I purchased System Shock 2 while I was in college – probably the original release. The game was in a silvery-blue box that I wish now I had kept. At this point I can’t recall what prompted me to purchase it, but I believe I came to it via the Ultima Underworld series – I knew that the folks who had worked on that game, which I had really enjoyed, had moved on and were at Looking Glass Studios. So I picked up the game at Electronics Boutique, brought it back to the house that my friends and I were renting, and fired it up.
Horror movies had never really been my thing, but I had played Doom, so some of the tricks they used in the game such as the dark lighting and the surprise of having an enemy jump out of a doorway weren’t new. Resources in the game were tight, though – this was Doom without the near-limitless ammo and where your combat effectiveness was constrained by a system of RPG-like upgrades. You’re kept on the edge of survival, many times, until you figure out how to harbor your resources and make headway in clearing out areas of the game where you can access medical tables, purchase supplies, and upgrade your skills using the resources at hand.
Not only do you have a compelling, edge-of-your-seat resource management component added to a first-person shooter, you also have a unique and compelling story. You’re thrown into a crisis situation in medias res, and the characters and dialogue play out primarily in the form of comm logs you discover. The game teases the possibility of interacting with other survivors, but doesn’t really deliver – the only person you can interact with, early in the game, dies just as you reach him.
I think it’s this compelling narrative that caused me to fire up System Shock 2 a week or two ago and plough through the entire game all over again. It had been a good 15+ years since I’d last traveled the corridors of the Von Braun, and I marveled again at the clever level-design, the resources hidden in little pockets or dark corners, the way the designer hooks players and encourages them to look one way while they’re bringing up a nasty surprise from a different direction. The ending of the game still felt epic – a death-march through formidable foes and a showdown with the villains who have taunted you all throughout your journey.
The games Looking Glass Studios released around the turn of the millenium (Thief, System Shock, and the original Deus Ex) are my favorite games – but I think System Shock 2 is the most compelling. The Bioshock series is a carbon copy of System Shock 2, with a few other faction names and characters cut and pasted over The Many and SHODAN. While the Bioshock series is good, I think it’s only Bioshock: Infinite that began to approach the level of genius that System Shock 2 began. There aren’t many games that I can turn on and enjoy just as much now as I did 20 years ago; the fact that I can do that with this one is unique. I think that, just maybe, System Shock 2 is my favorite game of all time.