META This! Ep.7: VGamers, Heads Up! Nightdive & Atari are Bringing Back Lost Classic Games

Illustration by @max_gps

META This! Ep. 7:

Larry Kuperman of Nightdive, and parent company Atari, want to preserve oldies like System Shock and Turok 3.

Podcast Transcript:

David Schnider: Welcome to the Look Legal META This podcast. My name is David Schnider. I am a partner at Nolan Heimann. I have with me today Larry Kuperman, who is the director of business development for Nightdive Studios, which is now a part part of Atari. Larry is a friend, a writer, a teacher, a scholar, and has been in the game industry for over a decade working with developers of all types.

And normally our show, we talk about cutting edge technologies, and to some extent, that's what we're gonna do today. But I wanna take a little bit of a different direction because Nightdive does something a little bit different. So, Larry, can you tell us about what Nightdive does?

Larry Kuperman: So, our our motto is that games are art and that art deserves to be preserved. A study came out recently that said that only 13% of games made more than ten years ago are still playable. And we look at our mission as as being one of bringing back potentially lost classic games and making them accessible and playable for today's audiences.

David Schnider: I mean, just generally, how do you go about doing that?

Larry Kuperman: Well, it it always starts with identifying, you know, the target, identifying the IP that we wanna go after. People ask how we how we make that decision, and there there there are, I guess, three different ways that we we look at at games. First of all is is popularity. So the, the game that launched Nightdive Studios was, System Shock two, a game that before us was was inaccessible. You could not legally play a copy of it.

There were copies that were, you know, gray to say to say the least that you could get. But even then, it was more difficult than than the average gamer could could possibly do. Well, that game was the top most requested game on good old games. So when we looked at that, we knew that we had the potential for something there. So popularity is the first criterion.

Second criteria is influence. Recently, we did an interview, that isn't out yet with two industry greats, our friend Paul Neurath and and Warren Spector. And they were talking about how Looking Glass Studios' older title, space rogue, titles that before we brought it back, I would say, you know, 95% of today's gamers had never heard of, was influential in setting the road map for the system shock franchise, which in turn went on to inspire other games, Bioshock, Thief, Deus Ex, a whole litany of of what are called immersive sins. But it really started with this almost unknown title space rogue. So, clearly, that was that was a game that we wanted to bring back.

And then the other part, and I won't minimize this, is personal importance. We have done a lot of work on the Turok games. Turok three is is going to be coming out soon, the cap stone of the the Turok trilogy. But, since 02/2015, we've been the the publishers and republishers of the Turok games. Those were games that Steven, my, my partner at Nightdive, played with his father when he was growing up, and these were games that I played with my son when when he was growing up.

So there was an important a personal importance to us. Did that sway our decision? Yes. Probably it did. What's the point of having your own company if you can't make those kind of indulgences?

But it was also something that was games that were important to us turned out to be important to a whole lot of other people in the gaming community. So as I would say, those are the three criteria. And and, David, I know we both share interest in music. I have the the same same criteria with what I listen to. I try to stay current on things that are popular.

And not it's not necessarily to my taste, but I should at least be informed, as I like to say, culturally literate. But I also explore bands that were influential beyond their own popularity. So it's the same with video games. There's games that you know, there's a saying about bands that that only 600 people bought this record, but they all went out and started a band. We find the same thing in the gaming world, that there were games that inspired other people to become developers.

And so there's all the fruit of those trees.

David Schnider: So there's something I want you to explain in a little more detail, which is when you talk about games being unavailable. You know, when you think about the comparison to music, even old songs are frequently available streaming. If they're not streaming, you can go find record albums. When you say a game is unavailable, what does that really mean?

Larry Kuperman: So let's take an example of of one of our successes, Doom 64, that we did on behalf of our our partner Bethesda. Everyone knows the importance of Doom one and Doom two. Those were clearly important games that influenced created a whole genre of their own. But Doom 64 was made only for the n 64 console. So if you had an n 64 console today and it was still in working order, you might be able to find a copy at in some bin someplace and be able to play the game.

But other than that, here's a title in a very important franchise that was unavailable, that you just could not play because the hardware had changed, and nobody had bothered to port that to modern hardware until we did. We've also brought back, you know, a number of other n 64 games that are now playable on the Switch, and so a whole new generation of gamers gets to try them.

David Schnider: Can we talk a little bit about the process, what it takes to bring back a game? Because I know from having worked with you, it's not just, hey. I like this game. I'll go remake it. There are legal issues.

There are technical issues. What's involved in bringing one of these games back from the dead?

Larry Kuperman: Step one is finding out who owns it. And with a step one a, we vastly prefer to have the original source code available for us. So there's who owns the intellectual property, and, of course, that's both copyright and trademark are are involved in those. And and and the answers to who owns the copyright, who owns the trademark are not always the same. But then you ask the next question, who actually has the assets?

So we do a a lot of detective work before then. Then you begin by reaching out to the IP, the rights holder. Again, using the Turok games as an example, that rights holder turned out to be NBC Universal. So you reach out to them. You make your pitch to them.

You find out if they have any appetite to allow the game to be remade. And, if they do, then comes the next phase, which involves our various lawyers, which is negotiating a a contract that will allow you to make the game. And there are often challenges in that. You know, I mentioned that you can have different owners for copyright and trademark, yet a different person with the source code files, and then you have the music files. If it's a game that, was based off of a movie or a series of movies, you know, cinematic universe, then you have to find out who the various rights holders are.

Can you remake it with the original characters in the game? So there's some degree of complexity to that, as you well know, sorting that contract out. Assuming that you can get all of those pieces in place that I present to my team and say, we've signed a contract to make this game. We have all the rights needed, and I've been fortunate enough to find the source code, and and here it is. Then the real work begins, which is taking apart the original game, taking the assets, analyzing the physics, importing the way the game is played into our own engine so that even though it's using different code, different access for different hardware, it plays the way you remember the original playing.

And that process is one that takes always takes years in many cases. And even once the game is published, there's always challenges of the the multiplayer elements in it. So there's there's a great deal of complexity to it. People often ask why there's a delay between the time we we announce that we're going to be making a game and it and it comes out. I mean, don't you just go to the big machine and you push the button that says make a game?

Isn't it isn't it just that easy? And and the answer is no. It's it's not quite that easy. We have multiple teams, but we have about 40 employees at at NightDive, and many of them have specializations. We have a senior developer whose specialization is reverse engineering in the event that we don't have the source code.

But even if we do have the source code, he's invaluable for explaining how things work so you're able to accurately duplicate the physics. So that the way Turok looks when he shoots his bow in Turok one is the same way that Turok looked when he did that same action on the n 64 all those years ago.

David Schnider: It sounds like a lot of work to restore these games and bring them back. Why do you think it's important work? Why is this worthwhile?

Larry Kuperman: Well, I would say that, first of all, you know, what I've said at the very beginning of it, that games are art. I think that that's incontrovertible today. I don't think that that's that's something that we no longer need to debate that. And art in general should be preserved. But there's also the the influence that games have, you know, cultural influence beyond just the the gameplay itself.

You know, I think that those are those are important factors. I think that games which outsell movies and and music these days are important to an audience that for whom movies, for whom music might not quite resonate, no pun intended, resonate the same way. But games are immersive. They they draw draw you in. You're not passive.

You have to be actively involved in in the gameplay. Even what are called, you know, idle games, you have more involvement in it than you do in in watching a movie or or listening to to an album. There's no time. Well, there are some there have been some attempts to gamify movies, but most of the time when you're watching your character, you can't tell him that, no. It's it's the door to your right, not the one to your left that that you really wanna open.

So, you know, gaming has a level of immersion because you are actively involved in creating the story. It has a level of immersion that that I don't believe any other art form can quite match.

David Schnider: So I had long presumed that the audience for these kinds of games was old guys like me who wanted to play things we had in our youth. That's not the case, is it?

Larry Kuperman: No. It's it's grown far beyond that. Again, the influence of games, it's understood that gaming didn't start yesterday, that that when you look at a magnificent series of games like Ken Levine's Bioshock series, that there were precursors to that. And so there's an audience intelligent audience, appreciative audience that want to understand, want to experience how this came about. When Warren Spector created the original system shot game, he he created a whole genre, the immersive sim.

It's one in which you are you truly are the character in a game, and you have to have growth. Your understanding changes. It's not just, you know, if it moves, shoot it. So you have a game of that level. Well, people understand that there are dozens of titles that were inspired by that, and they wanna go back to the original and understand how that came about.

In the same way, I was at the Salvador Dali, Museum in Florida, I wanna say, a year, year and a half ago. And one of the things that was interesting was at the same time in that museum, they had an exhibition of Picasso's work. And in particular, they showed the influence that Picasso had on Dolly. In much the same way we wanna understand how one artist influenced another artist, we wanna do the same thing with games. We wanna understand how how a title influenced a whole genre that came after.

David Schnider: I had some firsthand experience with this. I've got a 23 year old son who's a gamer, and he got very into XCOM and was playing I don't even know the title, but the latest version. And then after he finished that, he started working his way back. And I found him at one point playing the original PC version that one of my college friends had been addicted to. Then he just sort of went down a rabbit hole and into all these other classic games.

It sounds like that's a huge audience for this kind of product.

Larry Kuperman: I, I also see a future employee. But, yes, I mean, there is. And there are museums. There are I mean, there there are dedicated efforts at preservation. And not only is Nightdive leading it, but now our our parent company is is leading those efforts.

For Atari, Atari just was the winner of an event held by Google. It was not an Atari event, but it was a a Google event to determine, I guess, the greatest video game of of all time. And it it shouldn't have been any surprise. It was the 1972 game Pong because everything that came after that was built on that foundation. And in fact, if you go back if you peel back the layers of history even further, nineteen seventy two's pong was derivative from the 1967 brown box by by Ralph Baer, a Jew who fled Germany, got out a couple of months before Kristallnacht, and then created the first video game console.

He would go on to work for for Magnavox on on their Odyssey games, but everything has starting point. Right? And I'm gonna bet if you look further in Bayer's work, you would find that the original that that that there were original games that were being played on on pieces of of paper.

David Schnider: You had mentioned something about the parent company. I wanna talk about that. So first, congratulations. You guys were acquired by Atari earlier this year. Atari, I think, been going through a renaissance.

It's got new ownership. They're a new direction, a new strategy. What has that meant for Nightdive and what you guys do to be able to work with them and be a part of that?

Larry Kuperman: So let's go back to the origin story of Nightdive. Stephen Kick stumbles upon and manages to acquire publishing rights for System Shock two from an insurance company of of all places. He begins the company. There is no technical support at the beginning, and this person from England keeps on pinging him on Steam chat and says, you know, you could do this better. There's this other thing out there that you might not be aware of.

And finally, Steve says to Daniel, well, if you know how to do those things, why don't you join us? And he does. Well, I'm, I'm employee number three as a company. And we come on, and and our focus is is growing the company, is getting the games out. And we have a a lot of initial success, but things that we did not plan for, we had no HR.

We we had no accounting background. Let me rephrase that. Alex was doing doing the job of accounting, but it was all a shoestring accounting, Alex being Steven's wife. You know? We were ticking all the boxes that we needed to, but we had no bandwidth to to go outside that.

We couldn't put together plans, things that were important to us, plans for employee growth, employee satisfaction. We just did our our first satisfaction survey. And it it, by and large, it went well, but but it also reminded us that there were things that we needed to address. We were fortunate that we had very good external counsel, not naming any attorneys or or or Whoever that might be, of course.

But but now we have counsel, you know, within the company. And, yeah, while while I may have been someone's favorite client, we weren't their only client, whereas whereas now we have kind of dedicated resources for that kind of thing. In terms of day to day operations and guidance, there was really only the two of us. Our our knowledge base did not extend beyond that. And so now we have a whole larger support mechanism, and and the rationale behind it was not that night dive would would stop doing what we've been so successful doing or that we would pivot onto something else or but the reason for it was to enable us to do more of what we had been so successful, what we're good at, and to allow us to focus on those things without distraction.

I will just tell you anecdotally, David, and it's it's one of my favorite moments. It's the nature of our job that we're very active on on social media. So when the acquisition was announced and and and there was a lot of news about that, a fan regretfully posted that this would be the end of an era that two of his favorite titles, Quake two and Turok three, would would never see the light of day because because now we would be doing other things. And, of course, in the first six months post the acquisition, we've not only released Quake two, but but, we're releasing Turok three next next month. The whole rationale behind it was it was a great fit, and it was it was really to enable us to do more of the kinds of things that that we're best at.

David Schnider: Well, you can sort of see the synergy because Atari is most known for its classic games. But how do you think Nightdive fits in with the company's new strategy going forward?

Larry Kuperman: It's been it's been great. It has been a boost all the way through. And probably the, the greatest demonstration of that was at Gamescom, which takes place in Germany, where we, we shared booth space. We actually shared demo space there between Atari and the night dive portions of the company, and the the synergies were were immediately obvious. We were talking to the same reporters, the same areas of interest.

I mean, there was so much overlap, and it went really well. And and, you know, that was where, we first showed off, some of the footage of Turok three, and we also announced that, coming early next year will be star wars dark forces, remastered by night dive. So, you know, on one hand, Atari gave us a lot of structure, and there's our missions are are very consistent of of bringing back these lost games. The other part that goes with it is Nightdive has an extensive client base. I mentioned two companies, you know, three companies that we work with on a on a day to day basis.

We've had wonderful support from the team at NBCUniversal. We're really enjoying the work that we're doing with Disney slash Lucas, and we've had great success with our partners at Bethesda. I don't know if you're aware of it, David, but, Phil Spencer just did a video, interview where he was talking about the goals for Microsoft after the Activision acquisition. And one of the things that he addressed specifically was, the return of classic game titles. He mentioned Heretic and Hexen, which are both near and dear to to my heart.

And he also you know, they actually showed video footage of the work that we did for Bethesda and bringing back Quake two. So there's a synergy there. We have connections that that we can share with our parent company, and they have a structure and, you know, funding that they shared with Nightdive.

David Schnider: So I know you're not responsible for the Atari side of the operations, but, you know, oftentimes when I talk to people now and tell them we're doing some work with Atari, they're somewhat surprised and say, oh, that company still exists. I don't think people realize they have a new console out. They're releasing new games. Can you talk a little bit about what Atari is doing and and what's exciting over there?

Larry Kuperman: Absolutely. So Atari has actually several retro consoles out. Let's start off with the VCS, which looks looks and feels, and this is quite deliberate, and it it's been heavily engineered, look like the original Atari 2,600. That allows you to purchase and to stream games directly, classic style games directly to your console. They also have the 2,600 plus, which plays classic twenty six hundred and seventy eight hundred cartridges.

So for for those of us that remember the good old days of tapping the cartridge three times and then blowing in it to get it to work. Hey. You may call it you may call it sympathetic magic, but it worked. You know? So so that's back.

Atari has recently acquired or brought into the fold Atari age, and we're we're supporting homebrew developers that are making new classic games, if there is such a thing, new games for the for the 2,600. So so all of that is going strong. But Atari also supports the modern consoles, including PlayStation and Xbox, generations eight and nine, both of those, has games on the Switch. Atari is first and foremost an an IP company. There's quite a bit going on there.

Again, our our friend and and CEO, Wade Rosen. Let me come back to that in a minute. But but Wade Rosen has has really given new life to the company, and it's expanding in in many different directions. David, you know this, and it's publicly available knowledge. I'm I'm not not sharing anything that I shouldn't.

But when Nightdive began, we were always, independently funded. We were a debt free company. We we made did the old fashioned way. We we made more money than we spent. But we reached a point where we knew that we needed both advice and and and a and a cash infusion.

And Wade Rosen was our outside investor. He was the only outside investor in the history of Nightdive. So going to work with Wade at at Atari was was a natural. He was someone that we had known. We had known the depth of of his knowledge of classic games.

If you ever wonder what to do with several hours, call Wade up and mention the Jaguar console. You you know, you you see that somebody that is truly, truly passionate about about what he does. But, you know, he was a familiar figure, and he was somebody that that we trusted. And I'm I'm I'm going to use that word. You know, we've all seen it's been a tough year for the gaming industry.

We've all seen, you know, acquisitions followed by layoffs, and and we haven't experienced anything like that to this point. Our plans are actually growth oriented.

David Schnider: We talk a lot at our firm and on these podcasts about the metaverse and experiential entertainment. And I'm curious, you know, in a world that is shifting more and more towards and that type of entertainment, do you think the classic games remain relevant that they fit in?

Larry Kuperman: So the the answer is yes. I know that there's a lot of talk about, the metaverse. I haven't seen a lot of viability of it as yet. But but that said, when that vision does crystallize, and I do believe it will, I'm not not sure exactly in what form, but when that vision does crystallize, I see a lot of opportunities for classic games. I've used the word immersion a number of times.

I can't think of anything, any experience that's more immersive than playing some of these games in VR.

David Schnider: Do you see that as a as a possible future where you port some of these classic games to a VR experience, something like System Shock maybe.

Larry Kuperman: I think that that it's something that's going to happen. The question is always when and and, know, and at what point does it become does it become viable? I've not had a chance to use the Oculus three or to to test the new Oculus three. I will tell you, with the Oculus two that that our friends at at Meta provided to me, I it was the first time that I I really saw the potential there, but I also saw the downside. I mean, I I personally could not use it for more than, you know, ten or fifteen minutes at a time.

And that Yeah. You know, that that but that's a technology thing. That's a hardware thing. And those those things tend to get solved. We haven't reached the point of, of the VR Moore's lore, but but but we'll get there, you know, where where it'll become smaller and, you know, whatever it takes.

David Schnider: Yeah. It's interesting. Once you get past the hardware problems, I wonder if being immersed in classic games like that where you're actually in the world, not just looking at it, really resonates with people or turns them off because it's not the classic experience they had.

Larry Kuperman: The the most controversial part of our our System Shock remake, which, again, you know, it it scored very, very well. It was very, very well received. But the most controversial part of it was our art style. Because as you played the game under ordinary playing experiences, the art style looked absolutely modern, consistent with what players would expect in a 2023 title. When you got close to it, if you if you walked over and stood directly in front of a wall, you could see the pixelated quality behind that, that this was an homage.

This was a reminder to people that what they were playing was the modern version of a 1994 title. So I I think I think it answered your question that that there's gonna have to be some adaptation for it. That's fine. That creates the the opportunities for company like Nightdive to come along. If it if it was easy, everybody would do it.

Right. But it also creates the opportunity for for for new styles to emerge.

David Schnider: So last question for you. I just wanna know what titles you guys may have in the works announced or unannounced. You're welcome to announce them here if you want that you guys or that you personally are excited about.

Larry Kuperman: I'm probably most excited by star wars dark forces. And, again, that will be coming out in, in q one of of next year. And I as I started, I'm kinda coming back to where I started. That game is significant. It ticks the boxes both in the popularity of the original and in the influence that it had it had afterwards.

That was a game that I played with my son. I can't for for for people who are just casually listening to us, I can't begin to describe what the experience was like for a kid to find themselves in the Star Wars universe, not passively watching it on on TV, but being part of it and extending the canon of the story, how important that game was. So that's that's the one that I really wanna call out to the audience. I think that people who are gonna play, Turok three, and I think, you know, many of them will have been fans of the older games in in the series. Those games in the series that that we had done previously are gonna be absolutely delighted to see what we've been able to do as we've iterated on our proprietary engine on the KEX engine.

David Schnider: So if people are interested in finding out more about Nightdive and your games, where can they find, information about the company?

Larry Kuperman: Nightdivestudios.com a great place, but we also have a social media presence on Facebook, Twitter. I'm not sure about Blue Sky and Threads yet, but we're getting there. So just, you can find us everywhere.

David Schnider: Alright, Larry. It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for coming on the show today.