SYSTEM SHOCK
It’s exciting to be in a world that’s this coherent and restlessly creative
Ican’t remember how far I got through System Shock the first time around. It was 1995, a few months after it came out, and I was attempting to play it on my family’s 486/33 PC. But it was a full 3D game, with lighting and all kinds of amazing stuff going on, and it was far too much for our entry-level PC.
I had to give up, but oh my, I wanted to love it. This adventure through the decks of a cyborg-riddled space station was a spiritual follow-up to , which had stunned me the summer before. Like , is also in first-person and lets you jump and look up and down, and it features a huge, non-linear space to explore. caverns and labyrinths for the Citadel, the Guardian for an AI called SHODAN, and fantasy spells for guns and cyborg abilities. I remember seeing it as a heady blend of and . Perhaps I could finally… talk to the monsters?
