Nightdive Shifts Its Sights to Remastering and Preservation of Xbox 360 and PS3-Era Games

Nightdive Studios plans on remastering and preserving Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 era titles – a generation of gaming that is notoriously difficult to port. Their intentions were made clear during a discussion with VGC – who talked with Nightdive studio head, Stephen Kick, and director of business development, Larry Kuperman. 

Larry Kuperman announced the studios’ strategies on preserving older titles, many of which have had their development studios shut down: 

“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. That being said, there were some really good games that came out in that era that shouldn’t be lost,” he detailed. 

During the discussion, VGC asked the executives if the PlayStation 3’s unique system architecture could make remastering PlayStation 3 exclusive titles more difficult. 

“So yeah, if we get to that – or I should say when – we get to the PS3 era games, it will be a challenge that we have to face. But I think that we’ve had enough experience to where we can do a serviceable job on a PS3 remaster,” Larry Kuperman replied. 

“The other part is the advantages of having our own engine, and that’s a really big part of the Nightdive story. There are things that we can do because we have our own engine. So I’m going to guess that were we to go down that road, that Sam might figure something out that he could do with KEX.”

The exact titles planned were not revealed – but Nightdive executives did name drop a hypothetical game: Haze, which is a PlayStation 3 exclusive game. 

“With a game like Haze – let’s say hypothetically we had access to that, and that was our big title for 2028, right?” Stephen Kick said. 

“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.’ […]  In the case of System Shock 2 Remastered and a lot of these other games that we’ve been looking at, as soon as you bring them over import them onto newer hardware, some of the problems start to clear themselves up, like frame rate, refresh rate, texture resolution, streaming, loading times.” 

Nightdive Studios excels in creating PC ports of console games. Their portfolio includes System Shock 2, Doom, Bladerunner, and many other titles. The studio’s goal is to bring lost and forgotten gaming treasures back from the depths.