Our team has proven skilled at "bringing lost and forgotten games back from the depths" despite the difficulties often involved with restoring older titles. Of the preservation projects we've undertaken, fans may be surprised to learn that System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster presented us with some of our greatest challenges to date. We've already spoken about the extensive reverse engineering required due to incomplete and missing source code in an article for the PlayStation Blog, and how this contributed to System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster taking over six years to complete. However, something we haven't delved too deeply into—until now—is how getting the game's co-op multiplayer up and running also required clever development solutions and considerable time to get right.

"When we started on the multiplayer, it was completely non-functional," says Nightdive developer Sam "Reki" Piper. "Years of neglect due to changes from both NewDark and community mods left it in a really dire state. Add to that any errors introduced during reverse engineering, plus the infamous bugs already present in the original game, and… well, you get the picture."