Never mind the fact that it’s an absolutely groundbreaking work of visual design that elevates the original in every possible way without losing anything in the process. Here we are, a full seven years of stop-start development, engine changes, shifts in overall direction, and scope bloat later, and it should be considered a miracle that the game has been released at all. At the same time, it started development on what was intended to be a ground-up remake.
This isn’t developer Nightdive Studios first wrangle with the licence – after acquiring the IP in 2015, they promptly released System Shock: Enhanced Edition, a slightly prettied up version of the original optimised for modern systems. How do you channel that in an era of ultrawide monitors and digital only games? Does anybody even want it? Warren Spector himself, one of the key creative figures in the heyday of PC games about rifling through shelves and reading emails, couldn’t get a tumultuous System Shock 3 out the door before the whole endeavour imploded.Ītmosphere, functionality, old tech. It’s a genre of such a specific time and place, games that possess intrinsic vibes of fat chunky keyboards, bulky cardboard boxes and 640x480 CRT screens.
It’s arguably the game that truly launched the greatest boom of immersive sims in history – a genre whose fans are notoriously demanding, despite never having really been able to come up with a universally agreed definition of what an 'immersive sim' even is. It’s difficult to imagine a more daunting proposition for a remake than the original System Shock.
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