Hello, this is Samuel from The Back Page. We’re taking a week off this week, but we don’t want to leave our Free Feed listeners hanging, so we’re pleased to present Episode 1 of our previously Patreon-exclusive miniseries, PC Gaming Classics, hosted by Jeremy Peel, sometime guest on the show, and Phil Iwaniuk, a former colleague of myself and Matthews. So, we hope you enjoy this first episode, which is all about System Shock 2. We’ll roll out all six episodes of this miniseries on the Free Feed in the coming months, and thanks so much to our patrons for bringing it to life. We hope you enjoy. In the meantime, if you can’t get enough of us and you’d like to support us, patreon.com/backpagepod. We’ve just uploaded the best Mario moments. So, we’ll be back with a regular episode next Friday. Thanks so much for listening and enjoy this mini-series. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the first of a series of six Back Page Podcast specials. This is a podcast about 90s PC gaming that we’re calling The Backer Page Podcast because it exists purely due to the kindness and generosity of you lot on Patreon. I am Phil Iwaniuk, and with me is Jeremy Peel. Hello, Jeremy. Hello, Phil, hello, everyone. Jeremy is a familiar voice to Back Page Podcast. Long time listeners. Jeremy, you’ve spoken about all sorts with Samuel and Matthew before, haven’t you? Immersive Sims, Drive 3R. Is that the, am I getting that right? Drift 3R? I think you know you’re not. But you are. I’m the guy who shows up on the podcasts and just splurges an unnerving amount of information about Drive are all in one breath and then leaves again. That’s been me. I wonder if you’ll manage to cram it into this episode. So this first episode in the series of six, all focusing on classic 90s PC games is all about the venerable immersive sim slash shooter RPG thingy from Irrational Games and Looking Glass Studios, System Shock 2. I’m so excited to talk about this one. I went downstairs to make one of the more atmospheric cups of coffee in my life, Jeremy, just now, because I was listening to the System Shock 2 soundtrack as I did so. And it’s quite early in the, well, it’s half eight now, but when I was making the coffee, it was quite early. And my goodness, that was tense. What a soundtrack. Yeah, and it goes, we were saying it goes surprisingly hard, doesn’t it, that soundtrack? You’ve got the sort of like the dense, the thick ambience, and then you also have full on big beats. Yeah, it’s like Liam Howlett from Prodigy’s been at the desk on it. I should say who it’s actually composed by actually, it’s Josh Randall, Ramin Djawadi and Eric Brosius. Yeah, Brosius in fact, I know how to pronounce that now. Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Yeah, I recognized Brosius’ name. Yeah, he was like the lead sound guy on this and also on Thief. That’s why I know his name then. And that’s why Jeremy, you’re here. Like a driving instructor to just politely pull the wheel away from the curb. So let’s begin by introducing ourselves and talking a little bit about why we’re doing this and why 90s PC gaming is worthy of comment 20, 30 years on in the first place. So Jeremy, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got started in the industry and what your idiosyncrasies are in gaming. I’m a freelance games journalist going on about 10 years. I was thinking of how I could date that other than with actual dates, obviously, but Dishonored and the XCOM Reboot were kind of the significant games for me when I started. Within like a year of me starting, they happened and were a big deal for me. And they’re also connected to the games we’re gonna be talking about across the course of this series. You know, they have their roots in this stuff. Yeah, so I started at a site called PCGamesN and at this point, I’ve got to write for PCGamer and Edge and Rock Paper Shotgun and all of my favorite games outlets, really. Yeah, who are you, Phil? I think you know very well. I think of myself as sort of a gray man of the games industry, because I’ve been around quite a long time. You’ve probably not heard of me, but you might have read some stuff that I’ve written over the years. I got my start. To date, my debut, my first commission, I think, was for PC Format Magazine and it was a review of Dragon Age Origins. So, what was that, 2008? Very late 2008 that came out. Got that one bang on. Think I gave it like 87%, which obviously correct. And then when I first got my staff job in the games industry, I was freelancing for a bit. And so I was given the Dragon Age 2 review as my first gig as a staff writer. And I’m not the top on Metacritic. I’m not the highest review score, only because PC Gamer went 1% higher. But I did give it 94. So maybe that’s what people know before. For absolutely messing up the Dragon Age 2 review. I do think PC Gamer, you know, taking a little of the heat off you there. People still bring that up in their mentions. I know, it’s only 1% as well. That, between the two of us, we must have like been responsible for some massive bonuses at Bioware. Because without us, that average MetaSchool would be like in the 70s, I think. Anyway, so other than taking a bung for the Dragon Age 2 review, what else did I do? I went from PC Format Magazine onto official PlayStation Mag, where I was there for a few years. Then I went over to PC Games N, where I met Jeremy Peel. The two of us spent a long time talking about Quake, where we should have been talking about Minecraft or Roblox, or whatever was trending on search at the time. Then I went freelance. Yeah, you were my Features Editor when I was a Features Writer, and I was very fortunate to have you as a manager. I felt like I was often writing to make you laugh. It’s always helpful to have that as a writer, to have a specific mate in mind that you want to entertain. It was a humiliating experience for me, Jeremy, if I’m honest, because I was supposed to be managing you, but you were just so far ahead on top of it all. You were reminding me of the spreadsheets that I needed to ask you to update, and your work just needed absolutely nothing doing to it. I was like, oh, Jesus Christ, this guy’s amazing, and I can teach him nothing, but it did foster a long-time friendship and a safe space where we could talk about Trent Reznor’s production idiosyncrasies and the medieval imagery of Quake and things like that. So really, this is the perfect place for us to just be chatting nonsense about 90s stuff, because it’s really where our Venn diagrams overlap. Whilst I’m not the biggest Driver 3 fan, I can certainly respect the fact that it’s an older title with quite a niche audience. And that’s where we both choose to… That’s not even faint praise. That’s just facts. I can certainly respect the fact that it’s a game that came out in the past. Yeah, these are factual things. It’s very hard to debate them. So that’s a little bit about us and why we’re fixated on 90s PC gaming. I always think, Jeremy, you know, when you’re listening to a podcast that you really like, but the regular hosts are like away on holiday or whatever, like if it’s the film program with Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo, and then you listen to the latest episode and it’s like Robbie Colen and Edith Bowman, you’re like, ah, like, I mean, they’re great. No disrespect to those like very trusted and esteemed broadcasters, but you’re like, oh, where’s the people that I wanted to listen to and that I choose to listen to this podcast for? I’m hoping that just knowing a little bit about the sort of our CVs, a painstaking detail about the jobs that we’ve hopped between might mitigate that just slightly. Yeah, I’m glad you turned that sentence around at the midway point. I was worried you were just gonna be talking as out of a gig. I absolutely understand if you don’t wanna listen. All the very best, go and play System Shock 2. So that’s a little bit about who we are and forensic detail about where we’ve worked. What was your salary during all of those jobs? I’ll go through mine. No, so. But that’s the details about who we are. But why we’re obsessed with 90s PC Gaming is a different matter. Jeremy, why is this a special period to you? I think, you know, as I kind of touched on with Dishonored and X-Com Reboot, this is a period where a lot of the seeds were planted for my favorite genres. It was a time where tech was advancing at an almost alarming rate. And it felt like a new and revolutionary idea was happening at least once a year. And yeah, the games that we’ll be talking about in this series, they, you can see their influence today everywhere, but because it was also a period of huge kind of experimentation, I think they will all reveal themselves to have like fascinating dead ends as well, things that weren’t picked up, which we’re gonna uncover and kind of point to the cool stuff that was left behind. There’s so much of that in this period. What do you reckon? Absolutely. I think we’re in a really privileged position because the sort of nostalgia that we can indulge in now is so much deeper than previous generations, right? So whereas like our parents might listen to records that take them back to their youth, we’ve got this entire virtual worlds that are so much more immersive and fleshed out and they come with a soundtrack and the music itself is like massive nostalgia here, but it’s also attached to like an explorable environment full of like characters that you remember and specific experiences that you remember doing. So it’s just like a mind blowing level of a time capsule. And I think you’re absolutely right that the nineties was genuinely and sort of empirically a really special time for game development. I think the pace of innovation that you mentioned there was crucial in that it brought in the best and brightest minds in tech. I always think about people like Demis Osabas who worked with Peter Molyneux on Dungeon Keeper and then Black and White during this period, Black and White slightly out of our remit, 2001 it was released. But Demis Osabas went on, he was a junior chess prodigy, an actual genius, went on to found what became Google DeepMind. He will be running the world at some point. And in the 90s he was fiddling around with PC games because that’s where the greatest chance to innovate was happening. So I think even aside from all our misty eyed nostalgia, that really was kind of a once in a lifetime moment for tech and for entertainment. Probably just like really quickly worth mentioning the caveat on this, like as great as the 90s were in gaming for like for most of us, I guess we should also acknowledge that like this wasn’t the most inclusive time, this wasn’t the most like progressive time. And if you weren’t like a white teenage boy, then maybe there was a danger of feeling a bit alienated. Like certainly women’s representation in games has come a really long way since the 90s, non-white characters, non-binary characters. Like it was a completely different landscape. So just wanted to like throw that in before we spend the next two hours regaling in this era. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how that comes up in these games. I think in System Shock 2’s case, it’s in the main that there are very few female parts in the cast. That’s the main one I’d point out there. Yeah, equally, I don’t think it’s quite right to condemn games from this period on those grounds, is it? Because it was a reflection of the culture. I think we can maybe like judge the culture, but the developers are responding to where the culture was and where they thought the dollars were. It’s interesting. I was going through some like original design docs for some games back in the 90s, like without naming names. And the way that they, the language that they use when they talk about the player is always a he. It’s just always assumed that like, why would a woman be playing this game? That’s unthinkable. Like he will be having a badass time with our new super violent mechanics. Yeah, I interviewed developers in the 2010s who did that. We’ve come a long way, haven’t we? So I thought that was worth throwing in. Just to sort of paint the picture like that. Although this is a deeply nostalgic time when there was a lot of special stuff happening, the 90s weren’t perfect. And the cultural material that it threw up reflects the fact that it wasn’t perfect. You mentioned time capsule and it’s worth mentioning that you have effectively a literal time capsule for this, at your disposal for this series, 1998 rig. Is that right? I’m really glad you brought this up because this is my favorite thing in the entire world. Yeah, I’ve spent the last five years sourcing the exact model of my very first PC, which I got in 1998, it’s a Packard Bell Platinum 350, if anybody’s interested. And that’s where I play my classic games now. And it’s so much better, speaking personally, it’s so much more of that nostalgia hit to be like starting these games from Windows 98 and just listening to like the floppy drive booting up when you turn the PC on. I don’t know, like for me, that would be the reason why I would play System Shock 2, not just as, you know, for quite a cold hearted forensic analysis of like, how did this inform Dishonored? It’s more about like, I want to feel like I’m in 1999 and I’m a teenager and I’ve got no worries in the world other than how to beat Shodan. Yeah. So playing it in this environment just absolutely heightens it. So that’s where I’ll be playing all the games that we feature in this series. And there’s a lot there for you to unpack in therapy, but it’s all to the benefit of Backpage listeners at this point. Exactly. And the nice thing about it is that it’s a relatively cheap debilitating hobby to source these things. I know Samuel’s got like a real eBay thing going on with pre-owned games. And I guess this is just an extension of it. We’re looking for the beige ephemera that goes with pre-owned games. Yeah. Was it beige when it started? I always try and remember this about how beige the PCs were at the time because they got more beige over time, right? They’re very beige now. Yeah, yeah. They’re like Ben Kingsley and Sexy Beast sort of beige. Whereas they began slightly just off white. You can actually like home brew a bleachy substance called retro bright, which you like slather all over your beige parts. And that’s a good little sound. So to speak. And then like put it under UV light and then it will restore it to its off white form of glory. But it’s quite risky because it’s like really strong peroxide. So I haven’t gone that far yet. That’s horrifying. Yeah, if anybody does have any. I was better off not knowing about that. Probably, yeah. If anybody does have any like old PC parts from this era, then yeah, look into retro bright at your own peril. The Back Page accepts no responsibility for damages incurred due to using retro bright. So Jeremy, I think that’s the intro done, isn’t it? Yeah. Would you like to stretch your legs, have an atmospheric cup of coffee, listening to big beats and then reconvene to talk about System Shock 2? Yeah, I’m gonna go and crouch walk around the house with a wrench for a bit. I’m gonna just plug in like a weird ball into my wrist and wander around brandishing it. That’s a tough joke. All right, we’ll be back momentarily to talk System Shock 2. Well, I’m back with a coffee. That was more Shrieking Ape-like monsters during a coffee run than I’m used to, Jeremy, but I did enjoy the big beats. How did you get on? Yeah, I was practising my side power, so I got a nosebleed, but otherwise all good. So, it’s about time we actually talked about System Shock 2 in a bit more detail. So first of all, let’s try to get to the bottom of what it meant at the time when it came out. What are your first recollections of this game? How did you first hear about it? And what was your impression? So, I was pretty young in the 90s. You know, a lot of this stuff I came to slightly later. And the first time I was aware of System Shock 2 was, I think, seeing it on the shelf. It was on my mate’s dad’s shelf in his house. So, a very good friend at school. And I think, honestly, his dad was, I was as excited to see his dad as I was my mate because he was a long time PC gamer. They were kind of aspirational to me as a family, actually, a PC gaming family. My friends, mum and dad, they’d kind of, you know, played Ultima online together in their youth. And then, you know, they had two phone lines so that they could play a quest and still receive calls because he was a doctor. That was goals, wasn’t it? That was absolute goals in the nineties. Yeah, and he had the most incredible shelf of big box PC games, like games that we’ll be discussing in this series. Fallout was on there. XCOM was on there, a slightly dodgier XCOM immediate sequel about underwater stuff. And System Shock 2 was on there. And I remember one time he let me borrow it, but then I was surprised by how quickly he asked for it back and I didn’t even get a chance to beat it up. So I then didn’t play System Shock 2 for many years. But I was aware, you know, I mean, you’re gonna covet something, aren’t you? If it’s kind of, you know, you get to own it for a couple of weeks and then have to give it back. You’re like, oh God. It’s snatched away from me. I’ve missed something there. What was it about it that made you wanna borrow it in the first place? Was it the box? Was it showdown on the box art? The box was good and I was aware of the connection to stuff like Thief from Looking Glass. You know, I was already into the kind of, the budget games display at Asda where you could get those, you know, sold out or Explosive or PC Gamer Presents, those brands were. For a fiver, you could get Thief 2 or Deus Ex. And you know, what an introduction that is. Your Asda was a lot better than mine, mate. My Asda just had like discount pork in it. We didn’t have a seminal PC titles on a little plinth for a fiver. My goodness. It wasn’t a plinth. It was shirts by George and things. Yeah, it was one of those spinny stands. Sure, sure, yeah. I don’t know what you call those. I used to work in a supermarket as well back in the day. I should know that. Plinths. That’s probably what this podcast is about, is it? No. Well, the plinth is more the end of the aisle, right? That would be where you put all the mints, your seasonal meats and things. I worked more on the meat aisle. Yeah. I think we’re a little off track. Ha ha ha. What year was this when you were going around to your friend’s house and you saw this remarkable big box game and it caught your eye? It was just like a few years after the fact, right? Oh, yeah. Like maybe 2003 or… That kind of time. For me, my introduction was through PC Gamer Magazine. Like so many other seminal titles in my life, really. PC Gamer was just like the absolute north star. So I remember the review. It was, I wanna say 92%, but certainly in the 90s and that always turned your head, right? If something was getting like above an 85, you’re like, these guys are serious about this. Yeah. From memory, I don’t think it was a Kieran Gillen review and that seems mad to me. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be, right? Cause Kieran was such a looking glass, irrational head to use Backpage vernacular that like retrospectively, if you were the editor of PC Gamer at the time and System Shock 2 comes in, you’d definitely give it to Kieran. I might be wrong about that. Maybe it was him that reviewed it. Hello everyone, Phil here from the future. I’m just editing the podcast and to be honest, that was playing on my mind the whole time after I said it, that I didn’t think Kieran did review it. So I pulled out the old issue of PC Gamer that I was referring to, November 1999. It’s the one with Rogue Spear on the cover, if anyone remembers it. Lovely silver treatment on it as well. Anyway, I skipped to the review of System Shock 2 and Kieran did review it. Of course, he reviewed it. Of course, he did. A fine review of it, it was as well. So apologies, Kieran, apologies everybody who was throwing their brows and going that sounds wrong, as I was saying that. Please enjoy the next two or three minutes of me insisting that Kieran Gillan did not review System Shock 2. Also, keep an eye out for Jeremy, just not really wanting to commit to the idea and instead steering me very gracefully into a more broad conversation about how review assignments work and how writers are picked for it, and me just not picking up on it and doubling down and going, but why wasn’t Kieran given the System Shock 2 review? Of course he was. Apologies and thank you. Kieran’s Deus Ex review is the earliest one that I talked about. I wonder if he was still getting his feet under the table and his taste established at that time. But then again, I think he reviewed Thief, so that’s 98. It does happen that way at an outlet, doesn’t it? It takes a while for you to feel out your space and for editors to know what it is that you’re best assigned to. Yeah. Well, that’s true of most of us. I feel like Kieran came in with a rock star energy that meant that he didn’t have to do that, and he just immediately got given the reviews that he wanted to write. Once again, we’re going slightly off topic and into the minutiae of PCGamer circa 1999. But Kieran, if you are listening or anybody from the team at that time, please do correct me as to who wrote that review. It was a great review there because it got me super excited about the game. It was, this was still the era where every one to two years, there would be a new best game ever. Yeah. Probably starting with Quake. Previously, the landscape was dominated by Doom, and then Quake came along and it was such a jump forward. So all the games mags got on it, and all the covers were like, this is the Doom killer, say goodbye to sprites, Quake’s here. Then a couple of years after that, it would be like, Quake 2 is here, shit’s all over Quake, throw out your copy of Quake, stamp on it, do a poo on it. Then Unreal turned up and the graphics were a bit better. It was like, all right, send your copy of Quake 2 out to the furthest reaches of Earth. You’ll never need to play it again. And then a year after that, Half-Life comes out and it was just this incredible laddering up of best games ever. And I think the point when System Shock 2 hit, because it wasn’t a thoroughbred shooter, that conversation had just slightly changed. And also we were still in Half-Life’s wake. We were less than a year away from further down the line from Half-Life’s release in like November 98. So it wasn’t quite that sort of buzz. This was more like the thinking person’s, not that Half-Life’s a big dumb shooter, but it’s like, oh, there’s RPG elements to it. It’s a bit more atmospheric, maybe a little bit slower paced. There’s an inventory to manage. So the messaging was very much like this is fantastic, but it’s not necessarily like the new best game ever. It’s not necessarily a cover game even. It’s just this like, if you’re in the know, if you like big beats and cyber monkeys, then this is like, this is the new essential thing to have. Yeah. I think Looking Glass have been running in a sort of strange parallel to the dooms and the quakes of the period, haven’t they? They’d had the first System Shock and Thief, and rather than kind of build these engines, which were purely dedicated to speed, that’s what id Software and John Carmack was all about. They were building these kind of slightly slower worlds that were stuffed with tons of objects that you could pick up and chuck around, basic physics, slower and kind of heavier tone as well. So slightly more of an acquired taste. But for those of us who connected with it, then it kind of became the thing to chase. The tone was definitely an important part of it, wasn’t it? I remember it feeling very grown up to me. So I would have been 13 when this game came out. And so I think that’s probably the perfect age for System Shock 2 because you’re like genuinely impressed by the maturity of the tone in the voice logs and things and a slightly more grown up sci-fi style story. We should also say, obviously this is a sequel to System Shock. I had very little understanding or appreciation of System Shock when the sequel came about because, hey, because I was a 13 year old boy and I’d only just got a PC. So I just wasn’t aware of like the PC’s great song book at that stage. And also in the nineties, it was really, really difficult to play games from even six months ago, right? Like let alone a number of years and like several operating systems ago. So at that point in 99, playing System Shock would have been such an incredible undertaking. Yeah, I already looked about like ancient history. Like it was pre mouse looking and first person controls as we already understood them by the late 90s. It released on the boundary of floppy disks and CDs, which didn’t help either. A bunch of people played System Shock. The first one, text only, like the voices for the audio logs and stuff that only came in several months later with the CD version. So there are all these kinds of things that made it anachronistic already. Yeah, I think the major thing that carried through other than the particular strain of sci-fi and the idea of being sort of lost and surviving on an abandoned space station was the adversarial like tet-a-tet with an AI, right? Like that’s the central idea in both of these games. And just like, I guess a little bit of backstory, like who you are and what you’re doing on here. So you wake up from a cryo tube on a space station called the Von Braun at the beginning of System Shock 2, having completed what I fondly remember as an excellent tutorial. I couldn’t tell you why, but I just remember loving every second of the tutorial. I think you choose your sort of, there are three very basic RPG style classes, aren’t there? And you choose that tutorial level. It is cool. It’s like, it’s all in universe. So you start, you’re joining as kind of Navy or sort of military support for this assume research mission. I think the Rickenbacker is the name of the military ship that kind of docks onto the side of the Von Braun. And that’s how you get there. But yeah, in the training sequence, you kind of, there’s a tiny little kind of human, human earth street that you get to walk across and you get to see some of the kind of the billboards of the future and whatnot. And then you head through different doors to kind of choose your path through your early career as a soldier and kind of potential psionics operative. And you get little sort of text descriptions of what you’ve been up to. And then you finally emerge on to the Von Braun. Those, the names of those ships are just etched into my brain forever as well. I’m not sure why, but the Rickenbacker and the Von Braun. I don’t usually pay attention to sci-fi ship names because there’s like, how many sci-fi ships have you been like abandoned on and fighting for your life on at this point? Like maybe 4,000. But it’s testament to the writing of System Shock 2 that there’s a really strong sense of place to both of those ships. But you wake up on the Von Braun after completing that famously fantastic tutorial in which you walk down a human street and choose one of three classes. And then you’re briefed in a similar way, you know, Bioshock obviously took a lot of this DNA, a similar way to Bioshock when Atlas is sort of filling you in on what’s been going on in this new environment that you’re suddenly part of. You’re immediately getting like voice comes through from Dr. Janice Polito, who’s basically letting you know that you’re in a really bad way. Everything’s gone to absolute heck on the Von Braun. And she’s sort of guiding you towards her so that you can, the two of you can survive this thing. But of course there’s a rogue AI element making things extremely difficult for you. That’s the basic premise, right? And I don’t want to get too far down that path quite yet. You know, Shodan has an interesting role in this one. Like in the first game, she is pure antagonist. This one, I guess she’s more of, you know, the Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Land. She’s kind of off to the side. The main threat that you initially come up against is the many. So these are kind of Shodan’s creepy organic children who, for the first game, who’ve kind of broken free and gone their own way and, you know, infecting the brains of the crew on the ship, creating sort of zombie-like creatures, horrible little mind worms squirreling away on the floor. There are also some monkeys. So there’s an interesting sort of dynamic going on there where nobody’s mistaking Shodan for a force for good, but there’s an uneasy alliance that develops during the game. I think the way that is presented in the game is that it’s almost like a twist that you’re dealing with Shodan, right? But as I recall it at the time, games mags did not care about that at all and had definitely spoiled that element for me long before I got to play the game. I think everybody was just too excited. Yeah, well, apologies. I mean, do let us know if you haven’t played System Shock 2 and you’re listening to this podcast. I’d be fascinated to hear from people who haven’t played it yet, but also apologies for spoiling System Shock 2 for you. I don’t think it’s essential to the enjoyment of the game. To not know that, but yeah, as we’ve touched upon, we’ve sort of spoken a little bit about this game’s lineage, but let’s make it explicit. This is developed by Irrational Games and Looking Glass Studios. So this is the same studio who put together Thief just a year before. Ken Levine was the lead designer on this game. As a 13-year-old boy, I didn’t know who Ken Levine was. I didn’t really understand how developers and publishers worked. I didn’t know to look out for studio names as a marker of quality. I really was just going on PCGamer’s review scores later on. At that stage, you don’t really know what the difference between a developer and a publisher is. You’re like, oh yeah, Activision. I was super into Sierra because of Half-Life. I was like, well, if they can put out something as good as Half-Life, then I’m sure Gabriel Knight 3 is an absolute banger. I mean, nobody knew who Ken Levine was at that stage, did they? Certainly, that’s my interpretation of it. Yeah, this was the game that forged his reputation as an individual name that stands on its own two feet, even adjacent to Irrational Games or Looking Glass. Yeah, he’d started at Looking Glass after some years in the wilderness as a budding screenwriter and this kind of thing. And he’d been on pre-production on Thief and had, you know, after some weird concepts around that time at Looking Glass that he had a hand in like Better Red Than Dead was one of his titles. And at one time Thief was a kind of dark camelot thing. That’s right. Yeah, it was very medieval rather than steampunk, wasn’t it? And, you know, the game like early on was kind of prototyped as a sword fighting game. I think it was supposed to be, you know, that’s the perpetual PC developer’s dream to kind of map a sword to the mouse and make that work. And it never really happened and it didn’t happen with the Looking Glass either. But, you know, that project became Thief and Ken was, you know, the person there at the beginning building that world. But he didn’t stay. He and two other Looking Glass employees, John Chay and Rob Fermier, I believe, who left to start Irrational and immediately got into trouble because the project they had was cancelled and Looking Glass said, look, you know, we’ve got this thief engine. We want to make more use of it. Why don’t you make System Shock 2 with us? And effectively Looking Glass incubated Irrational during their early days. You know, they were working out the same building. The whole sound design of System Shock 2 was made by the, you know, the Looking Glass people who had done it on Thief. A ton of like voices of Looking Glass staff in the game. So it really is like a proper co-development deal, a real sort of passing of the torch before Looking Glass shut down. Not that they knew or intended that they were going to shut down, but that’s how it ended up happening. I like how you left a pause after the names for me to confirm there, and I just didn’t do anything. I believe it was Jonathan Che, wasn’t it, Phil? Sure. I do have a quote from Jonathan Che, which I think not only sums up why this game is brilliant, but also all games in this entire period, right? So retrospectively, talking about the development of System Shock 2, he says, inexperience also bred enthusiasm and commitment that might not have been present with a more jaded set of developers. And retrospectively, I really do get a sense of that. It’s people just throwing in ideas without necessarily worrying too much about whether they can implement them with what we would now think of as AAA polish. It’s just like, wouldn’t this be cool? Let’s see if we can do it. And I will always meet a developer halfway, even now, who wants to do that, even if it’s a little bit janky. And it reminds me a bit of Rare talking about GoldenEye. Not a PC game, but let’s all be adults here. The level design in GoldenEye is super weird, right? Because there’s a bunch of rooms that just do nothing. There’s nothing in them. There’s no objectives. The critical path is like maybe 10% of each level. And when Rare were building these levels out, they were basically mapping them to the movie sets in GoldenEye. That was how they went about it because they hadn’t made a shooter before. Basically, it was only John Romero who knew how to make a cool corridor shooter where things popped out at you and it was like a fun roller coaster ride at that point. So Rare just took this totally different approach and were like, well, we’re making a game about the movie. We’ve got the movie to go on. Let’s build what we can see in the movie, even though there’s a bunch of superfluous areas to it and that’s obviously a treasured game. And the singularity of that approach to level design, I think is, I don’t think is central to the experience, but it’s certainly a fondly remembered aspect of it. And I think that Jonathan Che quote sort of explains that general ethos in the 90s that it was a new frontier and you could just chuck in things without fear of judgment to the same extent that you might experience today. Very much so, and System Shock 2 has its fair share of kind of like, oh, you don’t want to invest in that skill because it’s a mess. You know, broadly people would recommend you don’t use the psionics. But there were also some really smart decisions they made going in. You know, they knew that they had this engine which was made for Thief where you, you know, fire an arrow once every 10 minutes. It wasn’t built for speed. You couldn’t really make a fast shooter in it. And so they knew that they couldn’t compete with, you know, Eardor, Epic on that level, or Valve, I suppose, at that time as well. And so they, that’s why the RPG elements kind of came into system shock at that time. They were going, well, we want this to be really considered slower paced. We want you to be really kind of thinking about how you spend your resources, this really tight resource economy, and have it be more this kind of slow, thoughtful horror experience. I remember Ken Levine talking about, you know, implementing the machine gun in System Shock 2. It was just a ridiculous ordeal because, you know, the Thief engine is brilliant at representing objects properly in a world. That’s what’s amazing about System Shock 2 and Thief is they have, you know, this dense environment and you’re picking over all this stuff. But it did the same thing with weapons, you know, rather than generating one water arrow to fire out of the bow, suddenly you’re asking this engine to, you know, generate 30 bullets and ping them out in quick succession. And it’s just not built for this at all. They had a real job just making that work. So the whole deal was that they knew that they couldn’t make a shooter that would compete with the best of the time. So they were playing to the strengths of the tech they had. Yeah, and absolutely what they did was all built around atmosphere in that same way that FIFA was. I don’t really remember firing a weapon very often at all. If you were in combat, it felt like something had gone wrong or you’d made a mistake. It wasn’t explicit. It’s not a stealth game, you wouldn’t say. I don’t think you could go through it without getting into combat quite regularly. No, it has a lot of the mechanics of FIFA there in terms of stealth. Sound in particular being a really important element. You can hear if you hop down onto a deck and there’s a clang, and then you hear an enemy a couple of rooms over clock the noise and come over to investigate. So that was a big deal. But also, light and dark was a huge element of thief. And the Vaughan Braun is mostly an incredibly well-lit environment. So those elements kind of go out the window. I do feel like stealth becomes, it remains a consideration in System Shock 2, even when you become more powerful because nowhere is ever fully safe. Enemies come back to environments that you’ve already visited. And so when you’re like, well, I just need to get to that chemical room on hydroponics floor, then you don’t really want to shoot a bunch of robots on the way there and lose all your ammo. So you do end up leaning on sneaking. So it’s part of the equation, but it’s no longer kind of the central thing. I think that sense of pace is absolutely central to the experience to me. In a moment, we’ll take a break before we get on to our experiences of replaying the game in the cold light of 2022, and we’ll also be throwing our review wars at each other, in which Jeremy and I produce a little radio play-style version of basically what we would write in our opening paragraph if we were reviewing this for a games mag in situ in 1999. We’ll get on to all of that and make the final judgement on System Shock 2. But before that, I just wanted to throw in that atmosphere is always the big one for me in games, and it’s really hard to talk about because it’s such a nebulous term. What does that really mean? But I think the fact that you’re experiencing the world so slowly in System Shock 2, for the reasons that you’ve just mentioned, like by necessity in the way that the dark engine works, I think that’s why I found the System Shock 2 so atmospheric, because you actually have time to make sense of every room that you’re in and to scan every detail of it, and it was incredibly dense for the time. There were things to pick up. There would be little text logs. There might be a voice log. There was always a dead body in every room, and that dead body would have something interesting that furthered the story. It was a really early example, of what we would call environmental storytelling now, ad nauseam. Even if it wasn’t like a text log, it might be that you would see a dead body that was slumped in a way that looked like they’d shot themselves, and you would find a pistol and some pistol ammo in their inventory. And it would be just telling you a little bit about the backstory of that character, just through what was in its inventory. I think if you were experiencing the game like Quake, and you were sprinting through, Quake tells its story, such as it is, in really broad strokes because you’re experiencing it at a sprint, so you’re going like, oh, it’s medieval, bang. And that’s fantastic. I’m in love with Quake, and I always will be. But what had such an impact on me as an impressionable 13-year-old wasn’t just the big beats and showdown, but it was the fact that, yeah, I was walking, creeping along, and maybe that’s why I remember the names of these space stations, because I remember them room by room, because the way it forced you to play, you were creeping along, and that gave you the time to really let the music do its thing with the lighting and to really consider what the NPCs that you’re stepping over had just been through before you got there. And I think when I’m thinking about atmosphere, I think that’s probably what I mean in this game. I don’t know what your thoughts on that, Jeremy. Probably smarter than these. You just reminded me of one dead body in System Shock 2, which is still kind of smoking when you get there. Like, there’s an audio log nearby and this guy’s clearly been shot over a kind of dispute around the vending machine. And the fact the body’s still kind of, like this guy’s chest is still kind of steaming suggests that this has just happened and that, you know, the disaster of what’s gone on on the Vaughan brawl is very, very recent history. You know, like, it’s a game where you’re kind of, you’re late to the party and you’re getting to know these characters through these audio logs, but it’s all happened right there for you. And, you know, you get to know certain personalities through these audio logs and then eventually, you know, find a body with the kind of final entry and realize, oh, this is the person that I’ve been listening to this whole time and this is the end of the little story within the game. And, you know, that’s a powerful thing, something that we’ve maybe kind of come to take for granted a little now. You get this kind of thing in Fallout, for instance, an awful lot now. But I think, you know, System Shock was the first time that this was done effectively. And it came from, you know, originally Looking Glass kind of playing to their strengths where they kind of came to realize that one of the failings of the Ultima Underworld games was that you talk to these NPCs, but then when you try to apply this, you know, physics environment that they created to those characters, you know, you throw a fish at someone and they don’t react, and it kind of exposes all the limitations of this simulation they carefully built. And so, you know, this smart decision to kind of strip out all of the living NPCs so that you’ve got that incredible simulation. And you still have characters who go on journeys. They’re just, they’re already dead. So you don’t, there’s no way for you to kind of break that fiction for yourself. That’s a really powerful and smart thing that really contributes to that atmosphere. Definitely. I also found it really stressful at the time because being 13 and like, this was probably about eight or nine months into my journey into PC gaming. I wasn’t really sure what was possible in games. I didn’t have an eye for like, oh, I’m in a game engine right now. And like, these are the things I can interact on. You know, after a while, it doesn’t take very long really. You get to know like which doors to press E on because you can just see that they’re the ones that will open. Like I was so far behind that, that when I walked into a room and it looked like an NPC had just died, even though obviously that’s done for effect, it would stress me out because it’s like, oh God, do I need to like reload the game? Is there a way that I could have got there and saved this person? And I remember feeling the same way in Half-Life when all the Barneys are getting killed for comedic effect in the first few chapters. That would really stress me out. And I’d be like, oh, I could have saved him. There must have been a way that I could have stopped that elevator from plummeting down. And I could have saved those Barneys, and they could have been my friends, because I just didn’t know how games worked yet. And I didn’t realize that these were scripted events. I thought maybe the boundaries are just way, way beyond what they actually are in actuality. And in System Shock 2, I felt very personally responsible for many cadavers that I found. And I still hold you personally responsible for them as well. Well, thanks, mate. But yeah, obviously, that’s, as you say, kind of an experience as a player, but I do think that’s a characteristic of a few of the games we’re going to talk about in this series. You know, when the genres were less defined, you weren’t entirely sure what the boundaries were. And you were surprised sometimes by the things that could happen. And that’s quite a kind of special and electric kind of environment that went into as a player for sure. So that’s a good place, I think, to stretch our legs once more, listen to a bit more big beats. And then we’ll get into our review wars, our opening salvos from the PC Gamer reviews that we never got to write because we were tiny children. And then we’ll get a bit more into our thoughts on playing System Shock 2 in the modern era. Shall we have a break and reconvene once again, Jeremy? Nice. Let’s do it. So Jeremy, we’ve had a little break. Look, cards on the table, everybody. That little break has been several days. But in that several days, we’ve been playing lots of System Shock 2, and we’ve also, some might say even more importantly, made our debut review wars soundscape thingies. Yeah. So these are, what are they? We’re imagining that we’ve each been assigned the review for System Shock 2 in situ, as it were. Is that the right term? Exactly. It’s a bit of an arch concept, this, but it’s like, yeah, I would have loved to have been around in games journalism in this. Yeah, exactly. I would have loved to have been around at the time. I wasn’t. That can never happen. I will always, I will remain 12. Time works that way. There will never be a 1999 when I’m not 12. So this is as good as we’ve got. We’re imagining that we’ve been given this review. It’s the lead review in this issue of PC Gamer or PC Zone or Edge or pick your games mag of choice from the era. And so we’re writing our opening paragraph. Yeah, to get listeners into the mindset of a games journalist in this situation, if you get assigned a review of a game that you think is important or you’re excited about, it feels like a great honor, you’re probably overthinking it from the moment of assignment. Absolutely. And what comes from that is overly ambitious intro writing, because your intro is the main book, is where you stick all the best pros, all the high-concept stuff. I mean, we’re both maybe a little too experienced to do a lot of this stuff in our actual article writing these days, because we know it’s going to be stripped out by any sensible editor. But here, we’re going to be as indulgent as the very best game journalists were at the turn of the millennium. I think it was a more indulgent time, wasn’t it? You could genuinely get away with the most extraneous childhood anecdote to tee up a review of System Shock 2. And I think in some ways it’s a shame that attitudes have hardened towards that approach to writing, which perhaps doesn’t hold the reader’s time in the greatest respect. How we’re expressing these, we should say as well. This being an audio media when we’re talking about writing reviews is that we’ve done them as a bit of a like a radio play meets a song. We’ve just thrown a bit of sound design at them so that they hit the ear in an interesting way. But these are fundamentally reviews. Yeah. I wouldn’t say mine is a song exactly. It’s more a sort of monologue, docudrama. I don’t know. I think only Radiohead would describe mine as a song, to be honest. Nobody else. But I know you and you fiddle with production in your spare time. You noodle around on guitars and songs do emerge from you from time to time. They call me Noodles. Yeah. A lot of people call me Noodles. I was in a band that formed in Southern California in the 80s in the punk scene. Played guitar for them for many decades where I went by the name Noodles. And then I decided that actually the real money was to be made writing about Dragon Age origin. So I left the offspring and I’ve done this instead. Who wants to go first? I don’t want to be upstaged. I want you to listen to mine first so that listeners are whelmed rather than underwhelmed. Okay. Let’s go with that. Is there anything you would like us all to know about this before we listen? I started it, I had a breakdown, bon appétit, it took me all afternoon. There’s something about fiddling around in audacity, fading things in and out, recording bits of game audio, I got really into it, you know, I’ll get better. That’s what I’ll leave listeners with as a thought, I’ll get better. And without further ado, Jeremy’s review wars. In the offices of Luck and Glass, there were a couple of interpretations of what the robots were saying in System Shock. It’s deliberate gobbledygook, an approximation of human speech that’s meant to fall disturbingly short. If you hear any specific words in there, then it’s a kind of Rorschach test, a reflection of your in a psyche, rather than true meaning. Still, one interpretation that floated around the studio was, your memos are never good. Once you hear it, that’s all you can hear. I like to think that Ken Levine heard the same when he first played System Shock in 95. That when he was given the chance to write the sequel, he came to it with a determination to write good memos, audio logs. Great, I’ve got to change the access codes out of Cryo A again. Like I’ve got nothing better to do. The Von Braun is a dead vessel, but it has ghosts and they speak, the recorded messages littered across the ship. I think Grassi just likes to make work for me. I’ll set the new code to 45100. That should be easy enough to remember. Some hold their last breaths. When Dr. James Watts pressed recall on his autopsy report, you never imagined the squelch his splattered innards would make just seconds later. The time is 1630. Autopsy subject A Watson. Others are unlikely love stories, snippets of a doomed romance, playing out on opposite sides of a sinking Titanic. Don’t stop, Rebecca, keep moving. Get to the escape pods on the command deck. We’ll take off, set the toaster to wake us up in 30 years, and we’ll be back on Earth before you know. A toaster built for two, baby. That’s our next stop. Then there are the conflicts, the power struggle between the dictator, shodan and a hive mind called the many. A philosophical fight between the individual and the team. Fascism and communism. Either you disband that military army, or yours or some real military is going to come down there and walk all over your reddit cups. System Shock 2 is almost empty of NPCs. Irrational Games couldn’t fill it if they wanted to. The Von Braun is populated nonetheless, haunted by the stories of the people who lived there and whose bodies are still warm. An archaeological site just waiting for you to pick up your shovel and dig in. Good job, Ken. Your memos are really, really good. Right. Well, what’s happened there, Jeremy, is that you seem to have gone off and made an entire episode of This American Life produced to quite a professional standard. I’m sorry about that. That’s fine. Well, I feel absolutely fine about doing mine in a minute then. I think the magazine that you’ve written the review entry for there is Edge. That’s the vibe I’m getting. Yeah, probably. Yeah. I mean, in reality, I’d probably cut down. I wouldn’t use all of the… I don’t know, as soon as it becomes an audio medium, I want to use all the sounds and stuff. And I’ve already slightly broken the concept, haven’t I, really? Because you wouldn’t write it quite in the same way without those samples. But I think it’d be pretty close to something like that. I’m just imagining the samples being in italicized writing, and then it works absolutely fine. I’ll take that to Tony Malt tomorrow. I mean, you’d still lop out the first paragraph, but that’s the editor’s mandate, isn’t it? Okay. Well, that was Jeremy’s episode of Review Wars. What should I say about mine before we… I’d say it probably slightly got away from me. What I was trying to convey was something of the tribalism around shooters at the time, and this new best game ever that came out every year. That was very much part of the culture, and it would be referenced whenever a new big game came along. I wanted to do something that sounded cool, and what else? I think that’s all there is to say about it, really. I can’t big it up any more than that. I’m excited about the words, and I’m especially excited about the sounds, is what I’ll say. I’d be much less excited about the words if I were you. Okay, here we go. This is my contribution to the review wars. Look at yourself, chasing after the next big shooter, driven by pure animal instinct for bloodshed and circle-strengthing. You can’t even comprehend a piece of software like this. It’s not in your nature to stop and consider what you’re doing, to set a trap for the cybermonkey who’s been pursuing you through the operations deck, using the incendiary grenade you got in the storage room that you hacked into. To unlock your mind, harness its full potential using psionics and a weird ball connected to your wrist, you’re probably too busy sprinting towards the next enemy, hungry to unload more ammo. What are you running from? An environment as immersive as this has wasted on you. You, my child, are conditioned not to notice all the details around you. It’s in your DNA. Quake fandom. It eats away at the genetic code of everybody exposed to it. These people don’t know the meaning of the word immersive. Shall we educate them? That is everything I hoped it would be. And if I’m honest, expected, not to put too much pressure on you, but I’ve heard you do this kind of thing before and it’s great. I think from the moment the listeners voted for System Shock 2 for this episode, it was a foregone conclusion that you would do showdown voice at some point. Yeah. It’s low hanging fruit, isn’t it? I’ve been looking forward to it. At the very beginning, I genuinely didn’t know it was you. I thought it was an actual clip from the game for a few seconds. Then you heard the actual content. I thought, why would Ken Levine write this? This is a strange non-secretary for a showdown. You’ve tapped into something there. Like in the 90s, when levels were made by one designer, typically, there was a really sort of antagonistic relationship between player and developer. Not in terms of shouting at them on the Internet, but in terms of you were aware that someone had devised a load of traps for you specifically, and you felt their eyes on you in a way. Showdown is just like the perfect embodiment of that. You’ve totally married those two things, which were definitely connected in my mind. So that makes an awful lot of sense to me. Sorry, go on. I think you’ve made that sound a lot nicer and cleverer there. I think really what I was thinking is like, I think the best way to get somebody to play System Shock 2 at that time would be to antagonize them slightly and be like, are you smart enough for this game that’s like a bit of an RPG as well? And I do remember that being sort of the tone at the time as well. You’re nagging 90s teenagers. Yeah, that’s just what I know. I was listening to an interview with I think it was Greg Lepicolo, who did all the showdown post-production for the original System Shock and he worked on the second one as well. And he talked about it just being a much bigger undertaking than he’d initially understood. Like all the manual sort of like cutting and elongating and I can only imagine you’ve been through a sort of microcosmic version of that yourself and put this together. I think it’s probably a lot easier to do it in 2022 than circa 1994. If anyone is interested, I’ve used Autotune to pitch up my voice and then I’ve duplicated that voice and then I’ve pitched the other one down a little bit. I’ve put a beat repeat delay on one of the tracks so you get those glitchy bits and then a phaser and then a bit of ambient sound from the game. We switched to a totally different 90s magazine there, didn’t we? Welcome to the Mixmag monthly podcast. Well anyway, look, that’s that. I consider that a humiliating defeat, but let us know what you think. Maybe Samuel and Matthew will formalise this into a vote, like a poll that you can actually vote on and categorically decide. Get resentful about over time. I already feel a little bit resentful, mate. You were like, oh, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just going to do this rubbish thing. All I did was make it twice as long as yours by accident. You added so much content that was like about the game. I felt like I learned stuff about the game. There was insight in it and all that. I feel betrayed. Whereas I was just like, it doesn’t show down sound like this. That was my point. Yeah, but she does. She does. Isn’t it though? Anyway, that was Review Wars. Jeremy, let’s move on. While the acid is still fresh and hot on my skin from that defeat, that I’ve perceived before, obviously, there’s even been a vote. Maybe it’d be a worm-carried toxin, just for, you know, for Matty’s sake. I like how you folded it back in. And speaking of, we have both revisited this game very recently. Let’s dig into how it stacks up in 2022 versus our original memory. So, you didn’t play this until a few years afterwards. How did it hit you now? And how did that change those original memories? It still really stands up, doesn’t it? I think I played Bioshock first, weirdly, and I always expected from the way people talked about it that System Shock 2 would be… It is a more hardcore game, but there’s so much of what Bioshock is already in there. We both mentioned in chat, didn’t we, the replicator machines, the devices you respawn in after death. I always assumed that that was something in Bioshock that was like a sort of concession to new fans. This will make this more approachable, but no, it’s something that’s in there because it was in System Shock 2. Absolutely, yeah, it feels like an arcade-y touch, but obviously I would have been through that replicator many, many times the first time I played System Shock 2 without ever thinking, this is a bit arcade-y, you’re making this about accessible. It never feels like it’s throwing you a bone this game, and yet that mechanic is absolutely carried over from from System Shock 2 to Bioshock, and in that situ it hits different. I think, yeah, at first it struck me as like, oh, it’s sort of arcade-y, but now I’ve played an awful lot of System Shock 2. It feels like one of many touches designed to fold everything into the fiction of the world, including dying, which is traditionally, you know, the one moment in games where you just completely pulled out of it. And the thing it has over Bioshock, and especially the later Bioshocks, is an incredible kind of permanence, I guess. Like, you, there’s a linear story progression to System Shock 2. You know, it’s a Ken Levine story. It’s, you know, his first as an author type figure. You know, the, he was lead writer, wrote nearly all of the dialogue. And it is that audio log told story where you’ve got dozens and dozens of pieces, fragments of kind of memos and conversations. And together, they tell you the story of the place. But as you kind of ascend up the Von Braun from bottom to top, you, it’s not like, it’s not just a set of levels that you go through once. It’s not a roller coaster ride. You have to backtrack quite a lot. You have to hop between different decks. There’s always a reason, you know, you’ll find a code that takes you back to, you know, like a sort of weapons cache, two floors below, or, you know, the chemical stock rooms, they’re an amazing thing, aren’t they? These full rooms, which they’re all differently shaped as well. One looks kind of like a broom cupboard. One’s like an old library where you like, you go up like a ladder to look individually at all these different tubs, which have like chemical element symbols on them. And you’re looking for the right ones to use in your research. You find like chunks of alien or what have you, or a weird sort of viral weapon or something of that nature. And before you can use it, you need to research it. So you’re pulling these chemicals from the shelves and you’re applying them to this equipment and then you get to use it. But there are way too many chemicals to carry around at once because you only got this tight little inventory. So and all the stock rooms have slightly different catalogs of chemicals. This is so ridiculously involved, isn’t it? But they require you to hop back and forth between decks as you’re like, oh, well, there’s no iridium on recreation decks. I’ve got to go back to MedSci. And so there’s all these little elements that kind of take you back and forth between different parts of the ship. And in the process, it becomes a place. It’s not just a series of levels, which is really unusual for that point in time in games. I think that’s the thing that stuck out the most for me on replaying it as well. And in 1999, what left an impression on me were all the voice notes and the way it was telling its story. The ghosts, I thought that was cool. And you know, I had this sense that the story was playing out in a slightly different way than I’d experienced before, that I was stumbling upon something that had just happened. And in the absence of actual people around, I was piecing something together through audio logs or from those information kiosks, or just from the scenes or from whatever was splattered in blood, like written in blood on a particular wall or whatever. That I barely paid attention to this time, I guess because it was so influential that every game in its wake for the last two decades has borrowed that from it. And I actually remember the writing being a bit better than it is. I think games like Soma have taken that and run with it so far that like when you go back to System Shock 2, you’re like, okay, cool. Like it’s somebody telling you that the key code is 0451. But yeah, the level design is like absolutely labyrinthine. And it does this exact thing that Bioshock does as well, where you enter a new zone, a new deck or whatever, and you have to get through this big grand door. It’s always a massive door that like the level designers is funneling you towards. And whoever’s in your ear, in this case, it’s your mate who’s guiding you through the ship, Bolito. They’re telling you like, oh, you need to go through this door. However, something’s wrong and I can’t hack through the mainframe or whatever. You need to flush the tubes or sponge the chip or something to do with the workings of the ship. Yes. And what that means is that you’re going to have to visit every other room on this deck and only then, like four hours later, will this door open. And by the time that door opens, you come back to it and it’s like revisiting a childhood home. You’re like, oh my God, I’ve been doing all of this so that I could open this door. And I remember that was such a trope in Bioshock as well. That happens like five times and it was definitely born here. People who’ve played the original System Shock, maybe that was actually born in System Shock 1’s level design. I’m not to know. I was a tiny little idiot boy at the time, so I didn’t play it. But yeah, that level design, I think that really adds to it being a place. The fact that you’re revisiting things, you’re starting to develop roots between areas. It’s like you’re living in this environment and so you develop in a relationship with it. And I remember, I don’t know whether I managed to do it or not, but the last time that I replayed this was in 2012, 10 years ago now. And I got so fucked off with the chemical thing and having to go back to like, you know, it’s almost like doing the identify spell. That’s basically what you’re doing, isn’t it? In an RPG. Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. You can’t take the identify spell with you, so you have to visit the identify spell room. So I was like, fuck this, I’m going to put everything in my inventory that I can fit and I’m just going to carry it over to the other. I’m going to consolidate all the like chemical rooms and have one mono room that has all of the chemicals in them. So whenever I need to identify something and I don’t know whether I managed it or not, I don’t know whether there’s something that stops you other than the inherent like ball ache of having to traverse that many times and like leaving other things out of your inventory. I like that. That’s a very like immersive thing, isn’t it? It’s the same as like people in the first level of Thief in Lord Bafford’s Manor would pile up all of the servants and guards in one big pile in front of the higher place or something like that. Stack all the crates in the level and it’s nonsense but it’s great because it’s like it’s your nonsense and it’s enabled by everything in this world being convincingly physical like that’s what this game inherits from Thief and using its engine is it’s got you want to explore every room because they’re covered in you know you’re desperate for resources it’s a very tight resource economy in this game so you’re looking for your ammo and your hypos and all of this stuff but also there’s you know magazines dotted over and just all the detritus of living areas and you go into you know there’s a bar with a piano there’s all these kind of research rooms there’s a brothel on the top floor a sort of digital brothel of some kind there’s there’s a mall you know and the sort of half domesticity of it is what’s so exciting I think is it makes you believe that there’s you know there’s a there’s a toilet en suite to this to this bunk bed room and that makes sense because I think it makes sense, because the crew lived here. It’s not just a level designed to be fun to swing a shotgun around. It’s a place. Yeah, I think that’s testament to, that’s one of Ken Levine’s sort of fingerprints, right? It’s not just the double cross that he’s famous for. It’s the, he’s really thought about the space and everything in it and developed this canon. Like the replicator is sort of semi-plausible in this universe. And the UI is even sort of an extension of the canon. Like the, I think the UI is sort of designed to look like, you’re like a cybernetic enhanced person and this is how you see the world. Yeah. Showdown does this to you. It’s explained in the fiction. She gets, you know, one of the kind of bots around the place to cybernetic enhance you for her own purposes. So it’s all, and, you know, one of the things that System Shock 2 inherits from Looking Glass is, you know, when they designed System Shock around the annoyances they’d had making RPGs where they’re like, well, we’ve made these Ultima Underworld games and they have these cool physics systems and, you know, it feels like you have real kind of agency in this world and the place it breaks down is when you have a conversation with someone and you have, you know, three choices of what to say or what have you, that doesn’t feel real. And so they built this world where everything is explained by the fiction and nothing can be broken because everybody’s dead. Yeah, there’s nobody to show them up. Yeah, it doesn’t, the game is designed to be mostly invisible apart from the, I guess the sort of RPG systems where you’re upgrading your stats and whatnot. But even, you know, the characters in the game talk about that. They give you stuff and these cybernetic chips and they say, go knock yourself out, upgrade yourself. Yeah, they explain why there are 150 monkeys aboard a space station and why those monkeys are weaponized. And they explain why there are, you know, why the key code has just changed behind the door and all these things where you probably wouldn’t be marking the game down in your head if these things weren’t explained. Yeah, by the way, the monkeys came out of a recording session where Ken Levine had a bit of extra time. So he just asked one of the actors to, I think it must have been a mo-cap session to prance around like a monkey. And they built a whole chunk of fiction around that. Yep. I feel like that’s such a central part of the game to me. That would be the second thing I would think of. I think like showdown monkeys. Yeah, they really did it on a whim. Sticking the memory, terrifying. Wow. But yeah, I see that as a real Levine thing. He’s somebody who sits there and goes, well, in order for this ship to actually function, then yeah, you would need an entertainment center. You might need a brothel. Where would they be positioned? He really just thinks about this on a really microscopic level so that you don’t have to. We’ve used the word immersive SIM, and that’s a double-barreled equation, right? It has to be immersive. It can’t just be this really interactive sandbox for experimentation. Narratively, it’s actually got to immerse you in it for you to care enough to start experimenting. I think certainly that’s where Irrational flexes its muscles in the sub-genre, and that’s where System Shock 2 lives long in the memory in terms of sheer immersion. But how would you rate it as an immersive SIM in the broader sense? That I’ve just described, somewhere where you can experiment, you can play with the systems, you’ve got real agency to go about one quite vague objective in any number of ways and you can play around and be you. So Deus Ex is at the top right in terms of agency, or agency, different ways to approach a situation that is the model and Thief, weirdly, although brilliant and a great example of the genre, doesn’t actually, it’s quite restrictive, and it’s pushing you to play a certain way. One of the first stealth games as we know them now. And so it doesn’t really, the last time I returned to Thief 1, I’d come right off the back of Deus Ex, and I found it quite frustrating that there wasn’t really more room to be someone else. But that was never the intention of that game. You know, you are a master thief, and you’re not very good at sword fighting. That’s the deal. So System Shock 2, I think, sits at the higher end of that spectrum. You know, it has the stealth systems of thief are in here somewhere. It’s harder to use them, I’ll be honest. But you can sort of stand very still as a monkey passes you and half get away with it, you know, at least for a little while. But because of all these kind of RPG systems that Irrational layered into it, it becomes a very, you think very overtly about your approach to things. You have to invest in a certain path. Like I invested in Psyonix despite being told by everyone who’s played System Shock 2 that you shouldn’t do that. And I liked the idea of sort of throwing things around with my mind. That doesn’t really, that’s not really how it works in this. A little disappointing, like the best thing in terms of Psyonix fantasy is the pull. You know, you can pull an object from across a room towards you and it’ll float through the air and you can bounce off the wall maybe and you can catch it. But there’s no equivalent, you know, sort of push or anything like that. And it’s more a kind of spell casting system. You know, it’s more of a sort of, there’s a load of buffs. And I ended up kind of leaning into your pistols and your shotguns and assault rifles and stuff. But you leaning on the psionics for kind of buffs and things like there’s a whole, you know, weapon repair system in this game that’s really important, right? I completely circumvented that with the anti entropy psionic spell. And so before I fired a gun at any point, so long as I wasn’t too panicked, I cast that thing and the gun didn’t deteriorate. So you end up with this kind of these very particular sort of synergies of abilities and stuff. And I invested a lot in hacking as well. So you can hack the turrets, which is, you know, a cliche of these kind of games at this point. But that’s a really powerful tool in this game, because you know, you’re working way through tight corridors, and if you come up against a room with two rocket turrets at the opposite end, that’s a real problem that you have to think your way around or through. And that was my solution for that. Hacking turrets is borderline ascension, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah, it’s the biggest enemy in the game. I think we sort of touched on this one, Murichan, on WhatsApp about it, that the two worst things that can happen to you, like the most life threatening situations are an alarm going off or meeting a turret. If you’ve got both in close proximity, then it’s basically game over and you’re never really well equipped enough to deal with that happening. And there again, narratively, that’s really consistent with the idea that you’re actually battling the ship and its systems. The things on it are just a bit of a byproduct of the ship’s malevolence and obviously Shodan’s malevolence. So, it makes sense that the ship turning on you via an alarm and setting off this secondary enemy, it makes a lot of narrative sense. I think I found I was a little bit disappointed by its immersive system, immersive sim sandbox cred this time, if that makes sense. When I last played this through in 2012, I went the psionics route as well. And I think I sort of fondly remembered like setting a few more traps and being a bit more playful, erroneously. I think I might have just been like confusing those with ideas of from memories of Deus Ex and like probably Bioshock and Dishonored and all sorts, whatever else, maybe even Thief. Whereas actually like I replayed Deus Ex this summer and my goodness, yeah, it is still absolutely extraordinary for the things that you can dream up and the sort of like Rube Goldberg machines you can construct, just like flipping a domino on one side of a room and setting in motion this like incredible sequence of events that ends up with a guard, like one guard that you could very easily just shot in the head, you know, a guard is now on fire and like screaming and a camera has gone off and he’s like set his mate on fire. Not sure if that happened, but you know what I mean, whereas in System Shock 2, there were incendiary grenades, there’s not much in terms of like traps and sequences of events, which is quite a specific way to look at immersive sims granted, but maybe it’s just me being dumb right, that I didn’t find I was like really pleased with how I’d solved something. It was either that I’d hit it with the wrench, by the way, like probably one of the more iconic melee weapons of 90s PC gaming, or I’d hacked it, or like later on in the game, I had enough shotgun shells and I’d shot it. And that was that. And really where the agency came in, there’s like maybe a bit of route setting, like finding some sneaky pathways around things, like hacking into like storage rooms to get a bit more resources, that felt a little bit optional. You know, you’re going off the critical path and tooling up and returning to somewhere like perhaps a little bit overpowered, but maybe through lack of imagination or maybe just because of where the systems are and you know, it’s the dark engine and there’s a lot of thief DNA in this, like the animations, I think some of the sounds as well are pretty much carried over, like from Thief. And yeah, that was a stealth game that wasn’t supposed to be like approach this however you like, go in with fucking two swords and you know, dual wield your way through Lord Bafford’s Manor. I think it was probably a little bit hamstrung on a technical level and I felt slightly restricted in that sense. Yeah, no, I do think, oh, by the way, I love the sort of the slow weapon swing that’s inherited from Thief. It feels so desperate and panicky. Oh, God, but yeah, do you know what I think it is as well is the difficulty and like if you play, you know, sometimes you hear about people playing Dishonored for the first time and they’re not really kind of familiar with that kind of game and they go, well, I just breeze through it. I don’t really get it. Like if you, you know, tackle those games head on, you can probably shoot your way through pretty easily. But, you know, the best thing to do to get the most out of them is to be playful about it and try things. And what gives you the room to try things and succeed, to be inefficient basically is a bit of lenience in the, you know, just how tough these encounters are. Whereas in System Shock 2, you really are up against it a lot of the time. And I did feel like a lot of satisfaction from choices I’ve made in this game, but they were choices about those kind of combos of abilities that I was proud of coming up with because they would, you know, let me save my ammo or keep a weapon that might otherwise have broken. And those things, once you’ve kind of locked into them, you do those things the same way because that’s your way of overcoming something. I think generally in this game, if you try to kind of like muck about too much with getting rid of a turret, then you’re going to be dead, aren’t you? Yeah, I think you’ve hit on something really like really distinctive about System Shock 2 in the immersive sim space is that actually like it’s a survival game, not in the modern sense, where you’re like, you know, managing a hunger and thirst meter, but you really are made to feel that you’re just scraping by at every point and like it’s a horror game as well, right? Like, that’s the atmosphere. It’s not it’s not sheer sci-fi. Like it’s the fact that you’re in the future and you’re on a spaceship is sort of incidental. Really it’s a it’s a horror game. It’s an adversarial like tete-a-tete with a like a really novel and articulate horror antagonist. So you can’t ever really feel as soon as you do have that sort of that same tool set that artists easel that Dishonored gives you, you’re not scared anymore. I was never really scared or felt overwhelmed in Dishonored and the same sort of true in Deus Ex. It’s a really difficult game, but you always feel like you’re basically in control of the situation. And if you do hit some wall of difficulty, it’s because you’re over stretching yourself with your ambition, you’re trying to be a bit too cute about meeting the objective. Whereas here, you’re always just scraping by, your health is never full. Like you go back to the med bays and you heal yourself. And then 20 seconds later, you’re on seven health again and you’re just like, that’s informing your decisions. Like, well, I simply can’t go down this corridor because there’s a turret there and I know it’s going to at least clip me. And all I’ve got is like a clips worth of turret in me. So that’s that’s part of the permanence, isn’t it? And the mapping of the ship that you do in your head is when you get one of those, you come to one of those surgical machines that heal you fully and you have to activate them, don’t you? You have to put in a particular chip. So you kind of select the ones you’re going to use and then you go, right, I’m going to remember where this is because I’m going to be needing to come back to it. Because if you don’t, you’ll be using up all your medical hypos and you can’t afford to buy a load more because they all come from the same nonite currency that everything in the game relies on, you know, from squeezing out of vending machines. There were points in the game where I had loads of nonites because I was hacking all these containers and I thought, oh, this is great. And I took it for granted. And then I would end up in fairly dire situations with no anti-armor, ammo or any of this stuff and struggling, genuinely struggling. And like you say, it really is a survival horror game. Yeah. Shinji Mikami, fingerprint all over this. Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s our current experiences with it. Shall we stretch our legs once more, listen to a little bit more of the soundtrack and then decide whether this game passes through 90s games core and does indeed deserve enduring status as a classic. Let’s do it. Okay, Jeremy, well, we’re back again. And in this final little chapter, I think it’s time to reassess the game and to contrast our memories of it and the collective memory of it with the reality of playing it right now. And ultimately, we’re deciding whether this game deserves its place in the pantheon or whether it’s sentenced to irrelevance or something in the game’s court to stretch the metaphor to its elastic limit. So I mean, first of all, how well-regarded do you think this game is? In my head, it’s like probably like almost up there with Deus Ex, but some of that is probably fondness and nostalgia. I think it is very well-regarded, yeah. I think it’s, you know, if you, we talk about Looking Glass and the immersive sims of the 90s, how many of those are people actually going back to play? I think it’s the ones in the latter half of the 90s really skirting up to the millennium. It’s the first two Thief Games, it’s Deus Ex and it’s System Shock 2. So it really is one of the kind of like biblical texts of this genre. That’s my sense as well. And it’s also one of my personal favorites just because it hit me at such an impressionable age. And this era in general was just so exciting. And I think it’s also like in 1999, we were all absolutely obsessed with the future, right? Like everything had the suffix 2000 and like every album cover had the slightly metallic sheen to it. And we were just all like wrapped up in this like very 1999 breed of futurism. And I think that really bleeds through in System Shock 2. That really embodies the very specific and now anachronistic vision of the future that we had at that time. And that really heightens the experience. So I think my take on it, I would be very much acting in the defense for System Shock 2. Although I was a little bit disappointed that it didn’t give me quite the systemic depth that I remembered, I was struck by so many influences throughout the last couple of decades. Certainly Bioshock as we’ve touched on as well, Soma, Prey, the 2017 Prey almost feels like a like for like remake. Even things like the item fabricators in Prey, I’d forgotten that they were from System Shock 2. And like audio logs have been in literally every game since. Like I’m pretty sure they’re in FIFA this year. Like it’s such a pillar that I think it absolutely deserves its status. I don’t think it’s underrated. I think it’s probably about correct, right? And it was also genuinely enjoyable to play right now without too much faff. I mean, well, but perhaps you can talk a bit more about that because I played it on an actual old beige PC. But my understanding is it’s still pretty easy to play on modern systems. Yeah, probably less tweaking than I had to do with Deus Ex when I must play that a couple of years ago. I think it was ready to go from Steam and works well in widescreen. There’s nothing about it that feels… You go back to the original System Shock, this is why it’s being remade. It feels incredibly anachronistic and this doesn’t in the same way. There’s no mouse look, right? Mouse look was like a mod after the fact. So that’s pretty hardcore. I feel like in my head now, going back to it, this game is… The Bioshock games aren’t just spiritual successes. I just think of them as the same series now, because those games, they’re set in fundamentally different worlds, but they share the themes and they share the distinctive authorial touch of Ken Levine, not to underestimate the contribution of everyone else on the team. John Chay was project director on System Shock 2, not Ken Levine. But that sort of ideological struggle that I referenced in the review was Ken Levine being a skeptic at heart, isn’t he? He’s an individualist and System Shock 2 is really his getting to grips with the idea of the many as a, you know, collectivist thing. He’s trying to figure out, okay, what’s good about being on a team? What’s good about being in an organization or a church? And, you know, when he designed Thief’s World, the church was sort of the enemy, the Humorites. And here he creates this really sort of interesting contradiction with the many in that they look and sound disgusting, they’re horrible, you know, they’re like these moaning former humans and this sort of horrible biological mask coat and everything. And Showdown shares my disgust, she talks about how disgusting that is. But there are many, they’re having a fucking great time, like they’re loving it. They get shit done. They get shit done. And when you hear them speak about it, their togetherness and they talk about, you know, sometimes when they hear you, they say, oh, you are not of our song. In their collective consciousness, they’re all singing together in this beautiful choir. Sounds all right, doesn’t it? Yeah. Sometimes they ask you, are we one now? Yeah. It sounds like being one wouldn’t be that bad, actually, like, they sound pretty chill about it in that moment, you know, well, yeah, when you’re under such kind of pressure constantly in this game, it doesn’t let up. And the idea of succumbing to the many at some points sounds quite nice. But yeah, that’s a very Levine thing to kind of give these ideologies a fair shake and then kind of come down on what he thinks, you know, what the problems are with this. And that’s exactly what he did with Bioshock, with, you know, this kind of free market stuff and in Infinite with a kind of sort of biblical hierarchy and authority. So it’s very much of a kind with the Bioshock games in that way. And in how they play to a degree, especially with the first one, the first Bioshock. I do actually, I think there are some really strong mechanical additions in Bioshock that do change things. And they bring about some of that kind of surprise and ability to set up traps and that sort of thing that you’re talking about being missing in System Shock 2. You know, for having the big daddies roaming around, that’s just an extra layer. Like you have those situations where you’re like, right, there’s these turrets I need to get past. And there are these splicers. But there’s also a big daddy who may or may not be in that area once things kick off. So you can have them show up and, you know, turn the tide of a fight against you, or they might end up kicking off at the splicers, or you can plot to, you know, set up kind of tripwires and hack turrets and this kind of thing at a particular point in a big daddy’s kind of patrol area and take advantage of that. Like that is missing from System Shock 2. So I guess there’s a kind of… Yeah, in a way, you know, Bioshock is often spoken of as like, oh, it’s sort of a narrative upgrade but a mechanical downgrade from System Shock 2, right? But I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that. Like there are some really smart ideas that came through later. The plasmids and the big daddies definitely give you more in the way of starting those chain reactions that I was talking about earlier on. And actually, I hadn’t really thought about the direct relationship before. But as I’ve mentioned previously, the holding a weird ball that’s like, you know, that you’re just out stretching your hand as if presenting this ball towards your enemies. Like that begins in System Shock 2 with your little psionic ball thing. And like that’s plasmids as well, right? Like that’s plasmids are just like a fleshing out of that system that they wanted to implement with the Psy-Up stuff in System Shock 2. And it’s just all about watching a big fleshy sort of, it’s like Michelangelo’s hand. Hands in Irrational’s games are always dead muscly, aren’t they? And like statuesque, you never see a slender hand. Falling apart ever since that Bioshock trailer with the bees. Was it bees? There were bees, yeah. Coming out of the race. Very good. Well, so I take it then that you’re also falling under the, for the defense of System Shock 2 in 90s games court. Yeah, it feels of a piece with the later sort of noughties games, I love, that came from it. It doesn’t feel like we’re just studying an academic text, you know, and appreciating where things came from. Yeah, it’s still genuinely really enjoyable, really atmospheric, really easy to lose yourself in that world and to just appreciate how much thought has gone into quite a small and dense space and how much universe there is around it. In terms of mods and things, like in the orbit of this game, I wasn’t able to dig up a whole lot and I don’t remember there being a big modding scene around it at the time. Maybe that’s just… There were some thief mods, so maybe it’s possible in the dark engine, but certainly no new experiences. There are things like widescreen patches and HD texture packs. That’s like in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? I think I’d always rather see the original and for maximum nostalgia value. Yeah, so it is weird, isn’t it, the whole fan mission culture around thief and that doesn’t extend to this for whatever reason. Yeah, maybe I’m misremembering that there was a level editor or something in thief. There’s some super easy explanation for it, but yeah, I don’t remember a bunch of mods that were offering new experiences rather than trying to fix something. Yeah, I think if I was a modder, I would think of like, well, thief is built around the idea that you’re only ever seeing a tiny chunk of this metropolis, the city, and there’s tons of mystery and unexplored corners to it. I think I’d feel a lot more comfortable making something to go into that world, to just kind of say adrift on that rather than, well, System Shock 2 is the entire world of that game is accounted for, it’s the ship, you see every single corner of it, and I think it’d be quite hard to make just a little slice and make that work within, you know, the System Shock universe. It’s a good point, isn’t it? Yeah, it would maybe feel like those Half-Life mods that just stretched the Black Mesa universe a little bit too far. Yeah. Like, it’s still sci-fi, but there was, I can’t remember them by name, but there were a few that were still, like, they were using the assets, so you were in some sort of research facility, but it wasn’t Black Mesa anymore, so it wasn’t interesting to me at the time, and perhaps System Shock 2 content would fall victim to that same problem. Yeah, I’m always a little put off when I get that feeling, because I feel like I’m maybe contaminating my memories of the main event a little, you know? I feel like it might fiddle with my understanding and appreciation of the game proper. Yeah, a lot of my Half-Life memories are playing some fairly subpar mods. Maybe I’d hold it in even higher reverence if I hadn’t. I don’t regret a thing, actually. No, thank you for all the subpar mods. These people are probably making Cyberpunk, that was their first mod, and then they’re at the very top of AAA game dev now because of that. So no regrets at all. So I think quite categorically then we are voting System Shock 2 into the pantheon of 90s gaming gods. Yeah, you can imagine that big box being shuffled onto that imaginary shelf now. Yes, and now it’s got like an extra little game of the year award, just to sort of meek thumbs up from Phil and Jeremy to add to its other awards. Yeah, someone in 2022 can look at it and go, oh, what was that. Magazine? Well, that about wraps it up, doesn’t it? But I’ve had a lot of fun going back through System Shock 2 and talking about it. I’ll tell you what, there’s one thing more that I wanted to mention. Since we first mentioned Eric Brosius, I’ve had like a post-it note in my brain to say that we need to mention Terry Brosius as well, who voiced Shodan, and I think the two of them as well were in a band and were quite avant-garde music artists. I know all about this. I’ve been reading about this in the last couple of days. The band was called Tribe. Please, pray tell. The band was called Tribe. They were very successful in the Boston and New England area and not really anywhere outside that. And like three members of that band ended up at Looking Glass. And so Greg Lepiccolo was another one who was from Tribe. And so I think, you know, they kind of… the part of why audio is so central to those kind of… to thief and those immersive sim games, you know, sound is, you know, the primary sense of thief, really. Yeah. And Terry was… still is a really good writer of weird fiction. Like she did a lot of the kind of thief world building in addition to, you know, voice stuff and obviously being showdown. And then after Looking Glass, you know, some of those same people went on to join Harmonix. And Greg Lepiccolo was the project director on Guitar Hero. So Tribe ended up having a huge musical influence on the whole world. I didn’t know that. That’s extraordinary. So Guitar Hero is actually like a full-blooded immersive sim. Yes, an immersive sim. In that sense. Yeah. Well, what a note to end on, if you’ll forgive the extraordinarily good pun. We hope you like this episode. This being the first episode, this is your chance to get in on the ground floor, give us some feedback and shape the series to come. So yeah, we’ll take all feedback, kind or really kind. Yeah, it’ll be useful. We’re not not sensitive, but it will be appreciated and useful. Yeah, it will. I mean, it would genuinely ruin my week to hear. Really effusive praise for this, but it might make the next episode better. So, you know, swings and roundabouts. The next episode we’re doing is going to be Blade Runner, the 1997 Westwood Point and Click. To my money, the best bit of material in the Blade Runner universe, but we’ll discuss that on the next episode. So thank you very much for joining us, and we’ll catch you next time. Goodbye. Thank you. Bye-bye.