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System Shock is a 1994 first-person action-adventure video game developed by LookingGlass Technologies and published by Origin Systems. It was directed by Doug Church with Warren Spector serving as producer. The game is set aboard a space station in a cyberpunk vision of the year 2072.
- Overview
- Plot
- Gameplay
- Soundtrack
- Development
- Reception
- Legacy
- Versions
was the first game in the System Shock series, developed by LookingGlass Technologies (later to be called Looking Glass Studios), produced by Origin Systems and released on September 23rd, 1994. It was followed up in 1999 by System Shock 2.
was a critical success and considered far ahead of its time.
It was revolutionary, being one of the first first-person experiences ever to creating true 3D environments, allowing players to look up and down, jump, lean, crouch, etc. It was also praised for its incredible storytelling and atmosphere, both of which would be influential to many games later on, such as BioShock, Dead Space and Singularity. Today it is considered a cult classic, and many have gone as far as to call it a masterpiece. However, despite the praise, the game's sales were deemed underwhelming by the developers.
The game received a port on DOS, PC, and Mac; with the developers later regretting the DOS port due to the limitations of no voice acting.
The game got an enhanced port in the form of System Shock: Enhanced Edition and System Shock: Classic on September 22nd, 2015, and later a remake announced in November 2015 and released in May 2023.
There was also a limited-edition big box re-release special edition and vinyl record that were announced in September 2019 and came out in October 2019.
On April 7th, 2072, a Hacker broke into the network of the TriOptimum Corporation and tried to access their confidential files. TriOptimum security forces quickly tracked down and apprehend him. The Hacker was contacted by a TriOptimum Marketing VP, Edward Diego, who offered him a deal - he will help Diego reprogram SHODAN, the AI in control of TriOptimum's Citadel Station. In return, not only will his offense be forgotten, but he will also be fitted with a military-grade Neural Interface. The Hacker, not having much choice anyway, agreed. He was taken to the Citadel Station
Meanwhile, TriOptimum sent a security operative, Bianca Schuler, to investigate Diego, whom the corporation suspects to be involved in illegal mutagen experiments. Schuler believed that the suspicions were true, but was unable to find any evidence, due to Diego now having control over SHODAN and therefore able to hide or erase all records of his activities.
On September 9th, SHODAN bypassed her ethical subroutines and started to take over the Station. At first, everything seemed like a few unrelated malfunctions - a security bot malfunctioned on the flight deck, access codes were randomly changed and displayed on computer screens throughout the Station, and bio-contamination leaks started appearing. At the same time, all environmental suits were moved to the storage level. Citadel's crew was unable to determine the cause of this, as all critical programs and computer nodes were made inaccessible by SHODAN.
On October 1st, SHODAN sealed off Beta Grove, one of the pods with a simulated natural environment attached to the Station's Executive Level, while the bio-contamination inside continued to get worse. Three days later, a group of TriOptimum executives residing on the Station tried to leave using one of the groves (which can be separated from the main body of the Station). After the pod was jettisoned, however, SHODAN disabled its life support systems and the executives all died within a few hours. Three days later, the grove jettisoning procedure was changed so that it became practically impossible for the Citadel's crew to jettison more groves, especially the Beta Grove where SHODAN was performing experiments.
's Flight Deck.
On October 10th, a shuttle carrying TriOptimum security forces who had arrived to help with the situation tried to land in one of the flight bays, but were destroyed by the automated defense system. Two days later, it was discovered that an unidentified signal was sent to the defense cannons by SHODAN milliseconds before they fired. Don Travers, head of the flight deck maintenance, tried to disconnect the local CPU nodes, but was stopped by a seemingly malfunctioning maintenance droid.
is a real-time action adventure video game that shares its gameplay pedigree with the earlier Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (which was also developed by Blue Sky Productions, later known as LookingGlass Technologies). Unlike other First-Person games at the time, System Shock featured actual 3D Environments, which let the player move about freely and fully without restriction. Like Ultima Underworld, System Shock features an emphasis on player choice and emergent game play, letting the player drive the gameplay, instead of the game designer.
The Game Over scene appears every time the Hacker dies without having cancelled the cyborg conversion process in the Restoration Bay. If this happens, a cutscene shows the Hacker's corpse being taken by a Cortex Reaver and fused into it, transforming him into a cyborg.
The tracks' names are from the bundled OST, with them being named after their respective level(s). However, in-game music is way more random, as it's generated in real time, depending on current area of the game, intensity of the action and many other factors.
1.Intro
2.Title
3.Dead
4.Elevator
5.Cyberspace
Initial design
was first conceived during the final stages of Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds' development, between December 1992 and January 1993. Designer and programmer Doug Church spent this period at the Texas headquarters of publisher Origin Systems, and discussions about Looking Glass Technologies' next project occurred between him and producer Warren Spector, with input from designer Austin Grossman and company head Paul Neurath in Massachusetts. According to Church, the team believed that they had made "too many dungeon games"; and Neurath later explained that they were experiencing burnout after the rushed development of Ultima Underworld II. As a result, they decided to create another "immersive simulation game", but without a fantasy setting. They briefly considered placing the game in modern day, but Church said that the idea was rejected because "it [would] just beg so many questions: why can't I pick up the phone, why can't I get on the train, and so on". Church returned to Looking Glass in Massachusetts, where he, Neurath and Grossman brainstormed possible science fiction settings for the game. According to Spector, the game was initially titled "Alien Commander" and was a spin-off of the Wing Commander series; however, this idea was soon replaced entirely. Spector said that they enjoyed not being attached to an existing franchise, because it meant that they "could basically do whatever [they] liked". The four collaborated to write numerous "minutes of gameplay" documents, which conveyed how the game would feel. Church later gave the example, "You hear the sound of a security camera swiveling, and then the beep of it acquiring you as a target, so you duck behind the crate and then you hear the door open so you throw a grenade and run out of the way". The documents would "hint" at the gameplay systems involved, and at the emergent possibilities in each situation. Although Neurath was involved in these initial design sessions, he believed that the project "was always Doug Church's vision at heart". Church and Grossman refined several of the team's documents and defined the game's design and direction, and Grossman wrote the game's original design document. Grossman built on ideas that he first explored while writing and designing Ultima Underworld II's tomb dimension, which he later called a "mini-prototype" for System Shock. These concepts included the minimization of dialogue trees and a greater focus on exploration. The team believed that dialogue trees "broke the fiction" of games; Church later commented that the dialogue trees in the Ultima Underworld series were like separate games in themselves, disconnected from main experience of being immersed in the environment. There were also concerns about realism. To eliminate dialogue trees from System Shock, the team prevented the player from ever meeting a living non-player character (NPC): the plot is instead conveyed by e-mail messages and log discs, many of which were recorded by dead NPCs. Here, Grossman took influence from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, a collection of poems written as the epitaphs of fictional individuals. Grossman later summarized the idea as "a series of short speeches from people, that when put together, gave you a history of a place." The removal of conversations was an attempt by the team to make the game a more "integrated whole" than was Ultima Underworld--one with a greater focus on immersion, atmosphere and "the feeling of 'being there'". They sought to "plunge [players] into the fiction and never provide an opportunity for breaking that fiction"; and so they tried to erase the distinction between plot and exploration. Church considered this direction to be an organic progression from Ultima Underworld, and he later said, "On some level it's still just a dungeon simulator, and we're still just trying to evolve that idea." Shortly before production began, Tribe bassist Greg LoPiccolo was contracted to work on the game's music. He had visited his friend Rex Bradford at the company, and was spontaneously asked by the game's programmers—many of whom were fans of the band—if he would take the role. The game entered production in February 1993. Although Grossman was heavily involved in the game's early planning, he had little to do with its production, aside from providing assistance with writing and voice acting.
Production
After production began, the team's first task was to develop a new game engine—one that could display a true 3D environment and allow for advanced gameplay. The team abandoned the engine used for the Ultima Underworld games and programmed one from scratch in Watcom C/C++, using 32-bit code. The new engine is capable of processing texture maps, sloped architecture and light-emitting objects; and it allows the player to look in any direction, whereas Ultima Underworld's engine was "very limited" in this regard. It also enables the player character to jump, crawl, climb walls and lean, among other things. The designers utilized loopholes in the engine's renderer to create more diverse and striking environments. Despite having coded the renderer, Church said that "at first glance even I couldn't see how they did them". However, this added to the performance issues already being caused by the engine's advanced nature, and the team struggled to optimize the game throughout development. 3D polygonal character models were planned, but they could not be implemented on schedule. Church said that the team's ultimate goal was to create a "rich, exciting, active environment" in which the player could be immersed, and that this required "a coherent story and a world that you can interact with as much as possible." Church later said that the team "stumbled into a nice villain" with SHODAN, in that she could routinely and directly affect the player's gameplay "in non-final ways". Through triggered events and through objects in the environment, such as security cameras that the player must destroy, the team made SHODAN's presence part of the player's exploration of the world. Because SHODAN interacts with the player as a "recurring, consistent, palpable enemy", Church believed that she meaningfully connects the player to the story. System Shock concept artist Robb Waters created SHODAN's visual design, and LoPiccolo recruited his bandmate Terri Brosius to voice the character. Brosius said that her goal during the recording sessions was to speak "without emotion, but with some up and down inflections". Afterward, her voice was heavily edited in post-production, which created a robotic effect inspired by the voice of Max Headroom. LoPiccolo later said that the large number of effects on Brosius's voice were "laboriously hand-done" with Sound Designer, which lacked the features that a sound editor would normally use to achieve such results. SHODAN's dialogue early in the game was given "a few glitches" to hint at her corrupted status. LoPiccolo increased the number of these effects throughout the game, which creates an "arc" that ends with SHODAN "completely out of her mind [... and] collapsing as an entity". The character of the hacker arose as a reaction against the protagonist of the Ultima series, the Avatar. According to Grossman, they wanted to cast the player as someone "interestingly morally compromised" who had a stake in the situation. Seamus Blackley designed the game's physics system, which is a modified version of the one he wrote for Looking Glass's flight simulator Flight Unlimited. At the time, Church described it as "far more sophisticated than what you would normally use for an indoor game". The system governs, among other things, weapon recoil and the arc of thrown objects; the latter behave differently based on their weight and velocity. The game's most complex physics model is that of the player character. Church explained that the character's head "tilts forward when you start to run, and jerks back a bit when you stop", and that, after an impact against a surface or object, its "head is knocked in the direction opposite the hit, with proportion to [the] mass and velocity of the objects involved". On coding physics for Looking Glass Technologies games, Blackley later said, "If games don't obey physics, we somehow feel that something isn't right", and that "the biggest compliment to me is when a gamer doesn't notice the physics, but only notices that things feel the way they should". Spector's role as a producer gave him the job of explaining the game to the publisher, which he called his "biggest challenge". He explained that they "didn't always get what the team was trying to do", and said, "You don't want to know how many times the game came this close to being killed (or how late in the project)". According to Church, Looking Glass' internal management largely ignored System Shock, in favor of the concurrently-developed Flight Unlimited—the game "that had to be the hit, because it was the self-published title". Spector organized a licensing deal between Electronic Arts and Looking Glass that gave the former the trademark to the game, but the latter the copyright. His goal was to ensure that neither party could continue the franchise without the other's involvement. While Cyberspace was originally conceived as a realistic hacking simulation—which could even be used to reimplement SHODAN's ethical constraints—it was simplified after Origin Systems deemed it too complicated. The game's star field system was written by programmer James Fleming. Marc LeBlanc was the main creator of the game's HUD, which he later believed was too complicated. He said that it was "very much the Microsoft Word school of user interface", in that there was no "feature that you [could not] see on the screen and touch and play with". LoPiccolo composed the game's score—called "dark", "electronic" and "cyberpunk" by the Boston Herald—on a Macintosh computer and inexpensive synthesizer, using Audio Vision. It dynamically changes according to the player's actions, a decision made in keeping with the team's focus on emergent gameplay. Each track was "written at three different intensity levels", which change depending on the player's nearness to enemies; and certain events, such as victory in combat, trigger special music. The game's tracks were composed of four-bar segments that could be rearranged dynamically in reaction to game events, with "melodies through-composed on top". LoPiccolo noted that, when using this method, it is necessary to write music that "still flows with the overall theme and doesn't jump around". Because the score was closely tied to the gameplay, LoPiccolo had to work closely with Church and Rob Fermier, the latter of whom wrote the "interactive scoring module" that allowed for dynamic music. After recording the music, LoPiccolo recorded all of the game's sound effects. He later recalled visiting an automobile repair shop with "portable recorder and a mic", and "having [his] mechanic [...] hit things with wrenches and so forth, just to get the raw material". He developed the game's audio over 16 months, working on a contractual basis until Tribe disbanded in May 1994; Ned Lerner gave him a full-time job as audio director the next day. Tim Ries composed the "Elevator" music.
While System Shock didn't sell poorly, with 170 000 copies being sold, the game never reached the popularity of Doom and ultimately lost money for Looking Glass Studio, which founder Paul Neurath attributed to its steep learning curve. However, System Shock received critical acclaim when it released, earning multiple awards and exceptional scores. PC Gamer US wrote "System Shock smokes. It is the most fully immersive game world I have ever experienced" praising the game's story and control system, and believing that "no matter what kind of game you're looking for, you'll find something in System Shock to delight you". The reviewer finished his review by stating that the game "unquestionably raises computer gaming to a new level" and gave it a 96%. PC Gamer later went on to rank System Shock as the 6th best comptuer game of all time in 1998, and the editors called it "one of the finest games ever due to its seductive game design that blended a fantastic storyline with meaningful, suspenseful action in a way that has rarely been equaled". Next Generation Magazine summarized the game as "a great blend of strategy and action backed up with all the extras".
The Boston Herald noted superficial similarities between System Shock and Doom, but called System Shock "much more elaborate". The reviewer noted its high system requirements and complex controls; of the latter, he said, "There's no way you can play System Shock without first studying the manual for at least 20 minutes". The paper believed that the game would "set a new standard for computer games with its combination of action and puzzle-solving" and awarded it 5 stars out of 5. Computer Gaming World offered System Shock a 4.5/5, and praised the game's scale, physics system, and true 3D environments; the magazine extolled the presentation of Cyberspace as "nothing short of phenomenal". However, the reviewer believed that the game had "little sense of urgency" and "confusing level layouts". Various sources have ranked SHODAN as one of the most effective antagonists and female characters in the history of video gaming.
In a Gamasutra feature, Patrick Redding of Ubisoft attested that "the fact that so many of System Shock's features are now virtually de rigueur in modern sci-fi shooters is a testament to the influence exerted by this one game". GameSpy argued that the game "is the progenitor of today's story-based action games, a group with titles as diverse as Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, and even Half-Life". Eurogamer called the System Shock series "the benchmark for intelligent first-person gaming" and noted that it "kick-start[ed] the revolution which ... has influenced the design of countless other games". Steven Wright for Glixel said in a 2017 essay that System Shock still is important to gaming today, and that the only reasons it is not considered a "Mt. Olympus of gaming" is due to its lower sales compared to games like Half-Life that sold in the millions, and that at the time it was released, it was difficult for players to adjust to the complex systems in the game compared to straightforward first-person shooters.
The game has been cited as a key popularizer of emergent gameplay, and alongside Thief and Deus Ex, is considered one of the defining games of the immersive sim genre. Certain game developers have acknowledged System Shock's influence on their products. With Deus Ex, developer Warren Spector revealed a desire to "build on the foundation laid by the Looking Glass guys in games like ... System Shock". Developer Ken Levine has commented that the "spirit of System Shock is player-powered gameplay: the spirit of letting the player drive the game, not the game designer", and at Irrational Games "... that's always the game we ideally want to make". System Shock was one of the key inspirations behind Irrational's BioShock.
A sequel to System Shock, titled System Shock 2, was released in 1999 by Irrational Games and Looking Glass Studio to further acclaim.
A third game in the series was announced in 2015, titled System Shock 3, and was to be developed by OtherSide Entertainment. Various trailers were released; however, in early 2020, it was announced that development team for System Shock 3 had been let go by OtherSide and that the game was "critically behind". While OtherSide initially stated that it was still working on the project, they later announced in May 2020, via Twitter, that Tencent, one of China's largest video-game corporations, would be taking over development of the game and that they were no longer attached to it. Nightdive affirmed in August 2022 that Tencent now held the IP rights to the series, and if a third System Shock game were to be made, it would be up to Tencent as the Otherside team had since been transitioned to other projects.
•System Shock - The original version. The floppy version does not contain voice acting, while the CD version does.
•System Shock Portable - A fan-made port created to play System Shock without problems on modern (at that time) operation systems such as Windows XP. It introduced mouselook for the very first time and featured WASD control.
•System Shock: Enhanced Edition - A slightly tweaked re-release of the game, available on GOG and Steam. It features resolutions up to 1024x768 and 854x480 widescreen mode, mouselook support, and re-mappable keys (including three presets: original, custom and left-handed). Players can also choose the original, unmodified version (labeled System Shock: Classic) when starting a game.
•System Shock: Enhanced Edition (Source Port) - Rewritten from scratch with original Source Code, this port uses Macintosh assets (higher quality graphics throughout the whole game) with previously unused weapon frames, higher resolutions (up to 4K) with widescreen support, adjustable FOV, View Radius, Anti-Aliasing and Texture Filtering, support for Modifications and Extra Missions through a dedicated menu, fully customizable controls and more.
Below is a comprehensive timeline of events in System Shock and System Shock (Remake) canon up to the events of System Shock 2, as well as what is known of System Shock 3 and other sources. Most major events from our world also occur with in the System Shock universe, with some minor differences...
May 30, 2023 · For a certain sort of PC gaming fan, System Shock is where it all began. 30 years of immersive sim development started here, as Looking Glass escaped the restraints of the RPG genre and embraced thoughtful first-person action. SHODAN broke free, and the world was never the same.
- Contributor
Mar 13, 2023 · The development of System Shock was a long and challenging process that took almost three years to complete, but when it finally released the title overtime became a landmark game in the history of first-person horror shooters and is considered an ultimate classic of the genre.
System Shock is a science fiction video game series originally created by Looking Glass Technologies. It consists of System Shock, System Shock 2, and the 2023 System Shock remake. A third main entry, System Shock 3, has been announced.
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Apr 14, 2017 · System Shock released in 1994 around the same time as DOOM 2: Hell on Earth, and was dramatically overshadowed by id’s mega-hit series. In the end, System Shock only sold enough to break...
