After the success of the System Shock remake and the Star Wars: Dark Forces remaster, Nightdive Studios is still considering reviving another past masterpiece, but they have to overcome some major obstacles first.
For lovers of refined gaming nostalgia, remakes and remasters of aging classics are a welcome sight. Nightdive Studios has perfected this form of game development, shining most recently with the System Shock remake and the Star Wars: Dark Forces remaster. They've been trying to revive an early 21st century FPS classic for a long time, but that hasn't been quite as doable as with their other projects.
No One Lives Forever – A Regulatory Jungle
The obstacle lies in the murky legal landscape surrounding the game in question: 2000's No One Lives Forever (NOLF), developed by Monolith Productions and published by Fox Interactive.
In an interview with PCGamesN, Nightdive Studios' director of business development, Larry Kuperman, expressed the company's continued commitment to rebooting NOLF. Stephen Kick, Nightdive's founder, also discussed the challenges of such a revival, as the rights are now split between Warner Bros. (via Monolith Productions), Microsoft, and Disney (via Fox Interactive).
The process involves digging up a lot of old contracts and, ultimately, gaining the approval of all parties involved, Kuperman explains:
"It's a title we really want to bring back. It's our white whale. We'd love to bring back all the titles in that series. But it's about finding the conditions and getting all the potential parties involved to say, 'Yes, please, do it.'"
Chances Are Good For A Remake In The Future
As for the timing of the NOLF remaster, Nightdive is not currently working on it. However, Kick did share an intriguing anecdote from five or six years ago. He said that he was called by an unknown number and the person on the other end seemed to know about Nightdive's plans to revive NOLF, suggesting that timing is everything and that new opportunities would arise with changes in the leadership of the rights holders.
Over five years ago, Kick also reached out to Disney on Twitter regarding a remaster of Star Wars: Dark Forces, which eventually led to it actually happening. On March 19, he repeated that request, this time for NOLF, with Warner Bros. So it's worth keeping an eye on how this story plays out.