Preserving old games was seen as a non-commercial 'art project' until recently, says Nightdive director: 'They were great then and they're 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.

Kic