The Thing: Remastered, an Interview with Nightdive

The Thing’s remaster caught many people by surprise, myself included. While a genuine cult classic, such games are often left to the seas of abandonware and obscure fan patches. They rarely receive the proper re-release they deserve. I already dove into how things turned out, but I also had the privilege of email interviewing some of the fine folks at Nightdive about their latest remaster.

As Joel Welsh (the remaster’s art lead) explains, he and his friend and coworker Albert Marin Garau (technical artist) both joined Nightdive around the same time, working on the Turok 3 remaster. “I arrived at Nightdive to help with the asset remaster process of Turok 3 (models and textures),” Garau explains. “Since then, I’ve been part of various [dev teams] like Dark Forces: Remastered, Killing Time: Resurrected and The Thing: Remastered. I love to remaster, re-create and reimagine stuff, no matter what!”

“We’ve been together ever since,” Welsh explains. “My responsibilities vary, but I generally ensure that our remaster game art retains its original vision, style and detail in high resolution, and help with vaults and provide support to the team.”

Along with Welsh and Marin, I was able to get programming insights from Josh Dowell, who joined on during the Killing Time: Resurrected remaster. “My job involves writing nonsense into a text file and then things happen on the screen,” Dowell explains.

As Welsh puts it, The Thing: Remastered is “For all intents and purposes [the game is] Stephen’s baby. That being said, we’re all big fans – we even had a movie night as a fun way to unify and connect the team.” This tracks with Kick’s social media presence, often being candid with fans about what games he’d love for his studio to tackle next. Fortunately, Universal not only was receptive, but provided a virtual treasure trove of resources.

Welsh elaborates: “We had access to a few different source builds, uncompressed art assets, original development libraries and materials, and two devs who worked on the original – Ron Ashtiani [Artist] and Mark Atkinson [Technical Director & Project Director]. Basically, a full deck of cards. In addition, we had about a year of prep time, so it was just a matter of piecing it all together and filling in blanks. For bonus features, I coordinated with Stephen and Ron on the Vault, and worked with Jonathan ‘Paril’ Barkley, Xaser and Daniel ‘Supsuper’ Albano to implement it. They did a great job on the design (menu too), which draws inspiration from Blair’s computer simulation at Outpost 31, and as an aside, Stephen found a font that matched pretty closely.”

However, Dowell notes that despite all this, there were still some hurdles: “Luckily we had access to the full original source code for the game, which is the most important resource when remastering a game. However we only had a few fragments of source material for the game assets, to get around this we wrote a tool to create workable files from the final game assets, so we could edit them in Blender then put them back into the game again afterwards.”

Garau echoes this sentiment, adding, “[As far] as art assets are concerned, we had access to uncompressed textures and a few higher resolution models, although some were reworked or redone from scratch, that material helped.”

However, thanks to the full source code, reverse engineering the game’s engine and scripting was unnecessary. This also meant they could delve quite deeply into the code, where Dowell’s department made a discovery. As he recalls, “Before development started I heard rumors that the trust and infection system was faked, but after analyzing the source code it turned out that the system was in fact complete and quite involved. The thing that made people think it was incomplete or unfinished was that the game’s level design just didn’t give it the room needed to fully be as dynamic as it could be”. In short, it was too easy for players to manage trust, paired with forced squadmate infections at certain scripted moments. This “completely decayed player trust in the dynamic infection system.”

Given it’s still rather forgiving, Dowell adds, “[I]f we get the opportunity, I’d love to make higher difficulties be more punishing to squadmate trust and fear. One key feature that sticks out to me is that squadmates would lose trust in you if you left them alone for long enough. The problem was that the time before this starts to happen is ten minutes, and after that, trust ticks down extremely slowly. This was way too slow to have any noticeable effect.” Having played the game, I can certainly understand this sentiment. Some levels can be traversed in under ten minutes. Regardless, Dowell is proud of the work the programming team were able to accomplish, stating “I think we did a pretty good job.”

Welsh also praises the programmers’ work, recalling: “I think Josh ‘Slartibarty’ Dowell, [Jonathan Barkley], and Xaser [Acheron] worked closely with Mark on the fear/trust system. Early on, we tossed around ideas for ‘false positives’ for the blood screening device, and it went through several iterations along the way. In the end, they found a great balance and practical solution to keep your team alive as long as possible.”

This approach – refining upon the original goals of the first release – is something that Dowell describes as feeling quite natural. “I thought about this a lot during development, I felt that if I wasn’t careful I would step on the intentions of the original team, but as I worked with the game I realised that I was performing the same thought processes that they would have done back then, and what felt right to change started to come naturally. We were basically just picking up development again after a 20 year break,” with the bonus of “having Ron and Mark on the team to bounce ideas off of helped a lot too. In hindsight we made a lot of good decisions, but one thing I wish I had more time to fine tune was the difficulty.”

Where programming was more a matter of polishing and honing in on the vision of a team from two decades prior, some aspects required a more substantial rework, such as the lighting. As Garau puts it, the lighting is “pretty much completely redone, [although] the goal was to stay true to the original vision.” That is, without the limitations of original hardware. This led to a unique perspective on the improvements. “We didn’t want to make the game look like the best next-gen game, but [instead] improve the original experience using newer lighting and material techniques.”

Welsh attributes the initial lighting work to Ron Ashtiani and Brendan McKinney, with art director Jonatan Pöljö overseeing the final pass. A particular highlight for Welsh is, “the scene where the Marines find Child’s body in the carpenter shack. They nailed the atmosphere. We used a modern release of the film with exaggerated color grading – heavy blue, purple, pink, orange – for reference.”

Garau continues, “Art-wise, all changes done are a direct consequence of not being tied by the original hardware limitations. So we could carefully add extra props and geometry to those places which were obviously empty due to technical limitations.” Garau later noted that the insights of the returning original developers helped them identify areas to address such additions. A few are even previously cut assets intended for the original release, now fully restored. “We had to be cautious, because each change could accidentally entail gameplay variations, for good or [ill]. This obviously encouraged us to add tons of The Thing movies references and Easter eggs here and there!”

One thing that’s readily apparent in Welsh’s recollections is the sheer amount of research put into truly understanding the 2002 release. Not only did they extensively play the first retail release, but read over the design documentation, any previous interviews with the developers, and more. “The Thing is an odd example because it’s a different beast on paper,” Welsh explains, “with the player exploring the alien craft and desert[ed base] after a 20-year time jump.” Together, Welsh and Ashtiani I talked extensively about restoring cut content that wouldn’t disrupt the storyline and setting. They also took great pains to ensure authenticity and continuity with the series’ evolution in the years since.

“For instance, we quarantined the Norwegian camp,” Welsh notes, “and replaced the dead infirmary soldier at Outpost 31 with Nauls since it was a leftover from the setting when Whitley sent in an advance team. Albert [Marin Garau] did the model for him. Anything not on paper was in service to movie edits. I also consulted with Sean Haworth, the production designer of The Thing 2011 (and art director of Avatar) in pre-production to make sure we nailed certain details such as door plates. Eternally grateful to him.”

“As far as scaling back goes, I think perhaps every project is a case of ‘What could have been?’. You have to pick and choose your battles carefully. If you need a few examples, we wanted to use the Universal logo at the start, Atari 2600 console and Asteroid pinball machine in the rec room, but ran out of time. Kaiser and I also toyed around with the idea of adding a black-and-white static filter option to match The Thing From Another World, and Lexi [Mayfield] proposed a mini-game for the chess wizard.”

Welsh goes deeper in his explanation, how he worked through the scripts, associated book, and even in some cases over a 35mm scan, frame by frame, to capture any details prior artists might’ve missed. “For instance,” he cites, “we added the balloon station and hunted down the construction materials from the corridor of Outpost 31, and swapped out manufacturer names with developer names. The game drum with ‘Leosoft – Heavy Duty Laundry Detergent’ is indeed a detergent in the movie, you just have to look really closely.”

This isn’t to say there aren’t a few fun nods to the remaster’s team. “Joe [C. Johnson, Nightdive COO] and I share the green fibreglass pipe insulation box,” Welsh recalls. “Larry [Kuperman, Nightdive’s Director of Business Development] is Kuperman Scientific, and Smokey the Bear was reworked into Stevie the Seal (after Stephen Kick, our studio head) since Smokey is property of the US Federal Government.”

“Atari also makes a cameo since they were around in ‘82 and literally appeared in JC’s movie in several scenes. Kind of a neat coincidence – DNA runs deep. In fact, the whole Nightdive team appears in one form or another, sort of like how the [Computer] Artworks team inserted themselves as characters, with Ron being Willams, as a solution to bypass potential copyright issues. Long and short, movie edits were a convenient way to enhance the game since they share locations, in addition to modifications related to game specific planning docs, notes and whatever ended up on the cutting room floor. In this case, there wasn’t much, but we tried to restore bits like trailer trucks outside the weather station and additional details via environmental storytelling. In the lab, for example, there’s dialogue for an unused cutscene reworked into a wiretap note.”

This staggering attention to detail was impressive to read, but it Dowell had an even wilder example to offer: “I was poking around the codebase one day when I saw some disabled code that added a breath condensation effect to NPCs, basically if an NPC was standing outside they’d emit a big breath particle to keep up the illusion that they’re actually alive and breathing, and a smaller, less visible breath particle inside. This was really cool but I figured it must’ve been turned off for a reason, so I asked Mark [Atkinson] to check out the version control history for the game, so we could figure out the exact reason for it being turned off, we eventually came to the conclusion that it was turned off by accident, so I switched it back on, tweaked the logic a bit to look more natural, and bam, restored cut content. The rate of the effect even changes depending on the NPC’s stress level.”

To the average reader, it might sound like such a small, weird thing, but every one of these details is the exact sort of conundrum remaster teams face when exploring a previously released game. Each new flourish sets their vision of the game apart, yet if done right, adds to the intended vision rather than simply differentiating. It’s hard work, capturing classic titles in a mental amber of nostalgia rather than purely as they once were.

The studio has come a long way from a minimal, if successful, port of System Shock 2, now encompassing a wide variety of genres, and expanding into titles from beyond the 90s. CEO Stephen Kick has even expressed interest in revitalizing games from the seventh console generation at some point. And if we’re lucky, they’ll dig up the best of the weirdest for years to come.

“I can’t confirm nor deny that we’ve seen the last of [other] cult classics,” Welsh comments, “because anything’s possible. Management has a strong plan for the future of Nightdive, and it looks bright.” It’s a sentiment Dowell echoes as well, simply answering, “Absolutely.” And I for one, look forward to what comes next.

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Elijah Beahm is an author for Lost in Cult that Unwinnable graciously lets ramble about progressive religion and obscure media. When not consulting on indie games, he can be found on BlueSky and YouTube. He is still waiting for Dead Space 4.