Nightdive and Ziggurat are restoring a cult classic with Killing Time: Resurrected

Nightdive Studios announced their next remastering project at the Guerilla Collective today. This time, they’re teaming with their fellow retro enthusiasts at Ziggurat to put the polisher on 3DO’s 1995 cult-classic FPS, Killing Time. Killing Time: Resurrected will be released later this year.

Killing Time is one of the few games I own for my 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, one of the doomed consoles of the ‘90s. While playing through the first area of the game, I stopped myself because, while the game is fine, it was obviously not the ideal way to play it. The 3DO version is rather choppy, and the controller affords little comfort. There was a PC port, and I already owned it on GOG, so I figured I might as well just play that version.

But I never did.

Now, I definitely will. Nightdive is bringing us what will most likely be the definitive way of playing Killing Time. Beyond simply being ported to a modern engine, the trailer shows off completely updated sprites and textures, mouselook, and smoother movement.

I spoke to Nightdive about the new sprites and textures. Some of the updates are drawn from original source photographs and models whereever they were able to find backups of them. Some, however, were exclusive to the PC version, and Nightdive artist Albert Marin Garau says that to remake them he “modeled, rigged, skinned and animated those exclusive PC enemies and render hi-res sprites that match the quality of the other hi-res assets.”

I’ll write about it in more detail soon.

Killing Time is a rather obscure FPS, but don’t get it twisted with PO’ed. While both games were initially released on the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer and both games were ambitious for their time, Killing Time just stuck the landing better. Rather than a series of levels, the world was more open-ish. It told a story using digitized actors and was fully voiced.

The story involves an island where an ancient Egyptian curse causes a number of high-society people to vanish. Your task is to undo that curse, but standing in your way is a number of sometimes bizarre enemies. One of the first types that you fight is ducks, which is sad. The only thing you should be firing at ducks is bread.

Killing Time: Resurrected is coming to PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, and PC sometime later this year.