Back in the summer of 1994 everyone was getting excited about Doom II. Everyone was wrong. The only game that mattered was System Shock.
It was a defining game for me, and for the handful of others who played it. Doom II was fun, but System Shock was changing our perceptions about what gaming could be. It was the big step forward from Ultima Underworld, with a physics system, realistic textured environments, complex AI and a towering, terrifying story of isolation and persecution aboard a malevolent space station.
This was the first showdown with megalomaniac computer SHODAN, and it's something I'll never forget.
Some gamers were confused and disappointed by the low-key opening. The squalid medical bays seemed rather lacklustre compared to Doom II's gothic techno-fortresses, and beating a haywire service bucket to death with a stick didn't seem quite as thrilling as hitting the high notes with a point-blank shotgun blast.
There might not have been a great sense of urgency in the opening hours, but this wasn't about the big adrenal release. System Shock was the slow build, the growing realisation of the scale of disaster and horror. You really were in the midst of something utterly terrible.
Even though System Shock never had the capacity to deliver a living, chat-enabling NPC, you almost always expected to meet one. Indeed, everything else about this game was so spectacularly ahead of the curve that it seemed inevitable that there would be someone just around the corner - 2004's Alyx Vance, or something. Indeed, you even started to get messages from just such a character.
And though you never did meet - could never have met - her story was convincing enough and affecting enough to have you cursing the malign power of SHODAN and her robots. There was worse to come.
Even with its graphically crude presentation, System Shock delivered the most believable, detailed environments we'd ever seen. Each of them was perfectly pitched - the great air-locks of the spaceport section, the clunky jungles of the bio-spheres, and the surprising elegance of the executive suites. More than BioShock's Rapture, the System Shock space station gave a strong impression of being a working thing - a device for living in space.
The structure of the game emphasised this: you were back and forth madly between the various zones, trying desperately to break SHODAN's control and, ultimately, save both yourself and the planet full of people that the deadly station was cruising toward. This was a story of escalation. You start off knocking over zombies and poking about in the trash of a ruined space station; soon you're exploring the innards of a super-computer with destructive intent. You run a gamut of feeling, from bafflement to horror and revenge. And finally, there's the vertiginous sprint through the collapsing station, into the brainstem of the beast - into SHODAN.
After years of playing FPS games that finish on a low, you might be forgiven for thinking there were no great FPS endings out there. System Shock tells us otherwise.
Crucially, SS made you feel vulnerable. This is not the story of the superhuman warrior of the Doom games, this is the tale of a human being. Sure, you can plug into the computers to play out cyberspace subgames, but you're still a person who can walk, lean, crawl, climb, fall, and die all too easily.
System Shock might lack graphical sparkle by today's standards, but its realism and humanity reached levels as high as any game has managed in the last couple of decades.
The interface seems crude now, mostly because it is devoid of mouse-look. The visuals, too, are hard on modern eyes. But the powerful musculature of the beast remains: the story, with its perfect pacing and savage crescendo, still beats anything we can play today. If BioShock had retold System Shock's tale, beat for beat, it would probably have earned even higher scores.
The man we have to thank for it all was Doug Church. Truly, Church is one of the fathers of gaming.
His vision of what was needed to create intelligent FPS games was what inspired Warren Spector to create Deus Ex, and Ken Levine to create Bioshock. Without Church's insistent vision and profound grasp of the possibilities that gaming provided, we would not be living in the same gaming world today. Thanks Doug, I think you saved us all.
I never played SS1 or 2, or even Deus Ex which is a great shame (I tried to play Deus Ex a few months ago, but without the nostalgia it just seemed pretty pathetic by today's standards, although of course it is unfair to judge it by those standards. Unfortunately, it was unplayable for me as someone who'd missed it first time). The first truly progressive FPS I played (in terms of not simply being a Doom clone) was Duke 3D, but it's interesting to see there were games before it doing much more.
Write more s**t like this & keep it for slow news days. That's an order.
Looking at those screenies fills me with an incredible sense of nostalgia *sighs* ... I can still remember how some of the audio logs left me with hairs on the back of my neck standing up. SS1 was truly a thing of beauty and as the writer implies ... it was a sign post to how great and deep a FPS could actually be. Maybe someone will wake up, smell the java and get back to making TRULY immersive games like that again. Deus Ex carried the torch but we've yet to see anything approaching the grandeur of these truly groundbreaking games ... but STALKER came close and I'm hoping FarCry2 may go even further (hopefully with a DX8 option).
if only they could remake deus ex.i love that game and i still play it despite the fact that i am stuck and have never finshed it.the similarities between deus ex and bioshock are quite striking
I know its only a far dream, but wouldn't it be great to see either a remake of the SS games or even a sequel? I'm sure a third System Shock would fit in quite well with the current horror genre. Where condemned and F.E.A.R didn't quite make the cut for me (F.E.A.R was too much of an action shooter), I think SS3 would be the killer ap of horror shooters, especially with the awesome return of SHODAN. I was expecting the encounter of SHODAN in SS2 but it really hit me with the way she appeared. I was in a dark room at the time. I wish I wasn't.
I know its only a far dream, but wouldn't it be great to see either a remake of the SS games or even a sequel? I'm sure a third System Shock would fit in quite well with the current horror genre. Where condemned and F.E.A.R didn't quite make the cut for me (F.E.A.R was too much of an action shooter), I think SS3 would be the killer ap of horror shooters, especially with the awesome return of SHODAN. I was expecting the encounter of SHODAN in SS2 but it really hit me with the way she appeared. I was in a dark room at the time. I wish I wasn't.
Man, I remember that now *shivers*. An update of those games is definetly required.
I actually finished SS1 a few weeks ago (I started playing it because all the Bioshock talk was making me nostalgic for the world of SS2), and I was surprised by how immersive and fun the game is, even in 2007. Yeah, my main complaint is that the interface is clunky, especially in a big firefight scenario, or when you want to use the laser rapier while moving, Jedi Knight-style. But if you can get past this, the game is very creepy and compelling.
When you start up the game for the first time, it defaults to this really, really low resolution, but if you set it to 640x480, it doesn't look all that bad. There's also a distro of this game called SS1-Portable that I believe can go up to higher settings.
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*shakes fist*
