If you were to make a pile of all the reasons I might get excited for a video game, and all the reasons I would be wary, and then smashed those piles together as fast as you could, what would emerge from the resulting explosion would be the System Shock remake. Due out next month (though still without a firm release date), the development of this game is one of the strangest and most turbulent in modern times. If you haven't been following the saga, some of what you're about to read will make you desperate to get System Shock in your hands, and some might make you hope no one ever does.
The obvious place to start is System Shock itself. It's a pretty dang good video game. Although I don't have the fondness for it that I do for a lot of other '90s titles like Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, or Spyro the Dragon, all of those have had some form of remake before, while System Shock has not. It's as good a candidate to be next in line as any. It has been enhanced (in the appropriately named Enhanced Edition), but this was not to the scale of Spyro Reignited or Tomb Raider: Anniversary.
As I've written about before, I'm conflicted about remakes in general as they can stem the flow of creativity in order to profit off polishing what already works, but I'm coming around to the idea for older classics lost to time. I'm never going to be on board with The Last of Us getting a second one in less than a decade, but for your Metroid Primes, your Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2s, indeed, your System Shocks, go ahead.
The game is also crowd-funded which, on the face of it, I'm here for. Gaming offers some foundational experiences with media, but these chances are slowly being taken away from the working class as corporations strive to make bigger, better games that take several years to produce and then cost excessive prices. Crowd-funding offers more power to people, allows creatives to make games their fans want without corporate loopholes, and can keep pricing down at the end of it - System Shock Remake shakes out at £34.99/$39.99, half of the typical £70 price point.
Great news, right? As you might have guessed from the opening paragraph, not quite. This crowd-funding was set up by Night Dive Studios, a corporation who acquired the rights to System Shock back in 2012, some 18 years after the original game launched. This team made the Enhanced Edition, but they are not the original creators of the series. They are investors who bought the game and now want us to pay for it. They're a small studio and they have an affection for the series - it's not all black and white. They're not greedy, slobbering suits looking for a quick buck. But they also had no input on the creation of System Shock and now they're crowd-funding for the right to reimagine their own remake.
On the flip side of that flip side, making for a rather gymnastic double somersault, Night Dive is very open about this fact. I haven't had to burrow deep into shady documents to bring you this earth-shattering revelation - it's readily available on the game's website, as is a current donation counter and an explanation of what the next stretch goal is (currently, it's PC mod support). Night Dive also acquired the rights not from the original creators Looking Glass, but from an investment firm who had swallowed Looking Glass' assets when it went bankrupt.
It's just as easy to paint Night Dive as heroes rescuing a cult classic from the jaws of obscurity, and taking its plans to the public, only to be met with aplomb. That gets harder when you look at how development of the game has gone. Chris Avellone was brought in to change parts of the script which had not aged well, as well as to fill in the missing sections as the game adapted to modern design ideals and added extra levels, new sequences, and a better way to link each portion of the game together. At the time, Avellone was best known for his work writing Fallout: New Vegas. These days, he's best known for facing three separate accusations of sexual misconduct, which caused him to leave his position writing Dying Light 2 for Techland. Avellone denies these allegations, but was also cut from the System Shock team.
Of course, Avellone is just one man, he's no longer there, and he wasn't part of the Enhanced Edition team which proved Night Dive had the pedigree for this. Only, they're not there either. Citing "feature creep" at the Games Development Conference in 2018, the game's leads stated development had restarted and a newly assembled team would be moving forward with the project. For the most part, it's not the people who made the game that was central to generating backers in the first place.
None of this alone is a red flag. There are just a lot of pink flags, and when you raise them all up as one, they look red. I'm still intrigued by System Shock. The demo played well enough when I first dabbled with it, and if you're going to remake something, it might as well be a forgotten classic crowd-sourced by a medium sized studio dedicated to doing right by the series. Night Dive didn't make System Shock, but it's hard to deny it loves System Shock. I want to like it too, but one peek behind the scenes and things don't seem as solid as they should. To be due out in, at most, 36 days and still not have a release date is another pink flag, and this one is very dark.