"It's through that adversity that they faced, that really brought out the creativity and why people really enjoyed those video games so much, because the creators had to come up with inventive solutions to gameplay and mechanics.
And I would say that one of the things I think that makes preservation so special is that you begin to understand the limitations that the original developers were working under, and you see why they made certain decisions." "Just like in film, you have to have the original movie, to show the differences in technology, storytelling and every other facet of the discipline to see what works and what doesn't. "I think you have to have that original playable, so that there's some frame of reference there," says Kick. Another way of saying this is, to quote our dual-Pros and Cons review line, it's a fastidiously accurate recreation of the original game. Sometimes this is to a fault, but it's also real. It may look shiny and new, but it wears its source material so firmly on its sleeve that the essence of the original game is visible throughout. The System Shock remake isn't the same as, say, Capcom's Resident Evil remakes, or the Dead Space reimagining from earlier this year. It's an expensive and time-consuming one, but it's also tangible proof that if the right people are put in charge of a project, there's a middle ground between original games and rebuilt-from-the-ground-up remakes that's totally worth exploring.
Nightdive's System Shock remake wasn't primarily intended to offer something new in the game preservation space – after remastering the '94 classic in 2015, this was a labor of love that was successfully Kickstarted and developed for several years – but I'm now convinced this approach is one that could help solve the game preservation problem. The most obvious result of this is the fact that games just a few decades old are often unplayable today – not just against modern standards and expectations, but because the games themselves, and the hardware they're played on, are simply unavailable. But unlike more traditional media, not least film, the evolution of technology on our side of the fence has moved at a far quicker pace. Game preservation has, of course, been a hotly debated topic in video games for some time.
Why it matters that Sony is getting more serious about game preservation
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