Kickstarter Games Under Crazy Pressure
System Shock
The System Shock series has been a classic ever since the first game came out in 1994.
A cyberpunk imagining of the year 2072, System Shock is a first-person action adventure set aboard the Citadel space station. You play as a hacker fighting their way through cyborgs, robots, and mutated crew members to foil the plans of a devious AI system.
It was one of the very first games to popularize a methodical approach synonym to exploration, while slowly revealing its story through scattered audio recordings and messages for you to find.
It’s no surprise, then, that when Nightdive Studios took to Kickstarter with their proposed faithful reboot that there was a tremendous outpouring of support from backers, generating $1,350,700. The campaign keyed into fans’ nostalgia, promising “not the Citadel as it was, but as you remember it.”
But in February 2018 things suddenly took a turn for the worse.
Nightdive’s CEO Stephen Kick posted an announcement on the game’s Kickstarter page declaring that development on the reboot would be postponed. He intimated that the overwhelming success in funding had led to feature creep and distraction from the team’s original vision, explaining that the game had “moved from a remaster to a completely new game.”
Everything to do with development went silent for about a month, until at last Kick released a new update announcing they were back on track. He explained that the team would be going back to the drawing board to create something closer to their Unity demo, with the release date pushed back from early 2018 to 2020.
After such a big setback, Nightdive are still on shaky ground. Fans have already been disappointed once so the pressure is on System Shock to actually deliver.