Kick now tells me that this story was the catalyst for his first business deal. He and Banegas had been road tripping through Central America from San Diego, where Kick had just left a job as a character artist for Sony Online Entertainment. To fill spare time, he’d loaded a netbook with classic PC games.
"By the time we reached Guatemala, we were staying in this jungle hostel, like down in the deepest parts of the jungle," Kick says. "And one night there was this power outage, this amazing storm. These lightning bolts were hitting the village nearby. It was really terrifying. So of course the first thing I did was I booted up the little laptop and attempted to play System Shock 2."
The atmosphere—all gloomy corridors and groaning monsters—would have been perfect, but Kick couldn’t get the game to work. He looked to GOG.com, a site that specializes in selling older games for today’s PCs, but found that System Shock 2 wasn’t for sale. After more searching, he found my story, and the lead for Michigan-based Meadowbrook Insurance, which acquired the rights to System Shock when the original developers, Looking Glass Studios, shut down.
"From there, I just started sending out emails, without any kind of clear plan or path on what it was I was looking for, or what I was going to do," Kick says.
The rest of the story came down to fortunate timing. Meadowbrook’s lawyer wrote back a couple days later, saying the company had just secured the System Shock trademarks from original publisher Electronic Arts. Instead of pitching an entirely new game, Kick proposed rereleasing the originals. Meadowbrook loved the idea, and Kick and Banegas decided to turn around at the Panama Canal.
Back in the States, Kick had just wrapped up a phone call with Meadowbrook that essentially finalized the deal, when luck struck again. A developer with the handle "Le Corbeau" had patched System Shock 2 to make it work on modern computers, somehow accessing source code that Kick assumed was lost. He ran the patch on his netbook, and the game worked flawlessly.
"I’m sitting there, kind of starry-eyed. I just couldn’t even put it into words how lucky I felt," Kick says. "This was the real hurdle that I was anticipating, was actually getting the game to work and utilizing my network of friends and contacts to do it. And here was this anonymous developer in France who had posted it online for free," Kick says. (He tried, unsuccessfully, to contact Le Corbeau, but maintains that the patch was technically legal for Night Dive to use.)
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. "Looking back on it now, there shouldn’t have been any doubt in my head that this would have been successful, but I literally put everything that I had left into it, and it was a little scary at first," Kick says.
