It was a dark night in Guatemala, and Stephen Kick just wanted to play an old video game.
Specifically, System Shock 2, the 1999 first-person shooter lauded as one of the most influential PC games of its time. It was 2008, and Kick, who had recently left his job as a character artist for Sony Online Entertainment, was traveling South America with his girlfriend in search of inspiration for what to do next. He was holed up in a hostel, and a tropical thunderstorm was raging outside. The atmosphere was perfect.
“I went to GOG.com [an online storefront known for classic games] thinking, ‘Well, it’s one of the greatest games of all time, it has to be available on there,'” says Kick, now 35, “and I discovered it wasn’t.”
As he’d come to learn, System Shock 2 was one of many pieces of “abandonware”—games not supported or distributed by the copyright holder. Sometimes…
