The Studio Behind Star Wars Remasters, Nightdive, Explains ‘You Have to Learn From Those Who Came Before’

As the video game industry matures, there’s been a major push to revisit the past, especially in the last decade. Remakes are a dime a dozen now, but alongside that, we’ve also seen a major shift toward the other side of the coin: remasters. Generally, remasters simply update the original game for more modern platforms, maybe making light tweaks to visuals or quality-of-life features. Remakes, on the other hand, more integrally change the experience, making drastic changes to gameplay or adding entirely new sections.

Alongside just giving players an updated version of the game, remasters can play an integral role in video game preservation – saving key titles from being lost to the ravages of time. Few companies have been more influential in that space than Nightdive Studios, the team behind remasters for System Shock, Star Wars: Dark Forces, The Thing, and much more. Nightdive’s work has helped the industry, in part, reckon with the importance of its past.

“The question that came up to me, over and over, is ‘Do you really think people want to play these old games?” Larry Kuperman, VP of business development at Nightdive tells Inverse, “It’s only taken us 20 years to definitively answer that question.”

Inverse’s Remade series explores why video game remakes have become such a prevalent part of the industry, and what they achieve. Remasters are an indisputable part of that equation as well, and the topic of preservation only becomes increasingly important as the medium ages and more of its history is lost.

With that in mind, Inverse spoke to Kuperman and Nightdive studio head Stephen Kick about the importance of remakes and remasters for preservation, and how vital lessons from the past can predict our future.

The team at Nightdive also gave a special mention of the late Rebecca Heineman, 62, who passed in November 2025. Creator of Bard’s Tale 3, among others, and an incredible pioneer for video game preservation. Heineman was instrumental to Nightdive, and in Kuperman’s words, “There’s probably been no one who has contributed more to games preservation than she did.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Nightdive’s approach is something you’d largely categorize as remasters more than remakes. Why is that the approach you’ve taken, and were there moments you thought about leaning more into remakes?

Kick: Just the evolution of the company led us to remasters, and that’s where we got really comfortable after so many years. When we first started, we were just using open source emulation tools on two platforms, GOG and Steam – and they didn’t really require any technical prowess. We could just focus on getting the rights to games and getting them back out there commercially. And that eventually led us to like Turok, for example.

Turok runs on Windows 95, and we can’t just emulate it to get it to run, so what do we do? That started the whole remastering process at Nightdive. We brought in engineers and were able to port it to other platforms, and that became our wheelhouse. It wasn’t until we got really comfortable with that, that we decided to dip our toe into the remake pool, and that was a very interesting process. There are a lot more pitfalls – a lot more people that you need to bring that kind of dream into reality. While we had a great time, and it was very successful, we just understood that if we want to do that kind of thing again, there’s a lot we can apply from our prior experience. And in the meantime, we’re going to keep doing what we do best.

Kuperman: I’d also like to point out, it’s one of those synchronicity things, that as we were starting the company, the topic of game preservation really blew up. The topic has become a lot more widespread over the years. Part of that may be because of our success in doing remasters. But if you think about what the word preservation means – it means bringing back the original game in a manner that’s accessible.

“You make the game first, and then you worry about what category to put it in.”

We obviously have the distinct categories of remake and remaster. But there are some games that blur those lines, like Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. Do you think it’s important to have these distinctions, and how do you deal with games that blur that line?

Kick: We have a really good example with the work we did on Shadow Man. When we started out, our goal was to bring the game back and have it run on modern platforms looking considerably cleaner and more polished – fix UV seams, repeating textures, etc.

But after speaking with the original developer, we discovered there were a lot of levels, a lot of work, that they wanted to do but couldn’t due to various constraints. They ran out of money, time. With their guidance, we were able to re-implement those features and levels they had originally planned. So we didn’t necessarily add anything that wasn’t intended.

So that’s the fine line you’re discussing, there’s not a “Nightdive addition,” this was what they wanted to do. We helped them achieve that to the best of our ability, while staying true to the aesthetics, the design, everything they had planned.

For us, the distinction was: if we’re using the original game source code or a reverse-engineered version of it along with original art assets, it would be a remaster. Now, if we were to basically take the DNA of that game and start completely over from scratch in a brand new engine, that’s where we come up with the remake.

You brought up the preservation aspect, and that’s increasingly something more people are caring about. With that in mind, do remakes have a role in preservation alongside remasters?

Kick: They do. If there are technical hurdles that would prevent a remaster of a classic game, reverse engineering is very expensive and time-consuming. So if you don’t have the code to a title, it could just be more economical to remake it as close as you can. So with that, you have another classification right there, almost like you’re trying to perfectly emulate or copy the experience of this game. It’s still technically a remake, but it’s as close to the original as you could get.

Kuperman: In general, in every area of art, the way new forms or new styles get created is through exactly what Steve just discussed, hybridization number one. It is, perhaps, less intentional than people think. Some of it derives from problem-solving. We don’t have the code, this is missing from it.

I love the fact that Warren Spector coined the term ‘immersive sim’. You make the game first, and then you worry about what category to put it in.

With Nightdive, a lot of people are impressed by the cadence of releases you’ve managed to hit. What does your workflow or formula look like, in order to achieve that?

Kuperman: (laughs) That’s probably the most complex question you could ask. So first of all, in terms of workflow, I’m going to call out one of our members, Joe Johnson, who’s been part of the team for several years. The enhanced workflow that allows us to meet that pacing is really a product of his management skills, and how he's been able to handle it.

The other thing I’d say is that the fast pace of producing high-quality games, there’s been no sacrifice. The fact it coincides with our joining the team at Atari is not coincidental. There was so much that was part of the day-to-day that was on Steve’s plate or my plate, from payroll to HR to legal, all of these things were on us when we started, and now to a large extent we have other resources if they haven’t been taken off our plate entirely.

Has Nightdive’s track record has increased interest in these kinds of preservation remasters? On your end, have you seen more interest in the industry?

Kuperman: My work on game preservation and remasters even predates my joining Nightdive. This goes back to years ago, when I worked for Stardock. We reverse-engineered and were able to remaster Total Annihilation, and that went out on our Impulse platform originally.

After the success of that, when we began to talk to other publishers about their catalog of games, everybody’s got a huge catalog. The question that came up to me, over and over, is ‘Do you really think people want to play these old games?’ It’s only taken us 20 years to definitively answer that question.

Kick: I will say, because we have such a wide variety of games, they’re all in the same genre, but we’ve got Doom on one hand and PO’ed on the other, and everything in between. From a community standpoint, the fans that we have now see that everything is on the table. They don’t know what we’re working on, but it’s going to be a total surprise. That’s been really powerful in keeping people interested, even so much as we’ve heard people are willing to buy anything we put out, just because of the care and attention to detail, and how obscure things are.

Kuperman: When we released Killing Time, it was the only game that a reviewer ever asked the question, “Why?” [did we do it?] But one of the things we found is that, first of all, games find a home. If you make it and do a good job, there are going to be people who say, I didn’t know I was looking for that, but I was.

Second of all, if you find that there’s an audience for them, people will write. We get at least one or two of these a week, if not on social media, via email of people saying, ‘You don’t know how important this game was to me. I played this game with my father; he’s passed on, this brings it all back.’ The emotional response to the games is something that Steve or I, never really assumed people would have. We knew how important these titles were to us, but we didn’t realize how large a fan base there was for just about everything we do.

Something I’ve seen a lot in the last couple of years is this idea of stagnant innovation in video games. A lot of people look at remakes and remasters and just see that as doing the same thing again. But can those lead to innovation? And how?

Kick: We’ll never innovate unless we understand our past, and if we lose our past, we can sometimes lose the ability to innovate in the future. One of our founding philosophies is that this is an art form, and the people who came before us and developed these games, they’re artists. They develop new tools, techniques, ideas, mechanics, designs, all these things they poured into these creations. Sometimes they’re wonderful and were considered masterpieces. And sometimes they were forgotten. But they all had something really unique to offer.

If we want more innovation and originality, developers today really owe it to themselves to go back and play a lot of these games that they may not have heard of, or maybe revisit a game that’s been remade to become inspired and come up with new ideas.

Kuperman: Steve and I come from art backgrounds. Steve was a character artist before beginning Nightdive, and my original background, many years ago, was in theater. When you begin to study, in any form of art, one of the first places you’re going to start is that you have to learn from the masters. You have to learn from those who came before you. That’s where techniques evolve. That same thing is true in games. Just look at how much came off the tree that grew from the System Shock seed.

Kick: The mentality, too, and just the ideas behind creating games has not necessarily been lost, but probably not appreciated as much as it should be. A lot of the early innovators and early designers, they created art through adversity. They had such insane technical limitations that they had to bend the art to their will in order for it to work at all. You look at the NES catalog, it’s like 1 out of 30 games, maybe that’s being generous, is fun to play, because they were all just figuring this stuff out.

Now, there’s virtually no limit to what you can do and create, and that can be harmful to good game design. So what if you were to take an old game, like PO’ed, for example, and give yourself the same technical limitations? Say, we’re going to develop a first-person shooter that can run on the PlayStation 1. What can we do? Can we push this even further than these developers had back then, with the tools we have now? It could be a fun experiment to see what you can do. But again, if you’re given unlimited resources, hard drive space, memory, that kind of thing, it’s hard to reel it in and focus on something good.

Kuperman: Love what you’ve done on GTA 6, now make it fit on a floppy disk.

Kick: We did a joke, actually, for April Fools’. We were gonna release the System Shock remake on floppies. We did the math, it was like 4000 floppies, and it would ship on a pallet.