It’s no secret that I always love reviewing games by Nightdive. Even if the game itself isn’t exactly an exciting title (PO’ed comes to mind), they always do their best when it comes to delivering the single best remastered version of said game you could possibly imagine.

This time around, they have decided to remaster a true hidden gem from 1995, Killing Time, a first-person shooter originally developed by The 3DO Company, in order to become one of the 3DO’s flagship titles. You can read more of our opinions on Killing Time here, but long story short: the game was already downright ambitious for 1995 standards, being a mixture between Doom, The 7th Guest, and Alone in the Dark, and Nightdive managed to bring that bad boy back from the dead, with vastly improved visuals, controls, and quality of life enhancements.

I wanted to know more from Nightdive regarding this particular remaster. Killing Time: Resurrected showed from out of nowhere, and it’s a freaking gem of a game. It’s easily one of my favorite titles by the company thus far. I had the privilege of interviewing the studio’s head, Stephen Kick, regarding Resurrected‘s development process, the company’s work philosophy, and their takes on remastering games most people hadn’t even heard of before.

WTMG: First of all, congratulations on the brand new Killing Time remaster, one of the most impressive feats by Nightdive so far! I’d like to start off by simply asking: why Killing Time? Of all games to have been tackled by Nightdive so far, Killing Time is possibly the most obscure. What led the team to look at that game, both of its versions, and decide to make that their newest project?

Stephen Kick: Nightdive has worked on many obscure titles, and I think that’s what really makes us special. One of our foundational principles is that games are art, and as such, they deserve to be preserved and experienced for generations to come. What I find particularly fascinating about 90’s era first person shooters is that each of them brings something new to the genre, and more often than not, those innovations don’t carry over or influence other titles, making them unique examples of that era.

Killing Time is the second game tackled by Nightdive to have been originally released on the 3DO. You are basically one of the very few developers – nay, gaming-related folks in general – to even acknowledge that system’s existence. Does anyone in the team own a 3DO, have any opinion about it, and have you played the original versions of both Killing Time and PO’ed on original hardware in order to gain some inspiration before having those games remastered?

SK: That’s a great question – I don’t know if anyone on the team owns a 3DO! I do know that both PO’ed and Killing Time were ported to other platforms, PS1 and PC respectively, so they weren’t exclusive to the system. Sam (Villarreal), our lead developer, discovered PO’ed on PS1. but as for Killing Time. I played the original on PC. as I wouldn’t own a console until about 2010. However, I believe we were able to access source code for the 3DO, which does give us a glimpse on how the game ran on that platform. It’s always useful to have that insight when revisiting a classic game.

Did anyone from the original development team join the development of the remaster in any way?

SK: Not for Killing Time, though the source code was given to us by Rebecca Heineman, who was responsible for the PC port of the 3DO code back in 1996.

The original Killing Time was far from being considered a scary title, but it was still marketed as a horror-themed shooter back in the day. Your remaster is very aware of how cheesy and hilarious the game can be at times, even being marketed as a comedic game of sorts. Was this a point of contention at any given point during the development process, as it would make the remaster go against the “spirit” of the original, or did the team simply acknowledge the game had always been silly from the getgo?

SK: There hasn’t been any contention about the tone of the game – one of the first enemies you face is a zombified duck afterall – I think Killing Time is very much in line with B-movie sensibilities, it has a fun plot with ghosts, creatures and demons. The atmosphere can be foreboding at times, and the actors who portray the FMV characters really ham it up. The game is self aware to some degree and I think that’s what really makes it stand out.

Could you tell us a bit about how you were able to restore the live-action footage to a decent enough state to be added to the game?

SK: When we were going through the archives that were provided to us, we were able to find the original footage of the live-action sequences. This is unbelievably fortunate as, in most cases, we’re lucky to find anything! This enabled us to recreate the sequences using the highest resolution source material available.

Killing Time features two vastly different versions, each with its own pros and cons. What was the thought process behind deciding which feature in each version should become the standard option in Killing Time: Resurrected (e.g.: the level design from the PC version, but the cheesier art and enemy designs from the 3DO original)?

SK: There’s no question that the PC had the vastly superior level design, so we built the remaster on that foundation. We did alter it to some degree, making the game world easier to navigate. On the sprites, we felt the higher resolution photo-based sprites fit in better with the aesthetic of the level art. Overall, we always try to combine the best elements from different versions of the same game if they exist.

One of the main selling points of Killing Time back in the day was the absence of loading times, with one single sprawling open world for players to explore. Was this feature easy to port over in the remaster, most notably for last-gen consoles like the PS4 and the Switch?

SK: I wouldn’t say any part of the development was easy, but features like that are essential to carry over whenever possible. The seamless loading is a really novel feature here, because it’s one of the first games that allowed the player to explore the entire map however and whenever they want. There are areas inaccessible until keys are found, but most of the exterior can be experienced at will, which to my knowledge had never been done before!

Some of the games Nightdive remasters are quite old, back in a time when source code preservation wasn’t exactly anyone’s main priority. I can only imagine that searching for the 3DO original Killing Time source code wasn’t an easy feat. How hard was it for the code to be decompiled to a state you’d be able to work on? Was there anything you weren’t able to bring back from the original version due to some incompatibility issue?

SK: Again, we had the code provided to us by Rebecca Heineman, and she archived everything to such a degree that it made the process of working with the code as painless as it could be. During her whole career she’s made a herculean effort to archive and maintain the codebases of the games she’s worked on, so that it’d never be lost. We can’t thank her enough for sharing her work with us.

You guys constantly alternate between remastering some old gems younger people may have never heard of before (PO’ed, Killing Time, Rise of the Triad) and remastering bonafide classics like Doom, Quake, Turok, and so on. Is that intentional? Do you like to alternate between classics and hidden gems, or is this purely coincidental?

SK: I’d say it’s a bit coincidental; we have a slate of projects we’re always working on, and sometimes we get some weird titles that sneak in. It definitely helps mix things up, and gives us opportunities to work on games that would otherwise continue to slip into obscurity. Some of the games we work on are requests from the development team: PO’ed was a project Sam always wanted to do, Dark Forces was my personal dream title, and I think just about everyone was thrilled to work on our recent Doom + Doom 2 remaster.

I love how Nightdive is helping revive and preserve classic games from the 90s and 2000s, but in pretty much every single release by you guys, your remaster is so much better than the original to the point it almost negates any reason for one to go back and experience them on original hardware. How do you see the role of your company in preserving long-lost games, but also polishing them up to such a state those remasters feel like the definitive and actual must-have versions of said titles?

SK: I think that’s the greatest compliment you could possibly give us! While we’re able to provide the original game alongside our remasters, sometimes it just isn’t possible. I think by doing so, it gives context to how much work goes into what we do, and allows the player to appreciate what the original developers were able to accomplish with the limited resources and hardware at their disposal 20-30 years ago.

Our goal has always been to make classic games playable on modern hardware and in doing so, hopefully inspire the next generation of game developers. Learning from the past is the most important thing we can do for our medium, and I couldn’t be more proud of the role Nightdive plays in facilitating that journey.