The rights to one of the greatest PC games of all time languished in the vault of a Midwestern insurance firm until a frustrated player bugged them about a re-release, 'But they asked me if I wanted to do System Shock 3'

Speaking to Nightdive founder Stephen Kick and VP of business development Larry Kuperman at this year's Game Developers Conference, I was curious about how it felt to be returning to System Shock 2 for the studio's upcoming remaster. After all, I had a loose understanding that Shock 2 is the game that kicked off Nightdive in the first place.

Kick recounted the unlikely story of how he found himself making deals to revive a dead franchise, and also supplied a detail I'd never known before: For the longest time, the rights to System Shock were in the hands of an insurance company that had no idea what to do with them.

"Initially it was just because I couldn't get it to run right," Kick said of his System Shock 2 quest. After some time spent working for Sony Online Entertainment, he and his girlfriend quit to go on a driving tour of Central America. "I brought a netbook⁠—just small, compact⁠—and the only things I could get to run on it were classic PC games."

But he couldn't get his physical copy of System Shock 2 to work, while a digital version was absent from the GOG storefront, then still spelled out as "Good Old Games."

"I started casually trying to figure out what happened to Looking Glass, where did the rights end up," Kick said. "And the search led to a G4 TV article that I found on the Wayback Machine, about how when Looking Glass went out of business, the rights went to an insurance company in the Midwest called Star Insurance.

"I looked them up and sent an email to their general counsel, which is just listed on the website: 'Hey, you guys still have the rights to System Shock.' And they wrote me back almost immediately, but they asked me if I wanted to do System Shock 3. I might have, like, a couple thousand to my name, and I'm in Guatemala, so I wasn't really in the best position to start a triple-A project, but I pitched the idea of re-releasing the original games."

Originally, the rights to the series had been split between Star and EA, with Star getting the IP copyright, and EA the trademark. "That was a strategic thing done by Warren Spector so that nobody could do a System Shock project," Kick explained. "He would tell us that many years later."

Luckily, EA's trademark had just lapsed from lack of use when Kick reached out to Star, so the insurance company had just attained full ownership, but lacked an obvious path forward to take advantage of it.

"I came to them with a business idea that was quick, cheap⁠—by comparison to developing a new triple A game⁠—and that would allow them to own the rights of System Shock," said Kick. "They agreed, and I sent the contract to GOG, because they didn't believe me when I told them I had got it."

"[Former GOG SVP Oleg Klapovskiy] didn't believe that Steve had the rights. Steve had gone in through the support email," Kuperman explained. "That gets forwarded to Oleg, saying, 'Hey, this guy says that he has the rights to System Shock.'

"Oleg writes back, saying, 'He's probably full of shit. It's probably all bullshit.' That gets forwarded back to Steve. Oleg is a man of few words. Most of them are obscene."

"He still doesn't believe me to this day that I just emailed and asked," Kick said. "He thinks that I have family working at Star, or that there was some kind of conspiracy, because [GOG] had been trying to get the rights for years."

Subsequently, Kuperman would join Nightdive and go about securing the remaining rights to the series held by Star Insurance, and the System Shock series has been undergoing a bit of a renaissance under Nightdive.

In addition to the upcoming System Shock 2 remaster arriving on June 26, the studio's ground-up remake of the first game was one of our favorite releases of 2023⁠—we gave it a "best remake" award even going up against the likes of the Resident Evil 4 remake. Nightdive hasn't spoken definitively about what's next after Shock 2, but I'm champing at the bit to hear more.