The Nightdive Studios team who are putting together the already-excellent System Shock remaster have started the wide-up process for their successful Kickstarter. With about a day and a half left to go they’ve made over $1.2 million, beating a target of $900,000 after just a few days. They’re now running a pair of major livestreams, one with the developers of the original which has already happened and another across the final 24 hours of the campaign as a celebration and final pledge drive.
Read more: enjoy the best FPS games ever while you wait for the complete version.
Here’s the archive of the first, which is a playthrough of both the demo and the original game involving various folks from Nightdive and Warren Spector. They talk development of both across three hours.
The second is going to be running for the final 24 hours of the campaign, starting midday PT / 3pm Eastern / 8pm BST today. Here’s the full schedule in Pacific time:
- 12pm – BioShock with Robb Waters, concept artist on the Bioshock games and SS remake.
- 2pm – Warframe with Rachael Messer, voice actress
- 4pm – Fallout: New Vegas with Chris Avellone and various FNV devs
- 7pm – Deus Ex with Alexander Brandon, musician
- 9pm – Interview with Steve Gaynor, of Fullbright
- 11pm – Nightdive plays System Shock 2 Co-op
- 4am – Animation demo with Max Lebled, animator with Nightdive who has also worked on various Dota 2 Workshop projects
- 6am – Art demo with Jonah Lobe, artist on various Bethesda projects
- 9am-12pm – Q&A with Nightdive and KS Countdown
The Kickstarter will finish at that point. At time of writing it’s sitting at $1,236,625 with a variety of stretch goals still to fill. There’s no predicting how fast a Kickstarter will accelerate during the final couple of days – especially considering Remind Me alerts are sent out during that time – so it could spike incredibly high before the end. That said, $1.3 million offers “additional locations and expanded narrative” and should be easily hit. Beyond that, both $1.4 million and $1.7 million offer even more new content, as detailed in this layout.
It’s currently estimated for release at the end of 2017. If you apply a standard Kickstarter delay algorithm to that, we’re probably talking mid-2018 at best, early 2019 more likely. It’s not as ambitious as some projects and as a straight port a lot of design work is already done but, basically, game development is really hard. Do try the demo if you’re still on the fence about pledging.