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How One Company Is Bringing Old Video Games Back From the Dead (fastcompany.com)
harrymcc writes: Night Dive Studios is successfully reviving old video games — not the highest-profile best-sellers of the past, but cult classics such as System Shock 2, The 7th Guest, Strife, and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. It's a job that involves an enormous amount of detective work to track down rights holders as well as the expected technical challenges. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman tells the story of how the company stumbled upon its thriving business. "Kick didn’t have money on hand to buy the rights, so he scraped together contract work with independent developers and funneled the proceeds into the project. ... Some efforts fall apart even without the involvement of media conglomerates. In early 2014, Kick tried to revive Dark Seed, a point-and-click adventure game that featured artwork by H.R. Giger. But after Giger’s sudden death, demands from the artist’s estate escalated, and the negotiations derailed. ... But for every one of those failures, there’s a case where a developer or publisher is thrilled to have a creation back on store shelves."
GoG is definitely clean and legit.
It's really System Shock (1) that needs the remake. Even with the mouselook patch, the controls are archaic and clumsy. It doesn't live up to the standards that modern FPS games strive to.
From the Article
One example: Night Dive is developing a full remake of the original System Shock, going well beyond the basic rerelease that launched a couple months ago. Night Dive has acquired the full rights to the franchise, and Kick says he’s been working with Robert Waters, the game's original concept artist, to reimagine his designs from the early 1990s.
Night Dive is the one securing the rights so that sites like GOG can legally sell them. Check out the "Company" line on GOG's System Shock 2 catalog page, e.g.
That's insufficiently correct. They also remove DRM (which could be especially clunky in the DOS days!) and patch bugs. While they absolutely DO use Dosbox for their DOS games, that's not ALL they do. Also, many of their games are post-DOS era. This means a whole other set of bugfixes and compatibility issues they handle.