Nightdive Studios is the team that’s made its name remaking and remastering classic titles that, in many cases, would have faded into obscurity if not for Nightdive.
Working on restoring older titles for modern consoles and players means that each project has its own unique challenges from a technical perspective, but that’s rarely where the complications end. In some cases, like The Operative: No One Lives Forever, the complications come from the fact that the game’s original developer is no longer around.
Monolith Productions developed and released the original title back in 2000, and they were also shut down earlier this year by their parent company Warner Bros.
Despite the shutdown, Nightdive Studios head Stephen Kick and director of business development Larry Kuperman are “optimistic” that they will still get the chance to remaster No One Lives Forever at some point in the future.
Speaking to VGC on the matter, Kuperman said “There’s a certain challenge to that, but again, I’m not sure how that whole thing is going to shake out at this point, and I’m still optimistic on that.”
Kick added “That was the word I was going to use too, because any time that there’s just a general kind of shift in the industry, it does open some windows every once in a while for that kind of stuff. So optimism is kind of where we’re at. I think that there’s at least a potential for something good to come out of that, but I don’t know. It’s too recent. I don’t want to keep on falling back on that.”
When pushed specifically about remastering The Operative: No One Lives Forever, and if the studio would ever give up, Kick said “Never give up. We don’t give up.”
Warner Bros shutting down Monolith impacted more than just what we could have seen next from the studio. Nightdive might still be able to remaster No One Lives Forever, but the process will potentially be far more complicated than it would have been, if Nightdive was still able to speak to people directly at Monolith. Maybe there was even someone there who would’ve remembered working on No One Lives Forever.
But we can’t focus on those ‘what if’ scenarios. Hopefully Kick and Kuperman’s “never give up” attitude gets them the results they’re looking for.
Source – [VGC]