers had, and hopefully expose a whole new audience to this stuff like that. It was just a dream come true.

I didn't really treat it like a business until much later. It was always just a thing that was driven by my passion for video games as an art form as a medium for expression. You can't have what we have now without what's already been built beforehand and having a part in that at all has just been kind of a life changing experience.

So to have, and to attract the kind of people that we have, and have them be here for as long as they have, I think is just a testament to the work we do. It's important and the people that help make the games at Nightdive, they clearly love it as much as I do.

RPG Site: Has it now reached a point where there are more people who want you to bring their games to modern platforms than you have time to do so?

Stephen Kick: Oh, absolutely. We've had that problem for quite a while now, actually.

RPG Site: That's a good problem to have.

Stephen Kick: I'd say that probably around the time of DOOM 64, once we did that title, it was like, we could no longer afford to go out and find games. It was more like, how are we going to handle the influx of people coming to us and asking us to do their game?

So the whole thing kind of flipped on us where we weren't looking for work. We were looking for people to come and work for us to do more games. It's been like that ever since and it's great.

RPG Site: I played the original DOOM, Wolf 3D, and Rise of the Triad on DOS back in the day, but for some reason around the time when I got into Jazz Jackrabbit and other games, I was moving away from PC gaming to using my new PlayStation. I completely missed out on Quake until finally getting to it with your release. I'm glad both of your Quake releases got physical editions. How did the Quake project begin?

Stephen Kick: It actually started with DOOM 64. Our lead engineer had, kind of in his free time, been working on a port of DOOM 64, and I will willingly admit that I never played DOOM 64. I didn't have an N64 growing up, and I just thought that it was a port of the original DOOM, much like all the other ports that were on PlayStation and Super Nintendo. I thought it was just a port. I didn't realize it was in its own game so when he showed it to me, I was like, what, how did a DOOM game go over my radar or whatever?

So we reached out to id Software at the time, and we proposed the project to them. They were completely heads down on, I think, DOOM (2016). By the time they were working on DOOM Eternal, they came back to us and said, "Hey, we loved that project. Can you get it done in time to launch as a pre-order bonus for DOOM Eternal? Can you also add in some extra missions so that we can create a tie in to DOOM Eternal, you know, some kind of narrative bridge between the two?" 

That was quite a motivator for the team, that they would get to create some kind of original content for a classic DOOM game. It was received so well, that the next day Bethesda came to us and was like, "What can we do next? Do you guys want to do this? We got all these great games that could use this touch." So our next project was Quake, and then Quake 2, and then DOOM + DOOM II, and we'll just leave it at that. (Laughs)

RPG Site: The new DOOM + DOOM II release is fantastic. I've bought tons of versions of DOOM over the years across platforms, but this one is perfect. Are there any plans to bring it to iOS and Android since Bethesda released the prior versions on mobile?

Stephen Kick: Not from our side. We don't do any mobile games. The one thing that we did on mobile was that we outsourced I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream through Dotemu. I would love to, one day. I think that there's a lot of potential there. The DOOM RPGs were especially cool. Even if we were to port those to Switch, I think those would be excellent. I would love to personally see a dungeon crawler, but with the System Shock IP in the same way. I think that would be really cool.

RPG Site: How was it working on the new campaign with id Software and MachineGames?

Stephen Kick: So I didn't personally work on them, but I got to play them. It's just such a great opportunity to see how far level design has evolved since 1996. I mean, you've got these guys that probably, again, kind of cut their teeth on the modding scene with Quake now being professionals at MachineGames and Nightdive getting to work together on a brand new mission pack. It was a dream come true for all the developers that were involved in it.

I think that it was really necessary, and it was really compelling for people to pick Quake up again to be able to play new missions and a new campaign.

RPG Site: What has been your favorite project to work on so far at Nightdive, and also the most challenging one?

Stephen Kick: My favorite one so far, that's gonna be a really tough question, but I think it's gotta be Dark Forces. That was one of my very first experiences on PC, like on my own PC. I've just got such strong memories tied to it. Dark Forces just really captured all my imagination, and I would say, kind of put me on this path of wanting to eventually be a game developer.

Challenging is a good word because there's been a number of different challenges over the years and they've all been different. I'd say one of our most challenging games so far has probably been Sin Reloaded. We own the rights to that game, to that franchise, and you would think that because of that, it would have been a massive priority to get a remastered version out, but we've just run into so many obstacles. Like originally we were working with 3D Realms. They were going to be doing the art and helping out with a lot of the designs, but that got delayed, and we got so busy with other projects. It just kind of went out on the back burner. We're still working on it now, but it's just been hard to find the time and the resources to give it the love that it deserves. In that way, I think it's been probably the most challenging for us to finally release.

RPG Site: I want to know your personal philosophy when you bring back old games. How do you decide how accessible to make a game, what art to change, what to keep the same? The aim ideally would be to match people's memories of the old games so how do you balance everything?

Stephen Kick: A lot of it comes down to just getting experience and hands-on with the game again. So thankfully, because of all the people at Nightdive and their backgrounds, there's always a group of people that are extremely familiar with whatever game we're working on, and so we get that hands on the ground or feet on the ground kind of approach where they immediately know all the grievances that people have with the original. So they can apply that knowledge and immediately fix a lot of those issues that have kind of plagued the game for however long.

On the art side, we just have an incredibly talented team of individuals that have really refined their ability to take an old 3D asset, and just breathe new life into it without really changing the aesthetic or really putting their own imprint on it. It's like they have this ability to translate a model from the nineties and bring it up to modern times, but without losing the character and the essence of what that thing was.

I think it just comes from experience. It comes from having to do this all the time with a number of different styles and art styles, that kind of thing. It's always a challenge, but we've got the right team to tackle it.

RPG Site: So before getting into some non-Nightdive questions, I have one last System Shock question. I interviewed Larry last year for The Thing Remastered and now I've interviewed you. Can I assume that next time I will do a double interview with both of you, and it'll be for System Shock 3?

Stephen Kick: Hopefully. (laughs)

RPG Site: I know you love the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, and you have a shelf at home dedicated to it and System Shock. Did you play and end up liking S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl?

Stephen Kick: Yeah, actually I've been playing through it. The way that I'm kind of experiencing that game, is in small chunks, because I didn't want to get through it so fast. I really wanted to enjoy and savor it. I play for like four hour increments every couple of weeks. I jump in, and I just get right back into it, and it's really been a fun way to experience it because I'm still playing it after launch. I think I'm really close to the end, and so I've taken a really long break because I just don't want to finish it.

RPG Site: Would Nightdive ever work on the original trilogy using the Kex engine for PC or modern consoles?

Stephen Kick: I mean it would be great to be able to do that, but I think that those original games have been re-released recently, haven't they?

RPG Site: Yes, and I bought them on Xbox. They're good there because they play well with a controller while the original PC versions are still not playable well with a controller, and they don't control well even on Steam Deck. Before these new versions got announced, was that trilogy ever a consideration for you to do? 

Stephen Kick: I can't even say there were any conversations. I think it's hard because the modding community for those games is so expansive. There's such a huge community built up around S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that it would be a massive undertaking. I mean, those games are huge. The X-Ray Engine is very, very complex. I mean, could we do it? Probably, but trying to collate the years and years of support that the community has gone into it and, everything else, would be a massive undertaking. I think for that reason, it just never kind of came to the top when it came time to start looking for games. It would be pretty awesome to eventually do you know, personally.

RPG Site: What's your favorite Deftones album?

Stephen Kick: Probably White Pony. 

RPG Site: Mine is either White Pony or Around the Fur. How was the concert where you watched them play live recently?

Stephen Kick: It was excellent. We got to meet them. They were fantastic and very friendly.I gave them little copies of the poster that I had made and they loved it which is the biggest compliment that I ever could have received. They were very grateful. Our tickets were like right in the stands, maybe 50 feet away from the stage. We got blown away. It was fantastic.

RPG Site: Was that the first time you saw them?

Stephen Kick: No, actually I saw them back in the 2000s, in Massachusetts. They opened for Godsmack. So that was an awesome show too.

RPG Site: I recently remembered that Godsmack did an acoustic EP, which had fantastic versions of Voices and I Stand Alone. I think I'm going to listen to it after this interview.

Stephen Kick: I just saw a YouTube video from Rock N' Roll True Stories, one of my favorite YouTube channels, on Godsmack. It really brought me back because I'm from Massachusetts and that's where they're from. We used to hear them all the time on our local radio station before they hit it big. When they came back to that Boston area for that concert, they went all out. 

The other time that I saw Chino (from Deftones), I went to a team sleep concert in San Francisco, which was really cool.

RPG Site: Have you heard his other band called Crosses? I just discovered them a few months ago.

Stephen Kick: I do like them. I haven't given them enough listens as that, as it probably deserves. Whenever I'm in that mood, I always just tend to gravitate towards Deftones. These days, I listen to a lot more of Saturday Night Wrist and Diamond Eyes than I do the heavier stuff from the earlier days.

RPG Site: I think you should give the Crosses song, The Epilogue, a listen. I'm curious what you think of it when you give it a listen.

Stephen Kick: Yeah. I'll put that on after this interview.

RPG Site: For my last question, how do you like your coffee?

Stephen Kick: Right now, I'm having an iced coffee. It's a latte with oat milk. That's kind of a boring answer, but that's what I typically drink.