Nightdive’s Larry Kuperman retires after 25-year career in games: ‘We never looked at games as products’

Nightdive VP of business development, Larry Kuperman, has announced his retirement from full-time work in the games industry. Kuperman’s 25-year career in games took him from publisher Stardock to retailer GameStop, but his most defining work was with the preservation specialists at Nightdive. I had the chance to speak with Kuperman about his career and decision to retire earlier this month at the Game Developers Conference.

The technical challenge of making an old game work on new hardware is one part of the story. The other, infamously, is untangling the tightly-wound knot of IP rights restricting access to some of the classics⁠—spy shooter No One Lives Forever has proven a bit of a white whale for Nightdive, for example.

A big part of Nightdive’s origin was founder Stephen Kick discovering that the rights to System Shock were held by a Midwestern insurance firm of all things. Kuperman joined the company early in its life as a specialist in this part of the process.

“There were two things that I felt were obligations that we really owed to the fans,” Kuperman said of the timing for his retirement. One of them was Sin: The cult classic, deliciously ’90s, Quake 2 engine shooter is getting a full remaster in Sin Reloaded.

Like with System Shock, Nightdive now owns the full rights to Sin. That meant timing was fully under Nightdive’s control, but also that it went on the back burner whenever the studio had an obligation to someone else, “Because when Bethesda asks you if you want to remaster Doom, you don’t have to think about that one,” said Kuperman.

The other thing Kuperman wanted to see through to the end was last summer’s System Shock 2 remaster⁠—which I highly recommend, by the way. The remaster was promised as a reward for Kickstarter backers of the ‘Shock 1 remake⁠—also excellent⁠—all the way back in 2016, and Nightdive honored those commitments nearly a decade later.

“There were financial sacrifices,” Kuperman said of this and other decisions by Nightdive. “Things that would have been more profitable had we said, ‘Yeah, we said we’re going to do this, but we have to charge you for it.’ But we didn’t do that.”

The games industry was already a second act for Kuperman when he joined Stardock in 2001, so the move to Nightdive after leaving what he assumed to be a “forever job” at GameStop might constitute Act Three. “I find myself unemployed at the tender age of 57, which is a great age to make new strides in the gaming industry,” Kuperman quipped.

But the recently-formed Nightdive was the second company he called when weighing a cross-country move. It turned out he and Kick shared fundamental values when it came to the medium. “We never looked at games as products,” said Kuperman, attributing this to their backgrounds in the arts. “If games are art and the people that make them are artists, artwork deserves to be preserved.”

One of Nightdive’s innovations in recent years has been the inclusion of DVD extras-style development material with its remastered games: Trailers, concept art, documentary footage, even cut content like a lost level for Star Wars: Dark Forces. But Kuperman also touched on a melancholic note for the human history of the industry.

“If you need a whole lot from my generation, you better get it now,” said Kuperman “This has been a tough year. The loss of [programmer Rebecca Heineman] really, really hurt me. It was so sudden, and she was a person so full of life.

“And then not long after, Vince [Zampella] of course⁠—I didn’t have a personal relationship with him, but everybody in the industry knew him, so it impacted all of us. My friend Paul Crockett passed January 1.”

Kuperman intimated that these losses partially motivated his decision to retire. But he won’t be leaving the industry entirely⁠—Kuperman indicated that he still plans to be active with the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), “trying to make things a little bit easier for the people that are entering [the industry].”

“If I have one parting lesson to give to the industry, it’s never say die. Our industry is very forgiving, and even an old man with limited talents and a background in theater can make it,” said Kuperman. “The industry has been really, really good, certainly to me, to a lot of people. I found myself without a job, in my late 50s, and things somehow managed to work out a whole lot better than I had any right to expect.”