My first impressions of the game were ones of extreme disorientation. And while its sequel has received the lion’s share of praise, there is a small and devoted sect of players who hold the original up as the true masterpiece.

I always strive towards giving honest and unabashed criticism, but the legacy of this game weighed heavily upon me. I started my play-through of System Shock, then, filled with a kind of trepidation. And it did all that less than a year after the release of Doom. It laid the foundation for so many mechanics that have become staples of the immersive sim genre, expanding greatly on the template provided by Ultima Underworld. Many of my favourite games - including Deus Ex, Bioshock 2, and Prey - couldn’t have existed without System Shock.

The 2000 game Deus Ex (produced and directed by Spector), the 2007 game BioShock, and the 2017 game Prey are spiritual successors to the two games.It's a strange thing to come face to face with one of the ancestors of gaming history. A sequel, System Shock 2, was released by Looking Glass Studios and offshoot developer Irrational Games in 1999. The game was a moderate commercial success, with sales exceeding 170,000 copies, but Looking Glass ultimately lost money on the project. It was later placed on multiple hall of fame lists. The developers sought to build on the emergent gameplay and immersive environments of their previous games, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss and Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds, by streamlining their mechanics into a more 'integrated whole' it is considered one of the defining examples of an immersive sim.Ĭritics praised System Shock and hailed it as a major breakthrough in its genre. System Shock 's 3D engine, physics simulation and complex gameplay have been cited as both innovative and influential.

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