When I interviewed New Blood’s Dave Oshry, it was one of two places on my list of all the boomer shooter studios. The second one is Nightdive Studios. The stars finally aligned and I had the opportunity to interview Nightdive Studios twice for a two-part interview. The first part will focus on the newly released The Thing: Remastered for modern platforms. The original game debuted in 2002, and this third-person survival horror shooter is a sequel to the 1982 film. I hadn’t even heard of the game before the remaster was announced, and I had the pleasure of speaking with Larry Cooperman (Director of Business Development) about what we can expect from the next remaster from this top studio.
TouchArcade (TA): What made you want to revisit The Thing from all the old games?
Larry Cooperman (LK): Many people at Nightdive are fans not only of Computer Artworks’ original game, but also of the 1982 movie and the horror genre. We know this remastered version of the game will be deeply appreciated by fans of the IP and genre around the world.
face: I hadn’t heard of this before you announced the remake. A friend of mine is a big fan. I wonder what we should expect from this version besides Nightdive’s usual stunning visual and control enhancements.
Lectra: We’re lucky enough to be working with two original members of the Computer Artworks team: Mark Atkinson and Ron Ashtiani. The remaster is expected to be very faithful to the original and look and play just like you imagined. Improvements to character models, textures, and animations are all hand-crafted, not just upgrades.
face: How long have you been working on this project?
Lectra: It’s been almost a year. During that time, our team was also working on several other projects, like PO’ed and Killing Time, as well as a few unannounced games.
face: Will lessons learned from past Nightdive remakes help The Thing: Remastered?
Lectra: You can expect to see more content restored and the development team’s original vision implemented as closely as possible.
face: Will we be able to play with the original visuals and controls?
Lectra: There are currently no plans.
Nightdive Studios’ game’s Steam store page confirms features such as anti-aliasing, per-pixel lighting, 4K resolution, and up to 144 fps gaming support.
I would like to thank Larry Kuperman, CJ Melendez, and Sean Walsh for their time and help.
Stay tuned for our second interview, which covers more of Nightdive’s projects, including System Shock.
You can follow all of our interviews here, including our recent interview with Peter ‘Durante’ Thoman about PH3 and Falcom, discuss M2 here, discuss shmups and more, as well as talk about Warframe Mobile with Digital Extremes, Team NINJA, sonic dream team, Hi-Fi Audio Sprint, remorse, and more. As always, thank you for reading.
