Immersive Sim | Code Like It's 198x

In March 1992 ACE’s reviewer tried to sum up Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss in one word, gave up, and reached for a bigger claim: “the closest thing I’ve seen to Virtual Reality … on a home computer”. The player could “walk, run, jump and swim”, he wrote, and “just about anything you can do in the ‘real’ world you can do” in its dungeon. That was the promise of the games later called immersive sims. Instead of a level built around one intended route, the player gets a place that follows rules: objects have weight, fire burns, guards hear footsteps, doors can be locked, forced or bypassed. The designers set up the rules and the problems, and the player finds a way through.

The name came late. It was in use at Ion Storm Austin by 2000, when Warren Spector described Deus Ex as “an immersive simulation game in that you are made to feel you’re actually in the game world with as little as possible getting in the way”. Two years later PC Gamer was still filing Deus Ex among the role-playing games: it was “an ‘Immersive Sim’ according to the big brains at developers Ion Storm Austin. But until there are enough to form a genre box, it goes here.”

Fast facts

First game usually named: Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (1992), by Blue Sky Productions for Origin Systems.
Core studio: Looking Glass, in Cambridge, Massachusetts: System Shock (1994), Thief: The Dark Project (1998), System Shock 2 (1999, with Irrational Games).
Named around: Ion Storm Austin’s Deus Ex (2000).
Later studios: Irrational Games, Arkane Studios, Eidos Montreal, Nightdive Studios.
Common ground: a first-person view, a consistent simulation of objects, light, sound and people, and several ways to solve most problems.

Blue Sky and the Underworld

Paul Neurath had worked for Origin before starting his own studio, Blue Sky Productions, near Boston. Edge’s 2004 history of the studio describes how he hired young MIT graduates, among them Doug Church, and how a programmer’s texture-mapping work gave the team’s first-person role-playing game a technical lead that won it the Ultima licence from Origin. “Paul set an early tone that was about just finding ways to make interesting games,” Church told the magazine, rather than copying existing ones. The studio later merged with Ned Lerner’s company and took the name Looking Glass. Edge put the sales of Ultima Underworld at half a million copies.

Writing in 2021, the game-city designer Konstantinos Dimopoulos called it “a groundbreaking RPG widely considered to be the first immersive sim”.

System Shock and Thief

System Shock (1994) took the same approach to a space station, where the player has to stop the station’s computer, SHODAN. Computer Gaming World’s Christmas guide that year described “a game that looks and plays like Doom, but feels like an SF flick”, and warned that “since you can completely interact with the environment, the game is naturally a little more complicated than the usual blast-fest”. By 1999 the magazine called it one of those “great games that not enough people played”.

Thief: The Dark Project (1998) made the simulation the whole game. Looking Glass built its objects on a system called Act-React. “Things that should burn will burn,” the designer Jeff Yaus told Edge in 1997, “and then it’s up to the player to decide to burn things, whether or not we’ve anticipated it.” The project director, Greg LoPiccolo, described it as “a type of simulator … where object interactions are correct and physics are tied in correctly”. Edge’s review explained what that meant to play: “Shadows are the most important asset to the player, with a glowing onscreen gem indicating how well hidden stealthy hero Garrett is”, and guards reacted to noise on metal floors and opening doors.

Irrational Games, founded by former Looking Glass staff, made System Shock 2 (1999) with Looking Glass, promising what Computer Gaming World called the same “multiple solutions” approach as Deus Ex. A year later the parent studio was gone. Looking Glass closed in May 2000, shortly after releasing Thief II: The Metal Age, “due in part to poor financial results”, PC Zone reported. Edge’s retrospective credited it with inventing “the firstperson 3D genre (Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss) and the 3D stealth genre (Thief)” in little over a decade.

Deus Ex and a name

Spector had produced Ultima Underworld and System Shock at Origin before a short spell at Looking Glass. At Ion Storm Austin he directed Deus Ex (2000), with Harvey Smith as lead designer. In 1998 Maximum PC had already paired Thief and Deus Ex as the games that would carry System Shock’s ideas forward, because Doug Church and Spector had been “two of the central talents involved in System Shock”.

Spector’s postmortem of the game for Game Developer, published in December 2000, is the earliest published use of the label that later accounts point to. He called Deus Ex “part immersive simulation, part role-playing game, part first-person shooter, part adventure game”, described the team as including “hardcore immersive sim fans”, and called the game “a natural outgrowth of work done by and in some cases with the late, lamented Looking Glass Technologies”. Later public accounts say Spector credits the phrase to Doug Church; the printed sources consulted here do not settle who said it first. In the same year, at the Game Developers Conference, Church set out what Clint Hocking later summed up in Edge as the “abdication of authorship”: “the idea that in attempting to deliver a specific player experience, the designer inhibits the player’s ability to generate her own (usually more meaningful) experience”.

Carrying the torch

For most of the 2000s few games were made this way. Edge wrote in 2013 that Looking Glass’s alumni had “carried Looking Glass’ torch in subsequent studios until the market for such games seemingly disappeared in the 2000s”, and that it was probably the success of Irrational’s BioShock (2007), led by Ken Levine, that showed there was room for “smart, richly drawn firstperson games with deep systems and imaginative narratives”.

Arkane. Raphaël Colantonio founded Arkane Studios in Lyon in 1999, “when all the RPG developers were folding”, as he told Edge. Edge reported that his small team set out to make “not just a game inspired by Ultima Underworld, but an actual U3”, and approached Neurath directly. “Paul was very excited about it — but he had the IP rights, not the distribution rights,” Colantonio said; a meeting with EA went no further, so Arkane made its own homage. Arx Fatalis (2002) was, in Computer Gaming World’s words, “an Ultima Underworld wannabe from a French developer” that turned out to be “one of the best RPGs in a year chockful of ’em”. Arkane’s Dishonored (2012), co-directed by Colantonio and Harvey Smith and published by Bethesda, scored nine out of ten in Edge, which found that “choice is the core of Dishonored”. Smith explained its Chaos system: “We never wanted to be judgemental — that’s why we didn’t model good and evil. We tried to model stability and instability.” Randy Smith, a designer on the first three Thief games, wrote in Edge that Dishonored solved problems his team “never quite figured out in Thief”, while lifting “straight from the Thief (and other immersive sim) playbooks: the goofy overheard conversations, the body-carrying side quests, the dark paths through the rafters”. Arkane’s Lyon studio followed with Dishonored 2 (2016) and Deathloop (2021), and its Austin studio with Prey (2017). Microsoft, which had bought Arkane’s owner ZeniMax, closed Arkane Austin in May 2024, after its game Redfall (2023).

Eidos Montreal. The studio revived Ion Storm’s series with Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) and Looking Glass’s with Thief (2014), which Edge in 2013 described as the studio acting as “the all-but-official carrier of a chunk of Looking Glass’ legacy”.

System Shock again. Nightdive Studios raised $1.3 million on Kickstarter for a remake of System Shock, Wireframe reported in 2020, and released it for PC in May 2023.

What makes one

The label is loose. Dimopoulos notes that immersive sims “can cover a variety of genres, ranging from stealth games and RPGs, to platformers, shooters, and survival horror offerings”. What they share, in the account Dimopoulos gave in Wireframe, is “reactive and consistent game systems” that “allow for emergent gameplay to happen, and heighten the sense of player agency”, in spaces detailed enough that “even the slightest detail can determine the outcome of a mission”. Thief’s stone and carpet are his example: which one Garrett walks on decides whether a guard hears him.

Randy Smith’s Edge column is a designer’s account of how hard those systems are to get right. Thief “could wear out the autoload button on your keyboard”: with “one false step you’re busted”, and despite oil slicks and flashbombs, making a noisy escape fun “never became as worthwhile as pretending it never happened”.

Sources

ACE issue 55, April 1992, pp. 36–37: review of Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (Origin; Blue Sky Productions; late March release; the quotations).
Computer Gaming World issue 125, December 1994: Christmas buyer’s guide entry for System Shock (Origin; the quotations).
Edge issue 43, March 1997, pp. 43–44: preview of The Dark Project (Greg LoPiccolo, Jeff Yaus and Act-React).
Maximum PC, December 1998, p. 51: Thief and Deus Ex, Doug Church and Warren Spector.
Edge issue 67, January 1999, p. 89: review of Thief: The Dark Project.
Computer Gaming World issue 182, September 1999: preview of System Shock 2 (Irrational Games “a team of ex-Looking Glass developers”; “great games that not enough people played”).
PC Zone issue 92, August 2000, p. 16: “Award-winning developer of Thief II closes down”.
Warren Spector, “Postmortem: Ion Storm’s Deus Ex”, Game Developer, 6 December 2000 (web, secondary): https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/postmortem-ion-storm-s-i-deus-ex-i-
PC Gamer (UK) issue 113, September 2002, p. 103: buyer’s guide entry for Deus Ex.
Computer Gaming World issue 225, April 2003: Arx Fatalis in the magazine’s review of 2002.
Edge issue 138, July 2004, pp. 82–86: history of Looking Glass Studios (Neurath and Blue Sky; Church and the MIT recruits; texture mapping and the Ultima licence; the merger with Ned Lerner’s company; Ultima Underworld’s sales; the closure in May 2000).
Edge issue 161, April 2006: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic feature (Colantonio on Arkane’s founding and Arx Fatalis).
Edge issue 180, October 2007, p. 88: review of BioShock (360, PC).
Edge issue 247, December 2012, pp. 90–93: review of Dishonored (Bethesda Softworks, Arkane Studios; nine) and interview with Harvey Smith and Raphaël Colantonio.
Edge issue 250, February 2013: Clint Hocking, “Abdicating authorship revisited” (p. 138); Randy Smith, “Dishonored is the new Thief” (p. 140).
Edge issue 253, May 2013: Looking Glass’s legacy, Arkane, Irrational and Eidos Montreal.
Wireframe issue 31, January 2020, pp. 6–7: Nightdive Studios’ System Shock remake and its Kickstarter.
Wireframe issue 53, July 2021, pp. 46–47: Konstantinos Dimopoulos, “Designing cities for immersive sims”.
“Immersive sim”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the attribution of the term to Doug Church. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersive_sim
“Arkane Studios”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Dishonored 2, Prey, Deathloop and Redfall and which studio made each. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkane_Studios
Bryant Francis, “Microsoft closes Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, and Alpha Dog Games”, Game Developer, 7 May 2024 (web, secondary): https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/microsoft-closes-arkane-austin-tango-gameworks-and-alpha-dog-studios
“System Shock (2023 video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Nightdive’s PC release on 30 May 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_(2023_video_game)