Warren Spector says his major contribution to System Shock was to stop 'it many times from getting killed'
PC Gamer's all-singing all-dancing all-action 30th anniversary issue is on-sale today, and includes a slew of major interviews with the creatives that have shaped our industry and some of the most important games in history. PCG's editor Robert Jones sat down with Warren Spector and Paul Neurath, key members of the original System
Shock team, which is generally considered the first game you could call an immersive sim, with its influence is still prevalent in the contemporary industry across the likes of Arkane's various titles and 2K's Bioshock series.
The origins of the game go back to its lead programmer Doug Church who, while Warren Spector was polishing up a proposal for something called Alien Commander, shared how bored he was with the then-industry's over-reliance on genre tropes.
«Doug Church was hanging out in my office one day, and we were both talking about how sick we were of fantasy games, and dungeons, and rescuing princesses, and heroes that were built like the Mighty Thor,» says Spector. «He and Paul [Neurath] were working—I didn’t know—on another similar project. They were sick of that as well, as I understand it. Doug came to me with an idea that ultimately became System Shock.
»I just sort of sat there with my pitiful, little, two-page Alien Commander proposal, with art I had done, which you never want to see. I listened to what he had to say, and went, 'Yeah, that’s better'. And so System Shock was born. I produced it. We could talk more about my specific role, but I represented it at Origin, and kept it many times from getting killed. I think that was my major contribution to the game."
The studio that would become Looking Glass was at this time called Blue Sky, and Paul Neurath says the studio's
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