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Blood: Refreshed Supply is the dawn of a new era for Nightdive
R
Rick Lane
Nightdive released Blood: Fresh Supply in 2019, comprehensively updating the shooter for modern PCs. So why is Nightdive releasing Blood: Refreshed Supply, another remaster, only six years later? The baseline reason is simple enough. "The first remaster we did, Fresh Supply, was PC only," says Stephen Kick, Co-CEO of Nightdive Studios. This was due to specifics relating to Nightdive's contract with Atari, which published Blood: Fresh Supply.
After Nightdive was acquired by Atari in 2023, the pair went back to Blood's rightsholders Warner Bros. for permission to create a second, multiplatform remaster. "The rights go way back to the '90s, so we worked in coordination with WB to ensure that we had all the pieces necessary so that we could finally put Blood on console," Kick explains.
Rather than port Blood: Fresh Supply directly to consoles, Nightdive saw an opportunity to create a bigger, better remaster, in part because of a major event that occurred in the interim: the discovery of Blood's source code, found with the assistance of Monolith cofounder Jace Hall, whom Kick has been acquainted with for years.
"We passed that over to our developers, and then they were able to go in and basically authenticate all the reverse engineering work that had been done up to that point to make sure that it was as accurate as possible—even so much as adding a lot of that code back in," Kick says.
Working with the source code also made it easier for Nightdive to add new functionality. Alongside Blood: Fresh Supply's existing modernizations, the new Blood: Refreshed Supply introduces additional game options, including advanced enemy behaviours and features cut from the original release, like weather effects. Nightdive also rewrote Blood's netcode to support 8-player multiplayer as well as online and local co-op.
But perhaps the most interesting additions are two of Blood's most beloved mods, Marrow and Death Wish, which Blood: Refreshed Supply elevates into "official expansions," according to Kick.
Originally released in 2023, Marrow is a 10-map episode created by Blood fanatic Nick Palsmeier, who also contributed to Blood's spiritual successor Cultic. Marrow was built using only the original assets seen in Blood (much like John Romero's additional Doom episodes Sigil and Sigil II) and was praised for its ambitious level design. Now Marrow's second episode will debut with the launch of Blood: Refreshed Supply, available both in the remaster and as a standalone mod for the original Blood.
"The creator of Marrow has been a friend of mine for many years," Kick says. "I've been a big admirer of his work, and have been following him and playing the mod and really enjoying it."
Death Wish, meanwhile, is a full three-episode campaign for Blood originally created back in 2011 by Dustin "Bloatoid" Twilley. Like Marrow, Death Wish aimed to push the Build Engine to its limits. Also like Marrow, it will arrive in Blood: Refreshed Supply with a whole new episode—albeit after launch.
Nightdive hopes these expansions will lend Blood: Refreshed Supply greater appeal for players who bought the initial rework. Their addition also represents a shift in direction for Nightdive's projects. Going forward, Nightdive doesn't simply want to overhaul old games, but add to them.
Kick compares Nightdive's aims to the original Half-Life. "When Half-Life came out, it was a big success, but Valve didn't have the bandwidth to do more with it," he says. "But there were other companies that specialised in additional content, so you had Gearbox at the time doing add-ons. They did Opposing Force and Blue Shift."
Previous Nightdive remasters have sort-of done this already. Nightdive's overhauls of Quake and Quake II both feature new episodes, for instance—but those additional campaigns were built by Wolfenstein: The New Order developer MachineGames. Kick wants Nightdive to handle future projects itself.
"The plan—we'll see how this goes—is to take the guys who did Marrow and Death Wish and some of the other things that we're working on right now, and put them together and have them basically be our internal Gearbox," says Kick.
Kick also envisions these expansions growing more ambitious than the additional episodes they've done so far. "To reference Opposing Force again, part of the back-of-the-box features for that was like 'six new weapons, new locations, new enemies.' That's what really makes it exciting, and that's what we would love to do," he says. "It's just going to be that next level of scope. We're going to need a little game design document and some resources. But I think we're uniquely positioned to make this happen."
This approach might not be limited to upcoming Nightdive remasters either. "Maybe we'll revisit some of the titles we've done in the past, like Turok or Killing Time or The Thing maybe, and we'll have them take the tools we've developed and create a brand new expansion for these classic games," Kick explains.
This isn't the only way Kick expects Nightdive's remasters to evolve. Like most of its recent overhauls, Blood: Refreshed Supply features a "Vault" of ancillary materials, including concept art, design documents, photographs taken during development, and so forth. "In this case, we had photographs of some of the original clay models that were physically sculpted," says Kick.
But Kick has been inspired by the work of fellow Atari subsidiary Digital Eclipse, developers of interactive documentaries like Atari 50 and Tetris Forever. "They do an amazing job of documenting behind-the-scenes stuff, and they have a really amazing studio that's just meant for filming real people."
Currently, Nightdive isn't equipped to create something similar. "It's a pretty big expense, because you're asking a lot of these developers—their time, their energy, their willingness," Kick points out. Nonetheless, it's another avenue Kick would like Nightdive to explore. "I do see that as kind of a next step, I think, and it'll be really special when we get there."
When Blood: Refreshed Supply releases, it will replace Blood: Fresh Supply on PC. But Kick is keen to reassure Fresh Supply owners that they'll still be able to play that version, and Blood: Refreshed Supply is being offered at a discount on PC. "As much as I would love to be able to give everybody the free update—have this culmination of a couple of year's work for free—we can't do that because we employ a lot of people now, and the company is continuing to grow."
Indeed, with around 50 employees, Blood: Refreshed Supply is far from Nightdive's only project. In November, Nightdive released its overhaul of LucasArts' 1997 Western FPS Outlaws + Handful of Missions. While a decent shooter, Outlaws was far from LucasArts' most commercially successful game, and was quickly washed away by true 3D hits like Quake 2, Unreal, and Half-Life. I asked Kick how Nightdive justifies remastering games that don't inherently have an enormous fanbase.
Kick is adamant in his reply: "Every game deserves to be saved and preserved to the extent that it could possibly be. Ultimately, my goal is to do as many of these as possible until I'm barely breathing," he declares.
There were also some extenuating circumstances related to Nightdive's Star Wars: Dark Forces remaster that made Outlaws possible.
"Dark Forces is one of my all-time favourite games, and that's what we originally set out to do. And the more we looked into it, the more we were like: 'Well, these two games use the same engine'" Kick says. "So we were recognizing, 'Well, if we put all this work into Dark Forces, we're basically halfway to Outlaws at that point.' And so that was kind of our business case to Disney and Lucas."
In total, Kick says Nightdive is currently working on "a dozen games" including the remasters of Outlaws and Blood. Some of these likely won't release for several years, as Nightdive aims to put out 4-5 games per year, and timelines vary. "It all kind of depends on the game itself and how long it's going to take to bring it up to our standards," Kick says. "The number one thing we don't want to do is release a game and not give it the attention and love that it really deserves."
Blood: Refreshed Supply's release has ramifications for Nightdive's future too. Kick hopes that a renewed partnership with Warner Bros. will lead to Nightdive working with the publisher's other licenses.
Kick doesn't specify which games, but the obvious candidates are Monolith's other turn-of-the-millennium shooters like Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Tron 2.0, and even the infamous Blood 2: The Chosen, which was not the sequel Blood fans hoped for.
"We get a lot of requests for Blood 2," says Kick. "I have gotten some emails from some of the original developers who have shared some behind the scenes stories of why that game came out the way it did…but I think there's a lot of room creatively to go in and flesh out a lot of the stuff that they were intending to do."
Then, of course, there's The Operative: No One Lives Forever, Monolith's beloved spy-shooter, which is something of a white whale for Nightdive despite being mired in licensing hell for years. Could this new relationship with Warner Bros. help untangle that in any way?
Kick laughs when I ask the question: "I'm not going to comment on that right now," he says.
Blood: Refreshed Supply is out now on the Epic Games Store.