System Shock - TV Series in the Works

Dark Horizons reports that System Shock is being adapted for TV.

A live-action TV series adaptation of Looking Glass Studios' famed 1994 video game "System Shock" is in the works for the upcoming U.S. gaming entertainment streaming platform Binge.

The original game unfolds on the cyberpunk-esque Citadel Space Station in the year 2072 where you play a nameless security hacker who awakens from a coma. You end up taking on murderous robots, killer cyborgs, mutants, and the malevolent artificial intelligence named SHODAN which seeks to control Earth.

[…]

More information.

I can't see how SS would translate well into a tv show, but I guess they'll try anything nowadays.

This is going to end badly.

So Tencent doesn't own the IP:
"Night Dive Studios, Inc. (doing business as Nightdive Studios) is an American video game developer based in Vancouver, Washington. The company was founded in November 2012 by Stephen Kick and Alix Banegas, former video game artists for Sony Online Entertainment, after Kick found himself unable to purchase the 1999 game System Shock 2. He successfully negotiated with the rightsholder Star Insurance Company, which had acquired System Shock and other assets from the defunct developer Looking Glass Studios, and Nightdive Studios released the game via GOG.com in.. "

Then :

Larry Kuperman and Stephen Kick, two members of System Shock rights holder Nightdive Studios, will function as the executive producers of the project, while Allan Ungar, the chief content officer at Binge, will serve as the main producer. Kick expressed excitement over the prospect of a live-action System Shock, saying that such an adaptation would serve as the perfect way “to retell the harrowing story of Citadel station and its rogue AI that subjects the crew to unimaginable horror.” Ungar expressed similar enthusiasm, saying that Binge looks forward “to do[ing] right by the franchise – and the genre – in bringing System Shock to life.”

Originally Posted by JDR13
I can't see how SS would translate well into a tv show, but I guess they'll try anything nowadays.

They need diversity: colored actors and the protagonist will be probably a Tranny.

Originally Posted by mercy
They need diversity: colored actors and the protagonist will be probably a Tranny.

Seems to me like you need diversity as an excuse to label others by things that have nothing to do with their qualities as a person and denounce the fact that you don't like it.

Originally Posted by JDR13
I can't see how SS would translate well into a tv show, but I guess they'll try anything nowadays.

Don't know, JD. Perhaps as an one-season-only TV show, or two seasons at max, this could work. Now if they try to milk it for unending seasons, then yeah

Yikes, I don't see how this can transition into a decent telly show. Then again, those with absolutely no taste find shows like Discovery and Discard worth watching, so what do I know.

Originally Posted by mercy
They need diversity: colored actors and the protagonist will be probably a Tranny.

SS would be one of the cases where this wouldn't really be that odd, would it?
It's obviously a setting with strong body modification to begin with and the game IIRC was fairly diverse skin color-wise to begin with as well (at least the dead people's logs in SS2 gave me that impression).
Thankfully, it was made in a time when characters' sexualities being irrelevant to the plot meant they did not usually even come up, so there isn't much established in that regard, either.

I don't think this would be comparable to cases like Witcher series or the new LOTR series where they just skin color/gender/sexuality/personality swap established characters for virtue signaling and brownie points.

Doesn't mean that they won't go the same way as e.g. Batwoman and focus so much on their messaging that they forget to actually make a good and watchable series around it, but hey, I'm willing to give it a go at least.

What do we know about this Binge TV network? Is this show even likely to air where anybody is going to see it, or have a halfway decent budget. I assume not if it is on this network.

I've never heard of that network, Jaguar, yet I'm fairly new to the whole "watching telly via interwebs" thing, so I bet there's a few that I'm completely unaware of. I suspect someone will regain their collective senses shortly, likely long before the bill is due.

I never even heard of the network either. They look to be some type of free smart TV digital gaming network you subscribe to. It will debut sometime in 2022 it seems.

Link - https://venturebeat.com/2021/06/09/b…ideo-platform/

I could see a loose adaptation happening, if Citadel station was imagined as a very large place with several enclaves of survivors. Then it could be like The Walking Dead, but with cyborg based enemies instead of regular zombies, and with SHODAN as an active antagonist directing them.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
I never even heard of the network either. They look to be some type of free smart TV digital gaming network you subscribe to. It will debut sometime in 2022 it seems.

Link - https://venturebeat.com/2021/06/09/b…ideo-platform/

Reading that article, they definitely have high ambition. Still, I'll believe it when I see it in terms of actual quality content.