

The System Shock remake isn't the same as, say, Capcom's Resident Evil remakes, or the Dead Space reimagining from earlier this year. It's an expensive and time-consuming one, but it's also tangible proof that if the right people are put in charge of a project, there's a middle ground between original games and rebuilt-from-the-ground-up remakes that's totally worth exploring. Nightdive's System Shock remake wasn't primarily intended to offer something new in the game preservation space – after remastering the '94 classic in 2015, this was a labor of love that was successfully Kickstarted and developed for several years – but I'm now convinced this approach is one that could help solve the game preservation problem. The most obvious result of this is the fact that games just a few decades old are often unplayable today – not just against modern standards and expectations, but because the games themselves, and the hardware they're played on, are simply unavailable. But unlike more traditional media, not least film, the evolution of technology on our side of the fence has moved at a far quicker pace. Game preservation has, of course, been a hotly debated topic in video games for some time. Why it matters that Sony is getting more serious about game preservation
