Nightdive Studios has announced the start of their Kickstarter campaign for the remastered System Shock. Nightdive Studios are a team of ‘top tiered industry veterans’ who believe that ‘classic video games should never be abandoned or forgotten.’ The studio actively makes an effort to preserve and update classic games ‘without the hassle of installing outdated drivers, or using obsolete hardware.’ Some of these titles include System Shock 1 & 2, Turok, 7th Guest & 11th Hour, and Wizardry 6-8.

Last November, Nightdive let the cat out of the bag, they were developing a full remake of the original System Shock. Nightdive had acquired the full rights to the franchise and began working with Robert Waters, the games original concept artist, to reimagine his designs from the early 1990s. System Shock will be a complete remake of the genre defining classic from 1994, rebuilt from the ground up using the Unity Engine.

According to the Kickstarter page, ‘System Shock was one of the first 3D games that took a methodical approach to exploration while revealing a story driven narrative through audio logs and messages scattered throughout the game world. It was a revolutionary step forward for the medium in a time when developers first began experimenting with interactive story telling.’

For the uninitiated, System Shock was a first-person action role-playing game released in 1994 on PC by Looking Glass Technologies. In the game, you took the role of a nameless hacker, trapped aboard Citadel Station, a cyberpunk themed space station in the year 2072. Your goal was to survive against the cyborgs and mutated crew members corrupted by a maniacal A.I. known as SHODAN, one of the most treacherous antagonists ever conceived. System Shock also has two well known spiritual successors in Deus Ex(created by Warren Spector, a producer on the original System Shock) and BioShock(created by Ken Levine, lead writer and designer for System Shock 2).  System Shock Remastered is current scheduled to be released on PC and Xbox One in December 2017.

Nightdive has included a short demo of the pre-Alpha version of the game for backers to check out their ‘proof of concept’. The demo is available through Steam, GOG.com, and the Humble Store. If you’ve been looking for a Kickstarter project to back, this might be the one for you. Click the link here to check out the campaign, or click the ‘Source’ link at the bottom of the article.