System Shock 2

Developer Looking Glass, Irrational Games Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC Release 1999

Beginnings can be difficult to trace, but you can find one haunting the claustrophobic gangways, crew billets and engine rooms of the Von Braun. “Look at you, hacker,” it says. “A pathetic creature of meat and bone. Panting and sweating as you run through my corridors.”

SHODAN had, of course, taunted and goaded players before. This malevolent AI was birthed on the space station Citadel in the first System Shock. But in that game she was the clear antagonist. In System Shock 2 SHODAN becomes something else. She’s more than just the final boss. She exists in the liminal space between design and story, game and player, setting up a tense central relationship which the immersive sim would go on to explore for years to come.

Of course, not even , which was released five years before its sequel, could claim to be the first immersive sim. The ur-text was 1992’s , which blended dungeon delving with firstperson immediacy, plus was released, presented a world to explore which felt real, and realtime action that you could think your way around. , which was made by many of the same principal developers, translated ’s fantasy setting to a science-fiction one and exchanged magic for technology, castles for spaceships. Your quest was to escape Citadel, where SHODAN had gone rogue, converting its crew to murderous cyborgs and hellbent on shooting the station’s mining laser at Earth. What introduced was a storyline and missions set by email and audio logs, detailing the locations you needed to go to and the keycodes that would get you there. But was an essentially lonely experience: everyone was dead or transformed and no one truly accompanied you on your journey. In the sequel, though, you have a constant flow of emails telling you what to do.