Nightdive Studios is great. We love how they keep bringing overlooked hits and classics like Dino Hunter 3 and Star Wars: Dark Forces to modern systems, but if our eyes aren’t deceiving us, one of the company’s next games wouldn’t have been predictable in a thousand years: most people didn’t play The Thing video game on a PS2, Xbox, or PC back in the day.
Ahead of the IGN Live event on June 7-9, Nightdive Studios revealed the new news in a not-so-subtle way via its official X account.
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Even without the help of more eagle-eyed gamers and fans of John Carpenter’s 1982 horror masterpiece, it’s not hard to conclude that they have indeed publicly hinted that a remake of The Thing is coming, a sequel to the film. However, they haven’t officially announced it yet, so it can’t be confirmed until it’s fully confirmed, you know?
This release will mark yet another example of the return of neglected retro games that have been stuck on old consoles and/or haven’t had a legitimate release on today’s PCs. Nightdive has traditionally excelled at digging through the dusty drawers of publishers and developers, rescuing classic games, then giving them clever upgrades and releasing them on modern systems. We hope to see more of these preservations, and only Aspyr could pull off such an operation on such a scale and over the years that we imagine they could.
The Thing wasn’t a particularly well-received hit when it was released in 2002, but it’s ranked near the top of the “well-received” category for movie-based games. Surprisingly, it pushed the story forward rather than backwards, unlike the mediocre 2011 prequel, meaning fans were given the developer’s response to the original film’s legendary yet thoroughly ambiguous ending, which left Kurt Russell’s MacReady and Keith David’s Childs the only survivors of this nightmare, each suspecting the other to be the eponymous alien monster/virus in disguise.
Narrative ambitions aside, Computer Artworks’ game is a very well-made third-person shooter with survival horror elements and some unique mechanics that draw on the film’s premise, so we’re excited to see how it gets updated if Nightdive hasn’t teased us otherwise. Stay tuned for more on what might be revealed (or not revealed) in the coming days.
