When I interviewed Dave Oshry from New Blood, that covered one out of two studios I had on my list for all things boomer shooters. The second was Nightdive Studios. The stars finally aligned, and I’ve had a chance to interview Nightdive Studios twice for a two-part interview. The first part here will focus on the newly-announced The Thing: Remastered for modern platforms. The original game debuted back in 2002, and the third-person survival horror shooter was a sequel to the 1982 film. I hadn’t even heard of the game before the remaster was announced, and I was glad to chat with Larry Kuperman (Director of Business Development) about what we can expect from the superlative studio’s next remaster.
TouchArcade (TA): What made you want to revisit The Thing out of all older games?
Larry Kuperman (LK): Many of us at Nightdive are not just fans of the original game by Computer Artworks but also of the 1982 movie and the horror genre overall. We knew that a remaster of this game would be deeply appreciated by IP and genre fans around the world.
TA: I hadn’t heard of this until you announced the remaster. A friend of mine is a big fan of it. I wanted to know what we should expect from the release aside from Nightdive’s usual amazing visual and control enhancements.
LK: We have been fortunate enough to work with two of the original members of the Computer Artworks team: Mark Atkinson and Ron Ashtiani. Expect that the remastered version will be very true to the original and look and play the way that your imagination remembered it. Improvements to character models, textures, and animations have been hand-crafted not just upscaled.
TA: How long have you been working on this project?
LK: Close to a year. During that time, our team was also working on several other projects, such as PO’ed and Killing Time, as well as some unannounced games.
TA: What learnings from past Nightdive remasters have helped with The Thing: Remastered?
LK: You can expect to see more content restored and, wherever possible, the original vision of the development team realized.
TA: Will we be able to play with original visuals and controls?
LK: Not planned at this time.
Nightdive Studios’ Steam store page for the game confirms features like anti-aliasing, per pixel lighting, 4K resolution, and up to 144 fps gameplay support.
I’d like to thank Larry Kuperman, CJ Melendez, and Sean Walsh for their time and help here.
Stay tuned for our second interview covering more of Nightdive’s projects including System Shock.
You can keep up with all our interviews here including our recent ones with Peter ‘Durante’ Thoman about PH3 and Falcom here, M2 discussing shmups and more here, Digital Extremes for Warframe mobile, Team NINJA, Sonic Dream Team, Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, and more. As usual, thanks for reading.