Why ‘System Shock’ was the best shooter of the ’90s

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1994’s System Shock has just gotten a long-overdue remake, and it’s already topping best-seller charts. The thrilling story of a lone hacker and a deranged artificial intelligence trying to outwit each other aboard a crumbling space station is being introduced to a whole new generation of gamers – many of whom may want to go back and check out the original. While System Shock 2 is well-remembered, the original is sadly often overshadowed by its sequel, despite being in many ways the better game.

Games like 1998’s Half-Life are deservedly remembered as the best FPS games of the decade, but much of Half-Life‘s sense of excitement, action, and spectacle had been captured by System Shock four years earlier.

Coming only a year after the legendary Doom, System Shock offered a level of immersion that no other first-person game had achieved by that point. Looking Glass Studios, the developers behind System Shock, had previously worked on Ultima Underworld – widely considered to be the first-ever “immersive sim.” Their dedication to truly immersing the player in the game world was at the heart of their design philosophy. Ultima Underworld allowed players to run, jump, talk to NPCs, sort their inventories, and pick up just about any item they came across, all while exploring a full 3D world. Commonplace features in modern games, perhaps, but revolutionary for 1992.

By 1994, video games were just starting to really investigate the potential for having movie-like stories. The JRPG genre had already attempted cinematic storytelling with the likes of Final Fantasy, but by the mid-90s, action games like Wing Commander were combining fast-paced gameplay with detailed worlds and sprawling storylines. With System Shock, developers Looking