[2][4] After also quitting his job, he and Banegas, then his fiancée, commenced a nine-month-long road trip from San Diego through Mexico and Central America.

[3] While staying in a hostel in Guatemala, he wished to play the 1999 game System Shock 2 but found that the CD-ROM version he had brought no longer worked on his netbook.

[6] Starting in October 2012, Kick sent various emails to Star Insurance Company to inquire about the status of the series' intellectual property (IP).

[2][3] Star Insurance Company had recently acquired the System Shock trademark from Electronic Arts but was wary of producing a new entry in the series given the high cost associated with such a production.

[2][3] Kick pitched the idea of updating System Shock 2 for modern platforms and re-releasing it via digital distribution services, including GOG.com and Steam.

[3][4] Arriving in New Mexico, Kick began phoning with Star Insurance Company's legal counsel and eventually reached a deal.

[9] Around the time of the company's foundation, a French developer known as Le Corbeau released a patch for System Shock 2 that allowed it to run on modern computers.

Kick was unsuccessful in contacting the developer but still used the patch as the new version's groundwork, asserting that it was the IP holder's legal right to use it.

[2] Kick decided to continue Night Dive Studios in similar efforts to bring back older games to modern systems.

[5] The company's first hire was Daniel Grayshon, a writer of System Shock modding guides based in the United Kingdom.

[21] In February 2015, Kick announced that the studio was working on re-releasing PowerSlave for digital distribution services with the bonus of porting the Sega Saturn version into the package.

[2][3] The company released an enhanced version of the original game, which adds support for more resolutions and mouselook, in September that year.

[28] The game's original source code had been lost, so the developers had to reverse engineer the N64 version and update the textures.

[2][5] According to Kick, this distribution allows the studio to operate "on pretty much a 24/7 basis", while employees collaborate via GitHub, Jira, and Slack.