![]() ![]() That disc contained the source code to the Looking Glass games. More interesting for the history of the NewDark mod was an old disc in the bag the machine came in. But that find wasn’t the important one here. After a frustrating attempt to get into the unit’s hard drive, he finally managed to dump its contents. A modder on the Dreamcast Talk forum announced that they had a devkit Dreamcast. ![]() To trace that, we have to skip back in time again, this time to 2010. “I provided them with the fan patched version, and explicitly informed them of the origins of the patch and that I claimed no personal ownership, or had permission to use it.”Īnd so, on 13th February 2013, Shodan lived again.īut how had Le Corbeau pulled it off? The only reasonable explanation was that they had access to the source code. After the deal with Star Insurance was signed, he immediately approached GOG with the license. Even the editor was future-proofed: “DromEd will no longer stop working after 03:14:07 on Tuesday, 19 January 2038”. Hard limits coded into the engine had been increased, codecs changed, resolutions were updated, bugs squashed. The patch notes were so ludicrously complete, a laundry list of fixes that entire communities had dedicated years attempting to hack around, that people worried the patch was fake, potentially even a virus. The impact of NewDark can’t be understated. Le Corbeau was a newcomer to the forum but had somehow delivered a patch that brought all the games made on the Dark Engine up to modern standards, releasing System Shock 2, both Thief games, and the editor DromED from their 90s technological prison. 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. ![]()
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