Nightdive Studios Head Talks Remastering Xbox 360 And PS3 Games

Having mastered the art of the early 3D game remaster, Nightdive Studios wants to move on to newer games.

In an interview with VGC, Stephen Kick, the head of Nightdive Studios, said that the developer is interested in taking on remastering games from the Xbox 360 and PS3 era.

Nightdive is responsible for a large number of retro game ports to modern platforms, including I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, The Thing, and Star Wars: Dark Forces, among many others.

They primarily focus on games that originally had PC versions and develop their ports using their proprietary KEX engine. Now, though, the studio is looking to expand their catalog to include games that were exclusive to the Xbox 360 and PS3.

‘We Stand Ready’

When it comes to these ports of newer console games, Nightdive director of business development Larry Kuperman said, “We stand ready.”

He goes on to explain the process of getting these ports into development and the games preserved for modern audiences, saying that they would start with some questions.

Was it Xbox 360 exclusive, or was there a PC version out too? Because that also changes things, the little preservation that’s available. Do we have source code? If so, what’s the quality of the source code? How about the assets? Those are the kinds of considerations that we have there.

However, things are more complicated for games where the studio has closed down, as many from that troubled era of game development have. Kick uses the ill-fated PS3 first-person shooter Haze as an example.

“We would go to the original designers, and we would say: ‘It didn’t do as well as you had hoped, I’m sure you’ve had a lot of time to ruminate and to think about what you would have done differently,’” Kick says.

This is apparently a conversation they’ve had with some of the original developers of the games they’ve remastered, giving them a chance to come back and do things differently; newer, more powerful hardware is sometimes all it takes to smooth out some issues from original releases.

System Shock 2 Remaster: People Who Pre-Ordered Or Backed It Above $30 Will Get It For Free

System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster’s release date will be revealed on March 20, 2025.

However, porting and emulating games originally released on PS3 introduces some unique challenges thanks to the console’s unique system architecture, which was an obstacle to game development even back in its day, but Nightdive is confident that they can make it work.

“I think that architecture – I mean, I remember the talk when the system was first released, of how difficult it was for developers to ‘get’ it – and that’s a big problem with backwards compatibility,” Kick says, mentioning how the original models of the PS3 handled PS2 backwards compatibility by including physical PS2 hardware on the PS3 motherboard to illustrate how incompatible the console was.

Still, though, he’s confident that his studio has “enough experience to where we can do a serviceable job on a PS3 remaster,” thanks in part to their proprietary engine.

For now, Nightdive is still dealing with the System Shock 2 remaster and System Shock 3, which is currently in a “very complicated” situation.