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https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/events-conferences/preserving-old-games-was-seen-as-a-non-commercial-art-project-until-recently-says-nightdive-director-they-were-great-then-and-theyre-great-now-and-companies-have-begun-to-realize-that/>
'The Nightdive Studios website makes its mission clear: "Bringing lost and
forgotten gaming treasures back from the depths." And so it has, through
outstanding updates of games including
Quake and
Quake 2,
System Shock,
Turok 3, and
Dark Forces. But it's not just the games that Nightdive aims
to bring back from the past: Maintaining the totality of their history is a
major part of what the studio aims to do.
"I think the issue of games as art has been answered more than enough,"
Nightdive director of business development Larry Kuperman said in an interview
with
PC Gamer at GDC. "But taking it to the next level, if we all agree that
games are art, then the people that make games are artists and deserve to be
remembered that way and deserve to have their names incorporated into what we
do going forward."
Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick said that aspect of the studio's work was
"synthesized" while working with Bethesda on the
Quake remasters. The updated
version of
Quake 2, for instance, has a "vault" option in the main menu that
gives players a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the game, with material
like concept art, early and discard enemies, videos, and even playable
pre-release maps.
"They had given us access to archives of past work, and it was kind of at their
suggestion that we find a way to incorporate that with the release of
Quake
2," Kick said. "So that is where the vault was conceived. And it was received
so well by the community."
Nightdive repeated that effort with
Dark Forces, which includes a level
called The Avenger: It was designed as a playable demo prior to the original
Dark Forces release, but wasn't actually included with the game. It took
nearly 30 years for people who weren't at CES in 1995 to be able to play it.
Nightdive had to make a few changes to incorporate it into the remaster—for one
thing, it didn't have a proper ending, so developers had to "clean it up a
little bit"—but as much as possible, it was left in its original condition.'
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
