[Update]: The System Shock Remake has now arrived, and it's looking quite good so far! The console versions are also on the way, though those will be coming at a later date.

The highly anticipated System Shock remaster recently hit a major snag in development which resulted in the whole project being put on ice. Thankfully, instead of simply canceling the game, Nightdive Studios ended up returning to it with a renewed focus. Perhaps most importantly, at least for fans anyway, they returned to System Shock with the desire to create a game as similar to the original vision as possible.

"We’ve gone back to the original vision we shared with you at the start of our Kickstarter campaign - this time with more reliable performance and higher fidelity visuals thanks to the Unreal Engine", reads the Kickstarter update. "No, we’re not starting over. We have been able to re-use the majority of work we’ve done over the past year and we’re making significant progress in a very short amount of time."

"With that said we’ll be inviting our highest tier backers to privately test the game beginning in September at which point we estimate that the game will be fully playable, from start to finish. The majority of the art won’t be finished, but we’ll be ready to start high-level testing."

Expect to see these kinds of visuals on your journey

Besides returning to the old and overwhelmingly popular demo style, Nightdive Studios will also be working on updating the music. As you might imagine given System Shock's age, modernizing the music is not going to be the easiest of tasks since the original composers had to constantly work around some major technological restrictions.

"Since the beginning of System Shock, it's been my job to take the music from System Shock 1 and figure out how to capture that in a more modern way," System Shock's Audio Director Jonathan Peros shared in the brief update. "So I have explored what it would mean if those technological limitations of the '90s (low samplerates and bit-depths, shitty DACs, digital skipping) carried over to today. Or even further - if we could exploit those limitations creatively and define music through it."

"I'm so excited to be able to apply all of this musical direction back to the System Shock 1 music! All of the gear that I've acquired for the sake of this project was entirely built around the idea of finding the heart of the SS1 music and intentions and extrapolating that past its MIDI limitations. The original music that I have to work with is far beyond its time, and I'm so happy to be able to take it into a modern - but still OH-SO-90s - light."

You can read more about the System Shock remaster, as well as follow its development moving forward, by heading over to the official website.