I had doubts aplenty yesterday when I wrote up the rumours of System Shock 2’s return to the world. The thoroughly thrilling rights/trademark issues surrounding the series were detailed in that post, so I’ll spare you them for a second time, but the upshot is that heroic new studio Night Dive has solved them all and will be publishing the game through GOG tomorrow.
The GOG site is running a countdown, which will end at about 7am Eastern US Time. Meanwhile, there’s an interview at RockPaperShotgun which confirms this re-release is happening.
Said interview suggests the various negotiations over System Shock began in October last year and have only just been resolved. Night Dive is a studio made up of “veteran developers” who are also working on an original IP of some description.
According to the interview, the GOG version of the game will come with the following: “In addition to the soundtrack, [the GOG.com version of] the game will have concept art, maps of the Von Braun, a interview with Ken Levine, the first pitch document, and much more.” Naturally, it’s been tweaked to work smoothly with modern machines as well (one of the sticking points of getting older disc versions working.)
