It was the work of an unknown coder simply known as ‘Le Corbeau’. This patch, known as NewDark, appeared on a French Thief fan forum called Ariane4ever. Kick had just got off the phone, having pitched a plan to hire some of his friends and reverse engineer the title, when the news broke that a patch had appeared - and it didn't just make the games playable again, it made them work almost flawlessly.

'They requested a call to discuss my proposal of re-releasing the original games, as opposed to developing System Shock 3, an inquiry they fielded often from many interested parties.' This is where most of the gaming world would hit a forum or, for the less scrupulous, perhaps a torrent site, but Kick took a different approach: he emailed the legal team representing Star Insurance. Yet, at the time, System Shock 2 was the number one requested title on GOG. “So I went to GOG.com assuming that a compatible version would be available.' Reader, it wasn't. But things weren’t so easy back then: “The game wouldn't install,” he told me. It was a stormy night in the Guatemalan jungle when he was struck by the urge to revisit the Von Braun. But in 2013 it somehow got a re-release.īack in 2012, Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios, was in the middle of a year-long trip through Mexico and Central America. It finally became the property of Star Insurance Company as nothing more than an asset. But it sold poorly, and fell into a strange, complicated web of ownership when the original developers, Looking Glass Studios, shut down. Without it, there would be no Bioshock, no Prey, no Deus Ex, no any number of weird FPS/RPG hybrids. An immersive sim set on the spaceship Von Braun, it's taken on a near-legendary status.

System Shock 2 was released on August 11th 1999, in the sort of critical spotlight that casts long shadows. Even after two decades, System Shock 2 still holds onto its secrets.

Can that really be the case? Spoilers for this article, but the answer is “yes”, and Le Corbeau remains anonymous to this day. It's an official patch that the game’s publishers pushed onto Steam, but reading the note it looked to me like they didn’t know who was updating their game. In the list of fixes, additions, and technical talk, there's a note thanking 'Le Corbeau' for providing the patch. If you read System Shock 2’s patch notes on Steam you might notice something unusual, as I did.

System shock 2 patch install