"This just felt like a hole in our catalog" - Nightdive Studios on finally bringing System Shock remake to Switch 2 and Switch, mouse controls, and much more

RPG Site: For those unaware, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Nightdive Studios.

Stephen: I'm gonna shake the dust off. It's been a long weekend. My name is Stephen Kick. I'm the founder and studio head of Nightdive.

Justin: My name is Justin Khan. I'm a producer here at Nightdive Studios. I oversee the remake team, who recently did the System Shock remake.

Larry: I'm Larry Kuperman. I'm head of business development for Nightdive Studios.

RPG Site: How involved were each of you in the System Shock remake project?

Justin: Steve, I think you have to kick this one off because you were there from the beginning.

Stephen: Okay, well, this is all my fault. (Laughs) 

What had happened was we had got the source code, from Paul Nurath for the original System Shock, and we had brought on some of the modders that were currently creating some really cool mods for the original System Shock. We worked on putting out a version of the Enhanced Edition that had mouse look, as well as widescreen support and some other features. After we had played with that, and we had put it out in public, we realized that there was something really special there. There was a kind of another game that people hadn't experienced yet. 

That's what kind of got us going on the whole idea of doing the remake. From there, it was a matter of assembling a very small group of people, I think maybe four or five people, to put together a prototype just to see what it could potentially be, what it would look like, and what it would feel like.

After a few short months, we were so confident in what we were doing that we decided to Kickstart it, to see if other people felt the same and overwhelmingly, there was a large group of people that wanted to see what we were doing to completion. That's basically how it started. I hired the very first group of people that transitioned into another team that then transitioned into a final team, which included Justin. 

For the most part I kind of oversaw the overall direction of the game, but it was really more of a shared discipline towards the end. It was pretty much me from the start and then it grew to the remake team that now Justin leads.

Larry: So my role as the business guy was tangential. At the very beginning of it, when I joined Nightdive, I joined Nightdive a year after Steve had started the company up. One of my first tasks was to get the remaining rights to the System Shock games. 

For over a year, I basically had the attorney that we were negotiating with on speed dial. We literally had weekly calls about the progress of that and finally that got the rights. At that point, that ended my initial role in the project. I was, of course, very actively involved in the marketing, and the presentations of it, and on the Kickstarter project. 

The next phase of it came once we had the game well underway, which was prior to the Atari acquisition. Nightdive was an indie and we were looking for a partner that could help us fulfill the promise of the game in terms of putting boxes on shelves. So that's the next time that I entered into things.

Other than that, I had the best role that any fanboy could have, which is I could sit on the side and look at the really cool things other people were doing and comment on them. I didn't actually have to do any of that work. (Laughs)

Justin: I joined the project in 2020, specifically as a UI and UX designer. So I was helping bring the interfaces and menus and the overall usability of the game up. I had known the lead artist of the team, Evelyn Mansell, before. It was her who introduced me to Steve and the rest of the team. I did a little test, it was for, I think, Realms Deep, the presentation that year that we needed to get the interface stood up for the cyberspace part of the game. Well, the rest of this history. I'm here now and became a producer for the team a few short years after that, leading up to release.

RPG Site: So there was one thing which Stephen has mentioned in another interview where after the Unity demo, there was one specific week where you all just stopped development on the project. After that week, you got back the team. Is that accurate to what happened after some people left the project?

Stephen: Not entirely. After the Kickstarter, it's going to be hard to recall a lot of this stuff, but we lost our art director almost immediately and I don't want to say that he was poached, (Laughs), but it certainly felt that way, which put a lot of the development at a momentary standstill. I would say after the Kickstarter was successful, we brought on basically a new development team that led the transition from that original Unity demo and prototype to the Unreal Engine. That's kind of how that worked out.

Larry: So what had happened after that was there's a risk whenever you do remakes, remasters, certainly on a full remake, it's magnified, where the team working on it wants to put their own signature on the game. And that was what happened and there was a, shall I say, a drift between what our original vision was and what the team saw that the remake in their minds should become. So there were really artistic differences. That's the easiest way to explain it.

We made a very difficult decision to let basically the majority of that team go and to rebuild our team from there. That was well publicized, but that was challenging for us.

On the other hand, once we had made that and we had the new team, which is the team that eventually brought the game to fruition, immediately, they saw what the vision was, they agreed with the vision, and we were all back to being on the same page.

RPG Site: At what point did you get Rob Waters on board for the project?

Stephen: He was probably one of the first people we brought on. It was essential from the beginning that we got the original artist, or at least a concept artist that had a lot of experience in that Looking Glass world. You may know Rob, that was his first job, like I think he said out of college back in 1994, was doing System Shock and then that led to, of course Bioshock, and working with Ken Levine and Freedom Force and his portfolio is extraordinary.

What was really fascinating about Rob's work was getting to see his take on those original designs from 1994 after 25 years of experience after that, and getting to revisit it. He's still with us today. I think we brought him on like 2014? So quite a while now that Rob has been developing these games with us.

RPG Site: I originally played System Shock remake before it had controller support on Steam Deck with the trackpads and tweaking. I've been revisiting it on PS5 recently and having watched the Digital Foundry video where John Linneman spoke about the rendering, it hit me. You basically made a first-person shooter with modern rendering and lighting, but you have the crunchy retro pixel textures. I don't know if this is related or was an influence at all, but it reminded me of how Octopath Traveler has Unreal Engine-powered rendering with the sprites and pixel art in its HD-2D aesthetic. Was there any influence or was that referenced at all?

Stephen: No, we didn't reference Octopath Traveler at all. But after you mentioned that, I could totally see it now. There is this super high fidelity sheen of what a modern engine can bring bought with like retro aesthetics.

I think our demo came out before Octopath Traveler so I'm just gonna put on the record that they copied us. (Laughs)

Larry: We prefer the words, "they were influenced by us".

Stephen: Thank you, Larry. (Laughs)

RPG Site: The System Shock remake project has had major releases after it was released on PC. What made you decide to revisit it at that point to add in the female hacker and changes to the final boss fight? Are you happy with the state of the game right now in every way?

Justin: That latter part is complicated. The first part of the question, I mean, I think when the game was released, the team knew that there was a lot more that we wanted to do with it. Frankly, the final fight in the original release code base was not really exactly what we wanted it to be. 

It was this quickly put together because our deadlines were here and we needed to get through certification and all this other stuff. We knew that we were going to be porting to consoles within the next year following that. So we said, "Ok well, what if we put this out now, we know that there's a lot that we want to address, including quality of life things. We need to add controller support, we need to add a whole bunch of things, rebalance the game", and I guess internally, we kind of treated and viewed the console release as the finally realized version of the game where we were able to give the final fight its treatment that it deserved, and just make the game a little bit more fair.

The distribution of items and the balancing of it was quite difficult in the original version of the game. I don't know that we made it easier, but I think we added a little more optionality of finding different resources, allowing the player to really engage with the systems to survive more potentially. 

And is it in the final state that we'd like it to be now? I mean, with the Switch and Switch 2 announcements of the System Shock remake, we are getting a chance to go back yet again another year later, almost two years later, and say, OK, now that we have all of this feedback from the community, now that we've let it sit and just mellow for a couple years since both the PC and then the console release, what can we do now with it?

There is a lot of really great potential with this project to bring it up to another echelon, especially with adding in things like mouse support with the Joy-Con 2 controllers and gyro control, which would benefit the PlayStation platforms and the Steam Deck as well. But it's because we're given the second lease on life with the Switch and Switch 2 versions

Larry: I would say third lease on life.

Justin: Third lease on life. If we're talking the remakes, this is what, the eighth lease on life or something?

Larry: We're the Sisu of games. (Laughs)

RPG Site: Based on what I've played and seen across interviews, is it safe to say that System Shock remake is Nightdive's biggest project till date?

Stephen: Yeah, and it's ongoing too.

Larry: Mikhail, as long as you add the words "to date". 

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely.

RPG Site: Now that you have a remake team and you've shipped a major remake, what learnings besides the community feedback have you taken from the System Shock remake project that you think will help the next remake you do and make it a lot better from the get-go?

Justin: That's a spectacular question. I think the team became familiar with how to plan elements of a remake. We are able to identify individual features or individual elements of whatever original game we are kind of looking at and then assessing, and have immediately kind of a gut feeling of either the validity of, say, a remake project at all. Is this X game, would this be worth remaking?

And then once you've picked a project, it's looking at it and saying, okay, well, what is obviously esoteric? What needs updating? What needs modernizing? What needs to remain the same, because that's part of the identity and DNA of the original game.

I think, especially coming from the System Shock remake and it being so faithful to the original game, that mantra of being faithful and doing a re-imagining, but as people remember it to be, is so important to the team, that no matter what we do, that's going to be the final end product.

If we don't hit that, then we've failed. I think about what we want to do, and what our team wants to achieve.

RPG Site: When you launched System Shock remake, it was with Prime Matter (Koch Media at that time). Now System Shock remake for Switch and Switch 2 is coming out with you being with Atari. I have like two questions about this. Obviously Prime Matter handled the physical release for the PS5 release. Now Atari is handling the new physical release for Switch and Switch 2. This is probably gonna be aimed at Larry. You've obviously seen the very positive feedback around the Switch 2 physical release from everyone who's very excited about it. I want to know  how you reached the decision economically to do that and how it is working on physical releases directly with Atari now as opposed to relying on Limited Run Games or other boutique physical publishers?

Larry: Well, so at the end of the day, there are still discussions with Limited Run, with other partners that we work with. So those discussions have not ended. It's simply that now they're being held to people that work for the same company that we do.

So it's a discussion between Nightdive as a part of Atari to the physical partners.

The rest of the question-- and to be candid, I had really anticipated that. I need to tell everyone that the landscape on the cartridges, the physical side to it, the economics of it, are very fluid at this point. 

There is no one, and I'm going to include the people at Nintendo, that really have a clear picture of how that's going to work. That being said, and with the understanding that the changes are happening all the time in this, and we're trying to adapt to those, that being said, we understand that preservation is really important, and that physical release has a role in that preservation. So that's something that we're very mindful of and when opportunities to preserve titles come up, we're going to take full advantage of those. 

That's a very, how should I say, biz guy answer, but the reality is really there, that if I ask a question to my physical partners about cartridges this week, the answer probably won't be the same as it was last week, and might be different two weeks from now. 

RPG Site: System Shock remake was 4K 60fps on PS5 and it runs really well on Steam Deck. What challenges did you run into when optimizing the game for Switch 1 specifically, and I believe it's been confirmed or publicly stated that it's a 1080p 60fps game on Switch 2. Can you comment on whether that's docked and handled, and just discuss the challenges with optimization and what players should expect on the Switch versions?

Justin: So as of right this second, the team is still hard at work on optimizing the game, just generally speaking. But, I'm quite happy with where the game is in terms of its performance on both Switch 1 and Switch 2. Actually, I'm more impressed with how well it's running on Switch 1. Most of the efforts have been poured into making it optimal, of course, for the Switch 1, but I will say 3 gigabytes of RAM is not much to work with.

You are right. So it is targeting 1080p 60 fps on the Switch 2 handheld. And we're currently exploring upscaling options using DLSS and like FSR, to see what we can do to bring that up to say 1440p for docked play on Switch 2, but that's still an ongoing investigation. But at the very least, 1080p60fps is for sure working and runs great.

RPG Site: So if 1080p 60fps is doable, this might be me being greedy, but I'm curious if you considered doing a 720p 120fps mode.

Justin: You know the actual bottleneck that we're facing is not really a GPU issue. So it's not the sheer amount of frames that the GPU can spit out to the frame buffer. It's actually a CPU issue. This is true across every single platform and the reason that we don't have, say, 120 hz mode on the PlayStation 5, is because of CPU bottlenecks that we were facing there. So this is an optimization side on the game code, not with the final rendered frame.

It turns out that when you have a lot of very low resolution textures intentionally, you don't actually load the GPUs VRAM to its capacity. So the GPU is actually usually sitting quite cool on basically all of the platforms.

So particularly for the Switch 1, we've been really optimizing the game code, the game thread, so that it runs a little nicer, so that, especially the Switch 1 CPU doesn't have to be sweating every single frame that we're throwing at it.

So to answer the question though, we have not looked at a 720p 120hz mode. I mean, that makes me curious, but I don't know that with the way that our game is architected from a game thread standpoint, that that would be technically possible. Maybe with another year of development.

RPG Site: Maybe if it comes to iPad and you get to revisit it again in a year

Justin: The project that never dies. (Laughs)

Stephen: I've been saying that for six years. (Laughs)

RPG Site: How was it working with the Switch 2 devkit getting mouse control working? Gyro is obviously something which Nightdive has been doing for ages, because every single Nightdive Switch game ships with gyro and it's all perfect. I want to know how it feels working with the mouse controls here. Would you say it delivers a comparable experience to playing with an actual mouse on PC?

Justin: Honestly, it's been very interesting working with them. It's not as plug and play as I think a lot of people might expect. At least in the Unreal Engine, you're not using the exact same mouse input code path that you would use a regular USB mouse with. You do have to tap into the Nintendo API and pull in the raw mouse sensor data and then figure out what to do with them because that doesn't actually translate into like, you know, a 2D vector to be able to be like, yes, here's where the mouse is moving.

It's been very interesting. But because of the nature of the game, we've been really experimenting with different modes of playing, but in kind of real time. So if you were to be playing say in mouse mode with standard left Joy-Con in one hand with the analog stick and then mouse down on the right hand, what if you were to pick up the mouse Joy-Con and switch over to gyro or analog stick input at any point and be able to do that freely. 

And so the logic behind doing that is actually quite complicated, way more complicated than certainly we expected, but it's been a very, very interesting learning curve and I think it feels great right now.

I was playing it for basically two hours last night just to really just give it its full pace and everything and I think it's quite compelling. 

I was not a gyro player, personally. I tried playing Splatoon way back when it came out and it was okay. I always turned gyro off, but with the System Shock remake on the Switch 1, actually, it was the Switch 1 that I was playing with a Pro Controller with gyro that really convinced me. I might be a convert now. That's how good it feels.

RPG Site: Do you end up using the gyro for like, you know, the cursor so when you're in inventory and like that kind of stuff also?

Justin: Yes, absolutely. 

RPG Site: So this isn't an RPG, but when I played the Dark Forces remaster, it had this engine tick rate thing that Digital Foundry covered, where if you played at 72fps or 144fps, it feels smooth, but if you played 120fps or 60fps, it does not feel as smooth as it should be. That's like hard-coded with the engine or something. So what I wanted to know is if a potential Switch 2 upgrade happens, do you think VRR could solve this and let you run the game at 72fps while feeling smooth? 

Stephen: That's a really great question. I'm not sure. I would assume that to your other question for Larry that a number of our older titles will probably get Switch 2 ports at some point, and it's my hope that that gets ironed out for sure. 

But yeah, I distinctly remember that being an interesting issue that was only present on that engine. 

RPG Site: Since we're on Dark Forces for a second, when are you announcing Dark Forces 2?

(Everyone laughs)

Stephen: Wish I could. 

RPG Site: When I spoke to you in May and I asked you about System Shock remake and 2, you said you'd love to bring it to Switch 1 and Switch 2. It was obviously in the works and you couldn't say at that time, but can you comment on how long the port, or well both ports have been in the works, or is that something which is under NDA?

Justin: I think it really started being worked on when I basically created a timeline of how long I believed the whole project could take and what the scope of the ports would be, including what we thought at first was going to be an upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 for the project. Basically, it was just a matter of putting together a team and starting to just put pen to paper.

So we actually grabbed the original lead programmer from the game, Matthew Kenneally, and said, "hey, can you start investigating what it would be like to port the project to Unreal 5 and see what kind of comes from that because there's a lot of unknowns that come from taking a very stable game and saying, "Great, let's just update the entire architecture that it runs on." Sure enough, there were quite a lot of issues and whatever, but we kind of had a timeline in front of us to start chipping away at those issues as well as started getting them running on the consoles.

We needed to get the Switch 2 devkits and so there was a bit of a hurry up and wait situation there where we were ironing out engine-related things from the upgrade, but then also saying, "Ok, well, we need a devkit yesterday, the sooner the better." Of course, it was quite challenging to get devkits when the Switch 2 was just announced, and then kind of following immediately after the release of it. 

So we actually didn't know when we were going to be getting devkits. We really wanted to be confident in not only our ability to port the project to the Switch and Switch 2 before announcing it, but also our timeline was kind of this unknown question mark until we actually had devkits in hand. It was kind of us arguing a little bit with Atari to say, here's what we believe the timeline will be, maybe.

RPG Site: I'm also curious what led to System Shock remake being the first Switch 2 native release, because you will be shipping the Outlaws remaster in a few days (as of this recording). I've been playing that on Steam Deck. It is also coming to Switch 1, but there's no Switch 2 port announced yet. I'm curious what led to this being your first native Switch 2 game.

Stephen: I think timing had a lot to do with it. It aligned really well for us. Kind of what Justin was saying earlier, when Switch 2 got announced, having not distributed the game on Switch up to that point, there was like a whole audience that we're very familiar with, that we like to support with our other games that, this just felt like a hole in our catalog.

We put our resources into that and we did, we pulled some of the original team members off their current project to come back and to do this, and to complete it, as well as to update and make fixes, and apply community feedback. So it definitely turned into a much grander project. 

RPG Site: I noticed a lot of Nightdive games ship with a nice vault with concept art, music, sound effects, and stuff like that. It is obviously not as good as a whole documentary which Digital Eclipse does for its releases. Now that both Nightdive and Digital Eclipse are with Atari, I was just wondering if there was a possibility of Nightdive handling the game portion while Digital Eclipse handles the documentary portion as a tag team release making potentially the best retro re-release of all time.

Stephen: That's the goal. We've been to the Digital Eclipse offices a number of times, and are really great friends with their developers, and Mike and I get along famously.

It always comes up, "Hey, you guys are more than welcome to come and use our studio to record interviews when you can't." It just comes down to resources and bandwidth at this point. 

But as you've noticed, you're a very keen observer, we put a lot of effort into these vaults, and they just keep getting bigger and better and more robust, and kind of more feature rich, as we get more experience doing that kind of thing. 

That becomes part of the development process. Because a lot of it has to do with our developers being fans of these titles, and having stuff already that they've kind of squirreled away or they've kind of digitally hoarded, right?  Daniel Grayshon, there's a title that we're working on now, he's a really big fan of and he's like, "We don't even have to look for vault material. I have it all already." 

So it's a matter of plugging it all in, creating the interface for it, the way that we like to display it, and presenting it. 

To your point, it's probably not gonna be much longer until we're coordinating more closely with Digital Eclipse to provide that next level of documentary-style footage and content for the vaults.

RPG Site: Have you considered shipping either free DLC for any of the games like System Shock 2 25th Anniversary Remaster which adds the YouTube interviews you've done so that people can watch them inside the game or do you want to keep those two worlds separate?

Stephen: We've had that come up before actually, where I think when we first started doing the Deep Dives, we're like, well, "Do we want this to be on the disc?" I think at the time, and this is another good example of us coordinating with Digital Eclipse, is that the tech that we had for converting those videos into files small enough so that it wouldn't balloon install sizes, we just didn't have it and we didn't have the bandwidth to really look into it at that time. If I'm not mistaken, I think Digital Eclispe has a specific process on how they're downsampling that stuff so that it still looks great, but it doesn't eat up hard drive space.

RPG Site: I guess the Switch cartridge size is the main concern over here because on PlayStation, you have 100GB discs. You can do whatever you want. 

RPG Site: So far, the Steam Deck is my favorite way to play Nightdive games because I have access to the trackpad for precision aiming and the 90hz HDR OLED screen, but now the Switch 2 is out with a 1080p 120hz screen. System Shock 2 25th Anniversary Remaster could potentially easily be 120fps on that. If you play docked, you can put the mouse down and play with Joy-Con 2 mouse controls. This might be a question for Larry where he says "no comment", but should we expect Nightdive games to get upgraded slowly over time?

Larry: So I can only give you a very, very general answer. It is part of our core philosophy that players should be able to enjoy our games on any media that they choose. We've even dabbled with the streaming services. 

I think eventually we're gonna reach the point where all of our games will be available on all platforms. And of course, as soon as that happens, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo will invent new platforms that we will try to catch up with.

RPG Site: Now I have a few questions for each of you. Stephen, what is your favorite song on the new Deftones album and why is it Infinite Source?

Stephen: Laughs. I'll be honest, I haven't given that album the time that it needs to really pick a favorite yet. Everything is still kind of coalescing, and I'm figuring it out. Great question. It's a great album though.

I did just go see, let's talk about music for a minute. I just saw Sigur Rós two nights ago with a live orchestra and that was one of the best shows I've ever seen. A totally different genre of music of course. 

RPG Site: Okay, what other albums have you enjoyed this year?

Stephen: You know, I tend not to listen to a lot of new stuff. I just kind of go back to some of my favorites, and I've recently kind of rediscovered my favorite band. They've always been my favorite but they've been defunct for so long that kind of getting back into them is almost like doing a retrospective on my 20s. Does that make sense? But it's a band called Oceansize. It's a UK band. They were pretty active in the late 90s to the mid 2000s. 

But some of their stuff, I just, I can't believe that they didn't reach an international audience. It's progressive and the music can get kind of technical, but it's masterful. That's all I can really say about it. So the album "Frames" is one of my favorites. I've been listening to that a lot. 

Then another one that I just can't stop listening to is from a band called The Contortionist, and it's called Language Those are my two recommendations.

RPG Site: Justin did you end up playing the Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remake on Switch?

Justin: Yes, I did and it was spectacular. It was everything I had hoped it would be, quite honestly. 

RPG Site: I hadn't played it before. This remake was like my first time playing it and I thought it was just a fantastic RPG in general. When I played Super Mario RPG, I thought it was a good game, and expected The Thousand-Year Door to be similar, but it was a long RPG that I loved a lot more.

Justin: Yeah, no, it's a big, big adventure, but Nintendo, the team at Intelligent Systems, they did a very good job with re-imagining that title.

RPG Site: I believe you also really like the Bravely Default soundtrack. So did you end up revisiting Bravely Default on Switch 2 with the HD remaster?

Justin: Wow. Yes, but not as much as I would hope to. I've been kind of distracted actually with playing through the Trails in the Sky remake most recently. I'm thinking afterwards I will revisit Bravely Default, but it is the soundtrack that just draws me back into that game, even though there's a very famous point in that game that most people bounce off of.

RPG Site: So Larry, I need to ask you a few questions about pinball. Are you ready? 

Larry: I'm ready. 

RPG Site: So, what recent Williams Pinball table have you really enjoyed playing? 

Larry: So first of all Fish Tales is probably my number one addiction. I bought an AtGames table that allows me to play the Zen Pinball games on a real table. So I've been re-exploring and Fish Tales is probably the one that makes my neighbors complain the most because I get real loud when I play that.

RPG Site: Hypothetical situation, given a chance to resurrect Epic Pinball, would you do it?

Larry: In a minute.

RPG Site: I'd love that as well.

Larry: But it's gotta be full screen and it's gotta be up to the, you know, the guys over at Zen, set the standard. By the way, if you haven't played their latest release of Halloween titles, let me recommend that to you. 

RPG Site: I didn't know they did a System Shock pinball thing until I watched one of your interviews.

Larry: The fact that they did the System Shock table means that I can talk about pinball and it's actually related to my job.

Stephen: We'll only do Epic Pinball if we can do a Jazz Jackrabbit table. (Laughs)

RPG Site: Why don't you just bring back Jazz Jackrabbit in general so I don't have to use my ROG Ally, which I just use for GOG games and testing, to play games like Jazz Jackrabbit on?

(Everyone laughs).

RPG Site: Nightdive has been basically boomer shooters, and then you have also the Humongous catalog. Has there been any demand to bring those to specifically Nintendo consoles?

Stephen: It's a really fun story anyways. We were involved in an auction, I think it was the Atari auction, wasn't it Larry? All those years ago this is well before, I mean it was 10 or 12 years ago.

Larry: Yes.

Stephen: Those were all Atari published titles at one point, and they were going through one of their bankruptcies, and a company called Tommo had acquired all the rights to those and I had reached out and said, "Hey, what's your plan with these? Can we put them on Steam and have them start generating revenue for you guys?" and we had a licensing agreement. We used, if I'm not mistaken, I think we used ScummVM. 

Larry: Yep. Pretty sure we did.

Stephen: Because there was no code. We just had the object files, of course. But that was the only thing that kind of stopped us from putting those games on console was that the ScummVM emulation tools were under public license and we couldn't put that on console and then also adhere to those licensing stipulations. 

As far as I know, we haven't gotten any requests though to put those on any other platform. However, we have not been the publisher on record for those for quite some time.

RPG Site: I think I just clicked on Nightdive with how Steam displays stuff. It just loaded up this random list of games I hadn't heard of.

Stephen: I played a bunch of those in my teens actually, when they came out, like I played Spy Fox. That was my favorite one. It is a kids game. It's a junior adventure. It's been for like 10 to 12 year olds or something, but the humor is quite good. The animation is fun and you know, that was Ron Gilbert's company.

So all the characters and the puzzles, they're all really well thought out and pretty clever for kids adventure games. 

RPG Site: Have you thought about bringing back a PS1 or PS2 JRPG, because I know you do shooters a lot, but I think Justin might want to do a JRPG as well. 

Stephen: We should just ask Justin. What's your wishlist Justin?

RPG Site: He should sort out Chrono Trigger. I'm sick of telling people to play the DS version since you can't even buy it anymore.

Justin: (Laughs) It's true if there was a PS1 RPG, I think it might have to be Xenogears if we were to pick one.

RPG Site: Speaking of licensed stuff, and I've already asked Stephen and CJ (from Uberstrategist PR) about No One Lives Forever as a joke, you have mentioned that The Thing Remastered was very successful. There are two games I want to ask you about. One is a licensed game and one isn't. The licensed game is Peter Jackson's King Kong. Is that something that you'd want to do?

Stephen: Yeah, we would love to do that. It's a fantastic game. The art especially is great. All the voice actors were in the movie, so it adds that level of detail and credibility to it. It's in that vein of licensed games like The Thing and Chronicles of Riddick, where it's actually really good for being a licensed game.

RPG Site: If you had to do that, what platform would you use as the base? I was looking it up and it has an OG Xbox and other versions. How do you decide which version to use as a base for a multi-platform game like that?

Stephen: Well, for me, it would come down to the art. I think the PlayStation 2 version has the best art because it's all hand-painted. The art direction is flawless and it isn't until you get to the Xbox 360 version where it starts getting like that plasticy normal map look where they just tacked it on to give it like a visual upgrade, when really they kind of ruin all the hard work that had been put into it.

From an art perspective, I would start with the PlayStation 2 version for sure.

RPG Site: For non-licensed games, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Would you like to bring that back?

Stephen: I mean, these are all loaded questions. but...

RPG Site: Would you like to bring it back? I'm not asking you to confirm anything.

Stephen: Yeah, it's very high on my list of games that I would love to do. It's a Bethesda game. We have a great track record with them. So maybe one day it'll come up in conversation and we'll jump on it. 

But, for a long time Uh, I would say that was probably one of the best Lovecraftian horror video games and there weren't many at the time so it was doing something really special but it combined a lot of stories of lovecrafts into one kind of interactive narrative experience, which again, nobody had done that before either. So yeah, it's high on my list. It would be awesome to do that.

RPG Site: I assume another set of games which is around the top of your list would be Condemned 1 and 2?

Stephen: Sure. Yeah. To the list. Yeah, those are great, too. The melee combat is something that we looked closely at when we're developing System Shock remake, as you also have a big pipe that you start with and it was really hard to understand gameplay-wise what they were doing, which made that so visceral and kinetic. 

RPG Site: So with Condemned, I'm glad you brought up the pipe. I want to ask Justin a question about that. How heavy is it to implement per object motion blur, and were you able to do that for the switch port of System Shock remake?

Justin: It's just a rendering setting, basically, that you can turn on in the render pipeline in Unreal. It's not as simple as just hitting a checkbox, because you do have to adapt a couple of things.

We've not really touched the motion blur settings as they currently are for the Switch version. If we have a per object blur, say, in the PC version and in the PlayStation version, it'll be in the Switch version and Switch 2.

RPG Site: It looks really nice when you're moving the pipe and when you disable it, like I disable motion blur sometimes, but I think the pipe looks a bit framey when you move it around. With motion blur, it looks perfect. 

RPG Site: How do you like your coffee? 

Larry: I stopped drinking coffee a couple of years ago. I drink my tea with milk and a touch of honey.

RPG Site: Since you (Stephen) already answered this when I interviewed you back in May, go wild with where you get your beans and how you make your coffee.

Stephen: We get our coffee beans from Costco actually, but we have a pretty sophisticated espresso machine. So I'm doing fresh ground coffee, a double shot of espresso with oat milk, and a little bit of Stevia. That's my go to. Iced in the summertime and hot in the in the fall in the winter

Justin: This is a very Canadian answer, but I'm quite fond of the Tim Hortons Iced Capps. At home, I drink mostly tea, like a Tetley Orange Pekoe black tea, Pekoe Black tea with milk and sugar.