The above image is a screenshot from the ending cinematic of System Shock, a 1994 computer game developed by the legendary team once known as Looking Glass Technologies. It's one of the more resonant depictions of a protagonist at the end of a video game adventure I can recall seeing.
For anyone with sight impairment—and don't worry, this is some blurry-looking mid-1990s CG we’re talking about—it's a picture of a man in a tattered uniform looking haggard, bloodied, and spent. As he leans against the wall, covering his eyes and catching his breath, his mind comes to terms with the fact that his long night of waking terror has finally ended.
What, you ask, has caused this man to be so bruised and battered? Well, he's just spent the last 10 or so hours battling hordes of deadly robots, cybernetic assassins, and other mutated horrors untold across 10 vertical levels of an overrun space station. You'd be lucky to look half as good as this guy had you just gone through the same ordeal.
System Shock must have been one hell of a game for 1994. I only finished playing it in August, by way of the more recent System Shock: Enhanced Edition, developed by Nightdive Studios and released in 2015. Getting through the game in 2019 was as memorable and engrossing as it was at times a chore.
The game itself is a first-person action-adventure game—one filled with plenty of shooting but also exploration, puzzle-solving, inventory management, and other non-combat activities. It's even got some amusing, straight-out-of-the-90s virtual reality hacking mini-games in which you fly through wireframe 3D tunnels and fire at abstract colored shapes. We have a word for this particular kind of genre mashup that wasn't available at the time of the game's release but is nowadays used to describe an entire host of games that sprang from the seeds that System Shock sowed—everything from Deus Ex (2000) to BioShock (2007) to Dishonored (2012) to Prey (2017) to Void Bastards (2019). Today, we refer to this genre as the immersive sim, and it's often characterized by things like:
- Nonlinear, first-person exploration in a 3D environment.
- The complex interplay of gameplay systems, designed as a means of allowing players to solve problems and achieve story progress in a freeform, spontaneous manner.
If you couldn’t already tell, the story and setting are pure cyberpunk. You play as a hacker who, prior to the events of the game, attempts to access a cache of files from the space station Citadel, owned by the TriOptimum megacorporation. Upon being caught, apprehended, and whisked away to said space station, a TriOptimum executive named Edward Diego cuts the protagonist a sweetheart deal: Hack into the station's A.I. security apparatus—a system known as SHODAN—in exchange for some military-grade hacking gear and a clean record. With the deed accomplished, the hacker receives his promised surgical upgrades and goes into a six-month cryogenic slumber to recover from the operation. The game begins as the hacker awakens in the station's deserted medical lab to find everything gone to hell.
The station's robots are all in attack mode. The rooms and corridors are littered with human remains in various stages of decomposition and even a few shambling corpses. SHODAN, it seems, has been busy, and not in a good way. Piecing together the events of what happened during your coma is mostly a secondary objective. Your real priority is to survive the onslaught of free-roaming cyborg enemies that have taken over every inch of Citadel.
This is the kind of 'in media res' narrative setup that we've seen across so many games, the aforementioned BioShock being perhaps the most famous. As in BioShock, the player character receives communications from an outside party that provides the player with background and objectives that point the way forward. There are scattered logs from the station's dead crew members, who recount in journal form the various events leading up to and after SHODAN's takeover. It's one thing to be told for years about the inspirational lineage from System Shock (and its sequel) to BioShock and another to see it firsthand, albeit in reverse, many years after the fact. I don't know how you could play System Shock and not think to yourself, at least once, 'You know what? This game really was ahead of its time.' And, yes, maybe eventually I'll have to go back even further and play Ultima Underworld.
From the in-game HUD interface to the architectural layout of the space station itself, everything in System Shock is a bit of a labyrinth—hard to understand and easy to get lost in. It's an asymmetry lover's dream. Even the elevator system is a bit convoluted. The first elevator you encounter travels between levels 1 and 2. You then access a different elevator on level 2 to get to levels R (energy systems level) and 3. On level 3, there are two additional lifts, one which takes you to level 6 and another that travels to levels 4 and 5. You get the idea. It's as if the design profession ceases to exist in the distant future. Or maybe the world of System Shock resides in some alternate reality in which Apple never revolutionizes the tech industry with its "user-friendly" innovations, and some version of DOS continues to reign as the dominant computer operating system into the 2070s. Depending on your level of patience, the game's general messiness either becomes a part of its overall charm or one of the main reasons you walk away.
Even the way in which the game communicates to the player what they need to do next—well, it barely does this at all. Even early on, I had to pay fairly close attention to the data logs and email communications I'd been collecting in order to locate the relevant details. For the most part, I was able to piece things together fairly well, and there was a satisfying feeling—akin to puzzle solving—in figuring things out on my own. Even I hit a wall from time to time, however, and I was unable to remember or decipher what exactly I was supposed to be doing. At one point, about two thirds through the game, I had to consult an online guide to figure out my current objective. I didn't feel bad about it.
The plot ultimately guides you through the maze of Citadel in a serpentine fashion as you continue to thwart each of SHODAN's doomsday scenarios. First, you have to deactivate an onboard mining laser SHODAN plans to use to destroy earth's major cities. Then, after you manage to preemptively destroy the laser, you have to prevent SHODAN from infecting the planet with a secretly developed super virus that transforms humans into mutants. Eventually, it becomes clear that your only option is to get to SHODAN directly. The game actually does a pretty good job of building up the stakes and the tension over time. There are even a few memorable boss-type encounters.
At each stage of the overall plot, you encounter various obstacles that complicate your original objective and force you to backtrack to other areas of the station. To get an idea how crazy this game's order of operations is, just take a look at this handy walkthrough guide. And keep in mind that list doesn't even factor in the many dead ends a normal player is going to encounter in trying to figure things out through the normal processes of exploration or trial and error.
I remember at one point my player character's next immediate goal was to fix some kind of broken relay. In order to do so, I had to use a computer terminal to diagnose which numbered relay needed to be fixed. Then I had to walk through four maintenance corridor mazes, blasting away deadly cyborgs around just about every corner, looking for that specific relay in order to apply a manual repair item. The relay I was looking for was literally, by sheer coincidence, in the last spot of the last room that I checked. It sounds tedious, but there was a workmanlike quality to the task that made it strangely pleasurable. If you've ever had to manually troubleshoot something on your automobile, flipping through the pages of a bulky owner's manual with grease-covered fingers while outside in the freezing cold, that's the kind of real-life experience this game recalls. With the entire crew of Citadel wiped out, it now falls solely upon your shoulders to perform each and every maintenance operation on each and every deck of the station.
Ultimately, the qualities that make System Shock an early immersive sim are not quite as pronounced as in later games like Deus Ex. Unlike in Deus Ex, you're not choosing whether to hack the door lock, blow it up, find the password, or crawl through the nearby air duct instead. If there's a door that's password protected, you typically just have to find the password. Rather, it seems that most of the game's variability of play style is concentrated in the combat, which—although it makes up a huge portion of the game—is extremely primitive and unwieldy by modern standards. Here, your minute-to-minute choices might boil down to: Which gun and ammo type should I use for this specific encounter, or should I lean around the corner and lob a grenade instead?
While there are a handful of neuro-interface hardware modifications (i.e. special abilities) the player can accumulate and upgrade through the course of the game, including jet boots that let you (sort of) fly upward, I barely noticed they were there and rarely relied on them. I can think of one interesting section of the game that requires you to navigate a series of particularly claustrophobic corridors, all of which are crawling with seemingly hundreds of these small proximity-mine drone robots that quietly sneak toward the player and explode. At one point, I realized this was a place where one special power, which gives you the ability to turn on a rear-view camera and see what's behind you, might come in handy. It was a clever mechanic, but it didn't really make much of a difference in terms of making that section easier to survive, seeing as there was still no option to actually shoot in the opposite direction. Once again, Deus Ex would turn this type of upgrade system into something much more immediately practical and robust six years later with that game's augmentation upgrade system.
Until 2015, System Shock was something of a lost classic, so we definitely owe a huge debt of gratitude to Nightdive Studios for not only acquiring the rights to the game but making it even plausibly playable for modern audiences with their Enhanced Edition upgrades. These enhancements include beefed up texture resolutions and a control scheme that allows you to play the game more like a modern shooter—namely, you now have the ability to smoothly control the camera aim with the mouse. I can't even comprehend how anyone managed to play through the original 1994 versions of this game (there was, famously, a floppy disk version that preceded the CD ROM version), which required you to use the 'R,' 'F,' and 'V' keys in order to tilt your aiming perspective either up or down. In the Nightdive remaster, by hitting the 'E' button (think 'E' for 'Enhanced'), you are able to toggle back and forth between the original cursor control scheme and the new, modern movement scheme. It's still a little clunky having to constantly toggle between the two, but the fact the option is there is a lifesaver.
I think what I'll take away from System Shock more than anything else is the pleasurable, geeky weirdness of it all. This is a game where you can literally click on any pixel of any environmental texture and the HUD will display a short name description for what it is. These are just a few of examples of the many unique descriptors that make up the walls, floors, and ceilings: quartz light fixture, duralloy panelling (sic), cable access port, industrial tile, medical diagnostic tools, molybdenum panelling (sic), halogen lighting, energy conduits. That's an odd detail I've never seen in another game, and it's one that helps make the world feel purposeful and utilitarian. The art direction itself a lot of fun, and each floor of Citadel has its own visual aesthetic. The old-school CG animation used in the game's intro and ending animations looks fantastic. The music and sound was fairly advanced for its time as well. While the soundtrack initially grated, it definitely grew on me over time as I heard more of its synth-based tracks through playing.
All that said, I understand why people still talk about DOOM and Half-Life all the time and only rarely talk about System Shock or even System Shock 2. You can have all the brilliant ideas in the world, but unless you manage to present them in a user-friendly package, you're only going to reach so many people. The unfortunate setbacks of System Shock's unwieldy interface and control input is probably part and parcel of why it's only remembered as a cult classic and not an all-time great. But for any true cyberpunk fans with a nostalgia for old-school PC gaming, it might be worth checking out.
(Alternatively, you could wait for the crowdfunded System Shock reboot, also being developed by Nightdive Studios. The most recent gameplay footage looks promising.)
