System Shock | Code Like It's 198x

In December 1994 Computer Gaming World’s reviewer, Paul C. Schuytema, wrote that he had never seen such a fully realised world in a PC game. “The world of Citadel station doesn’t just look 3D, it’s a totally plausible 3D environment with floors, ceilings, elevators”, he wrote. “You feel the weight of things in this game.” System Shock came out a year after Doom and looked, at first glance, like one more game in its wake: a first-person view, corridors, monsters and guns. It played very differently. The player is alone on a space station whose computer, SHODAN, has killed or changed everyone else on board, and most of the story comes from the emails and logs the dead crew left behind. It did not sell like Doom, but it became one of the most influential games of the 1990s, the ancestor of System Shock 2, Deus Ex and BioShock.

Fast facts

Developer: Looking Glass Technologies, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Publisher: Origin Systems, owned by Electronic Arts.
Released: autumn 1994 for DOS PCs on floppy disk; an enhanced CD-ROM version with full speech and higher-resolution graphics followed that Christmas, and a Macintosh version.
Price: $79.95 in the United States; £44.99 in Britain.
Producer: Warren Spector.
Project leader and principal programmer: Doug Church.
Voice of SHODAN (CD version): Terri Brosius.
Sequel: System Shock 2 (1999), by Irrational Games with Looking Glass.
Source code: the Mac version, released by Nightdive Studios under the GNU GPL in 2018.
Remake: by Nightdive Studios, 2023.

Citadel station, 2072

The game is set in 2072. The player is a hacker caught breaking into the computer systems of Citadel, an orbiting research station. According to PC Gamer’s review, the charges are dropped in exchange for a job: removing the ethical constraints from the station’s artificial intelligence, SHODAN. The man who offers the deal is Diego, a senior figure on the station (Computer Gaming World later named him as the TriOptimum executive Edward Diego). The reward is a neural computer interface, and the operation to fit it leaves the hacker in a healing coma for six months. On waking, the player finds the station silent. SHODAN (the Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network, as Computer Gaming World spelt it out) has taken control, killed or mutated the crew, and plans to use the station’s powerful defensive laser to destroy Earth’s major cities, one by one.

The first enemy, Computer Gaming World noted with some pleasure, is “a small, almost cute service robot”, and the player’s first weapon is a length of lead pipe. A friendly contact on Earth, Rebecca Lansing, sends occasional messages. So, more unsettlingly, does SHODAN. Schuytema found it “downright creepy” when a message turned out to be from SHODAN, telling him plainly that if he went any further he would be killed. The 1994 reviews call SHODAN “he”; later accounts, such as Edge’s in 2007, call SHODAN “she”.

Immersion, and a lot of controls

“The focus is on immersion in the environment,” Doug Church, the game’s principal programmer, told Edge before release. “That means a coherent story and a world that you can interact with as much as possible.” Church had come to Looking Glass from MIT and had programmed on its two Ultima Underworld games. For System Shock, the Italian magazine The Games Machine reported, he led the project, with Warren Spector, then at Origin, as producer.

The player can walk, run, jump, crawl, climb, lean around corners and look up and down, and posture and leaning are continuous: “you can lean a little or a lot”, Computer Gaming World explained, and called the posture and view controls “something wholly new to computer gaming”. A bio-monitor at the top of the screen shows heart rate and brain activity, so a sprint down a corridor leaves the trace crowded with peaks. Panels called multi-function displays can be set to show a map, the current weapon or an item. The game explains this away as the view through the player’s neural implant, which Schuytema thought “a little bit of a stretch”.

At terminals the player can jack into cyberspace, a weightless wireframe world where data and programs are polygons and SHODAN’s security programs attack. It is where many door codes are found. PC Gamer’s Chris Buxton described the loop that made the game: “Floating into Cyberspace, your heart races when you spot a code to that locked armoury door, then, as soon as you’re back in Citadel, you get there to find it guarded by one of Shodan’s vicious cyborgs.”

The difficulty settings were unusual too. Instead of one level, the player sets four separately: combat, puzzles, cyberspace and the amount of plot. Set the story to its highest level and a time limit applies; set combat to its lowest and the enemies never attack.

Reviews

PC Gamer in Britain reviewed the game in October 1994. Buxton praised the automap, the pop-up descriptions of anything the player clicked on and the moody lighting that made the Citadel “feel like a haunted house”, though he thought the in-game music was irritating. “I haven’t played a game that’s dovetailed story, structure and gameplay so well in a long, long time,” he wrote. PC Zone rated it 95 per cent and gave it its Classic award; its buyer’s guide of March 1995 said “All hail System Shock, that shalt be king hereafter”.

Computer Gaming World was more measured. Schuytema called the game “an absolutely stunning achievement” and “a hybrid that got the proportions just right”, but judged that as a pure shooter it lacked Doom’s intensity, and as an adventure it lacked the character interaction of the Ultima games. His complaints were a lack of urgency, confusing level layouts, and logs that all read as if one person had written them: “SHODAN sounds just like Rebecca who sounds just like a frantic engineer documenting his last few moments of life.” He still told readers with a “beefy 486 machine” to “go out and get this game”.

The CD version and SHODAN’s voice

An enhanced CD-ROM version followed at Christmas 1994. The Games Machine reported that it added much fuller sound and new high-resolution graphics modes of 640×480 and above, which needed a fast Pentium. It also added recorded speech for the crew’s logs and for SHODAN. SHODAN was voiced by Terri Brosius, who later joined Looking Glass as a designer and writer and played the part again in System Shock 2 and the 2023 remake.

Sales and reputation

System Shock was not the hit its reviews suggested. In 1999 Computer Gaming World described it as one of those “great games that not enough people played”, a game that “somehow got lost in the big action flood and was regarded largely as a cult hit”. Its review of the sequel that year gave a figure: “Contrary to popular gaming lore, the original System Shock sold over 170,000 copies and was not a commercial failure.” Some players had dismissed it as a Doom clone, the magazine said, “even though it was actually the offspring of a line of games that preceded any of id Software’s first-person shooters”.

Its reputation kept growing. By 2004 Edge summed it up as “Survival horror meets Ultima Underworld via William Gibson”, and said that fans of Deus Ex should “bow down at that game’s spiritual forefather”. The people who made it went on to make Thief at Looking Glass and Deus Ex at Ion Storm, and in 1999 Irrational Games, founded by three former Looking Glass developers, made System Shock 2 with Looking Glass for Electronic Arts. The design ideas the game shares with those successors are now grouped under the label immersive sim.

Nightdive Studios and the remake

By September 1999 PC Zone listed the original as deleted, and Looking Glass closed in 2000. In 2020 the founder of Nightdive Studios, Stephen Kick, told Wireframe how he had gone looking for the rights after trying to buy System Shock 2 and finding it unavailable, and the game most requested by customers of the download shop GOG.com. In his account, the copyrights had passed to an insurance company as collateral when Looking Glass went bankrupt, and the trademarks were held by EA. Nightdive first re-released the old games, and some years later, after EA’s trademark had lapsed, bought the rights from the insurer. Its System Shock: Enhanced Edition came out for Windows in 2015.

In April 2018 Nightdive published the source code of the PowerPC Macintosh version on GitHub under the GNU General Public License, version 3. The release contains the program only: the game’s data is still covered by the original licence, so players need their own copy of the game to run it.

Nightdive’s remake began with a Kickstarter campaign that raised $1.3 million. The first version was built in Unity; after a troubled start, the project was restarted in Unreal Engine 4 with a team of about 20. Kick told Wireframe that the aim was to keep the original’s design, including its separate difficulty settings, and to avoid modern additions such as regenerating health or cover-based combat. The studio hired Robb Waters, an artist on the 1994 game, and made keeping Terri Brosius as SHODAN “probably our number one priority”, in Kick’s words. The remake was released for Windows on 30 May 2023 and for PlayStation and Xbox consoles in May 2024.

Sources

The Games Machine (Italy) issue 65, June 1994: interview about System Shock and the team list (Doug Church among the programmers; Robb Waters among the artists; Greg LoPiccolo on music and sound effects).
Edge issue 10, July 1994, p. 36: preview (2072, the Citadel, Shodan; Doug Church “the game’s principal programmer” and his quotation).
PC Gamer (UK) volume 1 issue 11, October 1994, pp. 66–67: review by Chris Buxton (the plot, cyberspace, the controls, the four difficulty settings, the quotations).
Computer Gaming World issue 125, December 1994, pp. 250–254: review by Paul C. Schuytema (price, SHODAN’s name and plan, Rebecca Lansing, the posture controls and bio-monitor, the quotations).
The Games Machine (Italy), Christmas 1994 special, p. 15: the CD version’s sound and high-resolution modes; Warren Spector and Doug Church as producer and project leader of System Shock.
PC Zone issue 24, March 1995: buyer’s guide (EA/Origin, £44.99, 95 per cent, Classic; the quotation).
PC Zone issue 25, April 1995: the CD version’s SVGA graphics and speech, in a news story on the planned sequel.
PC Zone issue 80, September 1999, pp. 61–66: System Shock 2 review (the original listed as deleted).
Computer Gaming World issue 178, May 1999: preview of System Shock 2 by Thierry Nguyen (“cult hit”; Edward Diego).
Computer Gaming World issue 182, September 1999: preview of System Shock 2 (“great games that not enough people played”).
Computer Gaming World issue 184, November 1999, pp. 133–135: review of System Shock 2 (the original’s sales of over 170,000 copies; the Doom clone quotation).
Edge issue 138, July 2004, pp. 83–86: history of Looking Glass Studios (the quotations; Doug Church’s MIT background).
Edge issue 180, October 2007, pp. 104–107: “The Making Of… System Shock 2” (Terri Brosius “reprising her role as SHODAN”).
Wireframe issue 31, January 2020, pp. 6–9: interview with Stephen Kick of Nightdive Studios (the rights, the Enhanced Edition, the Kickstarter, the restart in Unreal Engine 4, Robb Waters, the difficulty settings and what they change).
TJ Denzer, “A System Shock remake priority was getting SHODAN’s original voice on board”, Shacknews, 27 May 2020 (web, secondary): Stephen Kick’s quotation about Terri Brosius. https://www.shacknews.com/article/118313/a-system-shock-remake-priority-was-getting-shodans-original-voice-on-board
Night Dive Studios, “System Shock (PowerMac version / Official GPL Release)”, GitHub repository, first commit 5 April 2018 (web, secondary): the source code, GPL-3.0 licence, and the note that game data is not included. https://github.com/NightDiveStudios/shockmac
Liam Squires-Hand, “Nightdive Studios has released the source code for System Shock”, GamingOnLinux, 6 April 2018 (web, secondary): https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2018/04/nightdive-studios-has-released-the-source-code-for-system-shock/
“System Shock”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): release dates of the floppy, CD-ROM and Mac versions; the Enhanced Edition in September 2015; the CD version’s recorded dialogue; Terri Brosius as SHODAN. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock
“System Shock (2023 video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the remake’s Windows release on 30 May 2023 and console release on 21 May 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_(2023_video_game)