Origin point
For a certain sort of PC gaming fan,System Shockis where it all began.
SHODAN broke free, and the world was never the same.
Without System Shock, there would be noThieforGloomwood, noPreyorDead Space.Bioshockwas conceived as its sequel.
This was not so much a game as an alternate reality.
As one of our interviewees tells us: We were trying to build the holodeck.
Heres the story of how it was made, as told by the people who made it.
Looking Glass was chock-full of talented, brilliant people who would set aside their egos.
Warren Spector, executive producer:That place was like a graduate school for game developers.
There was a thoughtfulness about what games could and should be that I havent encountered much since.
And were those folks smart?
Working with those folks was one of the high points of my life, let alone my career.
The whole company was full of people who cared about this.
Robb Waters, artist:Looking Glass was my first professional job.
That was the culture shock.
The work ethic was so strong that everything else just fell to the side.
Grossman:It was super exciting.
I have no memory of that at all.
Even looking back, I dont see it.
Grossman:That was the original concept.
I dont know whose concept that was, or why that sounded like a super good idea to them.
That went away at some point, and somebody said, OK, now were doing cyberpunk.
Grossman:Everybody had seen the Ridley Scott films, and I was a huge fan of William Gibson.
How do you make a dungeon in space?
Well, its going to be a space station.
We imagined you were a hacker.
We had physical augmentation and cyberspace.
That got cut, because it was too real at the time.
Thank goodness we did not go with that.
LeBlanc:Citadel was the project codename.
Travis:I remember the codename of the project was T-E.P.
[Director and lead programmer] Doug Church would not say what that meant for years.
It stood for techno electric paganism.
Fermier:I was really happy when we came up with System Shock.
And we were like, Thats a cool term, we should use that as the name.
We had all that in Underworld and you could barely tell.
If youre running around in a 3D world, how does that number matter?
Spector:We were all frustrated with state-of-the-art branching tree conversation systems.
That seemed like a great answer.
Grossman:Everybodys dead, and you have the audio logs.
Which werent audio logs at the time.
The first round of System Shock was on floppy disks, and there was no digitised audio.
We were just straddling the line of CD-ROM games.
It shipped with text logs, and then audio logs.
Fermier:I remember at the time being very excited about Austin [Grossman] coming up with that.
There was a desire to have the mechanics be a little more diegetic in their nature.
Grossman:I pitched the audio log idea.
It came from a couple of different sources.
It was classic environmental storytelling, except we didnt have the word at the time.
That stuck in my mind as evocative, and it didnt have the cringy awkwardness of menu conversations.
That and stuff painted in blood on the walls.
There hadnt been much in the way of environmental storytelling before Shock.
We knew we wanted exactly that: reading the words of this person who was trapped.
I cant believe that was taken seriously at the time.
A terrible pact has been made and it has destroyed everyone except you, practically.
Grossman:I dont remember exactly how we signed off on something that dark.
I pitched a bunch of ideas around a female protagonist, which literally they didnt even laugh at.
They looked at me with pity in their eyes, that I was this sad, deluded man.
Of course, this was three or so years beforeTomb Raider.
Its claustrophobic and paranoid.
And then at one point Warren gave the directive that we should distress it.
Grossman:It was quite a while before we settled on having it all happen in the same place.
LeBlanc:Revisiting any place youve been is an important idea in the game.
Maybe new enemies have spawned.
Even though its this tiny dungeon, its anopen world.
You never finish a level and are done with it.
Its always a space that you inhabit.
But we didnt have the technology to do it.
Then you go into cyberspace and come back out.
Its dreamlike - it doesnt proceed from boring to interesting, it goes back and forth.
Waters:There were only so many takes on a sci-fi wall panel that we could come up with.
Doug Church was obsessed with someone being hired and then betrayed by their employer.
Dont ask me why.
Travis:System Shock has its own moral stance, but its extremely negative.
There are no good guys and no hero in that game.
It’s a story about corporate greed, isolation and betrayal.
We couldnt do those things in the Underworld games, because the story was more optimistic.
Grossman:I left the project partway through to go to grad school.
Spector:Doug was, as they say, ‘The Man’ on System Shock.
His influence on game design and on me was huge.
The world has no idea, which frustrates the hell out of me.
Ive tried to make that guy famous for decades and he just wont let me.
Grossman:Hes brilliant.
He would always be almost horizontal in his office chair and reach up and pop in.
He has a charisma.
Doug and Warren were this great combination.
The most important thing about Doug, to me, is that hes a natural born teacher.
He has great conceptual strengths and has the ability to communicate those concepts to others.
Whatever combination of things he has, people were certainly willing to follow him anywhere.
Hell, I was willing to follow him.
Everybody would jump in with their ideas.
It was very much not a siloed project.
Fermier:He had a vision of what he wanted, but he led by example.
He wrote a ton of code, he was involved in a lot of design discussions.
The process was way less formalised than you envision today.
But he had a very egalitarian approach to the actual programming, he was not a super micro-manager.
Grossman:Weve always waited for Dougs next thing.
We have yet to see it.
System Shock remains the last game that Doug Church shipped as project leader.
Sim-ple pleasures
System Shock wasnt an RPG; nor was it a shooter either.
It occupied a new space that nobody yet had a name for.
Fermier:The term immersive sim wasnt around at the time, but the term immersive was.
We were talking about these concepts.
System Shock took that a step further.
Grossman:We didnt have the nice vocabulary for game design and game behaviour that we have now.
We were struggling to grasp and formulate it.
That sense that we were on the verge of a bunch of exciting ideas really charged System Shock.
Grossman:It was a very exciting moment, because real-time 3D tech was still not very old.
At the time that we were designing System Shock, we hadWolfenstein, we knew thatDoomwas in development.
People hadnt really gotten the conventions down of how it would work.
So it wasnt a shock to us that id was working on Doom.
It didnt really feel like competition, it felt like it was a different kind of game.
Travis:System Shock was not meant to be a shooter.
It was not essential that you could swing your point-of-view around at an incredibly high framerate.
It was more of a stealth and planning game, watching your ammunition and sneaking around.
And so that meant it could support more detailed graphics, unlike Doom.
Its why you dont have a cutscene where you hear your own voice.
Grossman:There was a lot of debate about whether to show the protagonist.
We werent going to impose ourselves on the player as to what they thought they looked like.
Somebodys got to make the world.
And the world has to be believable.
We were trying to build the holodeck.
Grossman:The studio took the simulation aspect of the game quite seriously.
Its a simple moment, but those are the moments that we were looking for.
People on some forum would collect soda cans in System Shock for grenade practice, to practice their trajectory.
In System Shock, the motion was realistic, and the natural speed really made it very immersive.
It reminds you of playing when youre a kid, hiding from other kids.
Grossman:The whole simulationist bent of it was great.
But that was kind of like a feature of the time that everyone just accepted.
People forget what the world before 3D hardware was like.
30 frames-per-second was considered flying fast.
Fermier:In fairness, mice werent super common yet.
But later, whenQuakewould come out with mouselook, we were all like, Oh, thats so obvious.
Spector:The first time I tried a game with mouse control, what was it?
The Terminator 2029 or something.
Anyway, I remember saying, This will never catch on.
Spector:I went to GenCon one year and Origin had a booth there.
Id rather not name it.
Should have been a wake-up call.
Grossman:Terri Brosius and the whole audio team were an interesting presence.
I have to appreciate how open they were to all that dorkiness.
LeBlanc:We were all huge Tribe fans.
Grossman:All the voice acting was done by people from around the office.
I was Edward Diego.
LeBlanc:Terri has this amazing voice.
And shes this diva - not in personality, just in her presence.
There was no she or he.
But then when we did the audio, that completely changed.
Like the trope of the nagging, evil computer lady was actually a put-on.
I always thought that was an important point that was completely forgotten.
Grossman:In a sense, SHODAN would represent us.
It turned out to work very well.
Fermier:We wanted SHODAN to feel like this presence.
We talked about a bunch of crazy things that never went in.
At one point SHODAN was going to drain your XP from you.
LeBlanc:We had desires to do more of the dungeon master AI.
Theres so much more we could have done.
Grossman:When youre in game development, the player kind of is the enemy.
Youre always picturing them trying to break your game or sneak past something.
Your commands wouldnt work, and you would start to think that SHODAN had come into your actual PC.
There absolutely would be no System Shock without Warren.
And hes a very rare guy in the industry who has never rested on existing techniques.
Fermier:Obviously we had a publisher and we had to keep them happy.
Warren was always very supportive.
He brought a good, kindly uncle energy to all the meetings we would have with him.
LeBlanc:Warren saved us from getting cancelled.
There was a moment relatively early on, where we gave Origin a demo of what we were making.
And youve got to understand that we worked in a very different way from Origin.
And that was there as a pillar of inspiration.
You had this one very pretty thing that you could look at.
It was a point of communication between development and the execs: This is what were making.
I mean, fantastic.
Those guys made their games pretty even before they had nailed the gameplay.
Clearly the powers that be valued that approach.
I always thought it was backwards.
And Shock, I admit, didnt look great at that time.
Warren talked them back from the edge.
Spector:There was a fight there!
Luckily, the fight went my way and we were allowed to continue.
Waters:We had programmers come in at nine oclock in the morning.
And then from behind the cubicle comes a programmer stumbling up from sleeping on some mattress on the floor.
LeBlanc:It was very much an MIT nerd culture.
It was very intense.
I dont know that it was the most healthy or positive culture.
Grossman:No one knew that crunch was bad.
No one knew about work-life balance.
The games industry has gotten so much better at project management and knowing how to give people lives.
The game has this error thats like, Dont forget to salt the fries.
Grossman:I felt super privileged to be working on this forward-thinking and ambitious video game.
All of my cohort at college had moved on to jobs in publishing or internships.
People worked crazy hours.
I met my wife during System Shock and Im amazed that she stuck with me.
She would hang out and sleep at the office, and make sandwiches for people.
That told me she was a keeper.
It was an alchemy.
There was a shared spirit of investigation and ambition that functioned well.
LeBlanc:There was Paul Neurath and the other grown-ups.
We were practically living at Looking Glass, we had futons we took turns crashing in.
That worked, but man, it devastated my long term memory.
Theres a huge gap of a month or two.
LeBlanc:It was very much a suffer for the art kind of culture.
We were super into it, and we all really believed in what we were making.
We didnt have all the answers.
None of us had particularly good communication skills.
It wasnt Lord of the Flies, but there was a backwards aesthetic to it.
We were just living our spartan lives, pouring everything into this thing.
And if you werent on board, then you didnt have a right to have an opinion.
Showdown
System Shocks launch brought disappointing sales and a dawning realisation that the future looked like Doom.
Fermier:I remember the stars going in extremely late.
The team was that committed to making the game as great as they could make it.
I wish more teams felt that way about their games and gave me ulcers like the Shock team did.
It really clicked at the last minute.
I remember playing it after it shipped and being pleased with how well things came together.
Spector:It was what you might call a late bloomer.
That was one of the things that resulted in Origins and EAs concerns about the game late in development.
As a note, no one ever believes me when I say immersive sims come together late.
But its the truth.
And it was a huge lesson to me.
People say, Well, System Shock is the thinking mans Doom.
And Im not a caveman.
Its just not as accessible to me.
But it never gained that status where it was this widely accepted thing.
It was just for people that were into that niche of micromanage-ystealth game.
Fermier:I remember being disappointed that it didnt sell as well as wed hoped.
Its still really hard to factor out sales from piracy.
Piracy was extremely rampant in that era.
But theres no two ways about it, we made a pretty inaccessible game.
It was clearly a mistake - once you make a first impression with an audience, thats it.
But there was a deadline to hit and quarterly projects to be made.
Fermier:A lot of people dont remember that SHODAN didnt have a voice in the original System Shock.
After we launched it, me and a handful of people did the Enhanced Edition.
That was when it first got the voices.
Spector:The floppy version was like a silent film compared with the CD version.
I have no sense of whether the marketing was good or bad on it.
I dont recall there being a whole lot of marketing for it.
I honestly dont remember anyone at Origin giving a damn.
They had bigger fish to fry with Wing and Ultima.
Remember Citadel
Despite commercial failure, System Shocks influence spread to every corner of the games industry.
Fermier:It was not an easy sell when we madeSystem Shock 2.
But Im very proud of those games.
They were the games we wanted to make.
Ultimately, thats the part we can control.
We cant directly control sales.
Waters:I appreciate the game more now than I ever have.
At different points in my career I looked back at System Shock and was just embarrassed by it.
Grossman:System Shock had a certain amount in common withDeus Ex.
It was a lot of the same people and it was somewhat the same kitchen sink approach.
Spector:Deus Ex wouldnt have happened - couldnt have happened - without games like Shock.
Theres a clear evolutionary line from one of those games to another.
That was such an amazing breakthrough and imitated by so many games.
Grossman:Flash forward to working on Dishonored, they still used menu conversation systems.
No ones ever really killed that beast.
Grossman:The door code, 0451, still pops up.
It was the door code we used to get into the office.
Its very fun to see that reference continue.
And so frankly, if it wasnt Bioshock, it could have been System Shock 3.
Grossman:Maybe we will someday get to do System Shock 3.
Itd be fun to do all the things that we couldnt do at the time.
Maybe on theback of the relaunch, well be able to do something.
