SHODAN SHOWDOWN
Irrational Games co-founder Jonathan Chey on the difficult development of System Shock 2 – and how he’s still finding new inspiration in it today.
For me, System Shock 2 is one of the all-time greats. Tying together sharp storytelling, taut gunplay and RPG character development, all set on a claustrophobic spaceship that drips with horror-inflected tension, it was the gateway to the immersive sim classics to come, such as BioShock, Dishonored, and Prey. For its makers, though, System Shock 2 was a test.
It was the first project by a new studio called Irrational Games, a chance to prove it could deliver a game that matched the calibre of Looking Glass, the developer of the original System Shock, Thief, and other PC classics. “It was probably the most pressure I’ve felt in my life,” says Jonathan Chey, one of its three lead developers. “My strongest motivation was not wanting to look like a fool, because we’d never done anything like this before in our lives.”
Now, over 20 years later, Chey can say the gamble worked. System Shock 2’ s sci-fi horror adventure made Irrational Games’ name, laying the foundation for a future in which it would make the likes of SWAT 4, Freedom Force and, of course, BioShock, and lately, Chey has found himself returning to it for inspiration. At the time, though, it didn’t quite light up the charts. Sure, it was critically lauded, but for Chey and his fellow founders, Ken Levine and Rob Fermier, it was simply enough.
Origin story
These three developers, two programmers and a writer, met after joining Looking Glass, where Fermier had worked on the first System Shock. Ken Levine had contributed to Thief: The Dark Project’s initial story and design, while Chey programmed for Thief and Flight Unlimited 2. They were young and not terribly experienced, and they wanted to found their own company. But they had already learned something important from Looking Glass.
“They weren’t a company that did small, highly polished products,” says Chey. “They were a company that did vast, sprawling, ambitious things that always overreached. That’s one of the things we really loved about their games, and we inherited that kind of ambition and way of working, which was to do things that were probably – well, definitely – well beyond what was realistically achievable with the
budget and time and personnel that were available. That’s how we were taught to make games, and the only way we knew to make games.”
They decided on a name (rejecting Chocolate Milk Productions and Underwater Horse) and scored a deal with French publisher Cyro to create a singleplayer campaign for an isometric action game called FireTeam. But they were left hanging when Cyro decided to make the game multiplayer-only. Fortunately, they’d stayed friends with their former employers, who rescued them with a huge opportunity: a sequel to System Shock, the already celebrated first-person sci-fi RPG which Looking Glass had released in 1994. “We were given an enormous amount of responsibility, and for not very good reasons,” says Chey.
The team took a couple of rooms in Looking Glass’ office, some staff, the Dark engine, which was still under development for Thief, and a meagre budget of $700,000. “The whole development process was us pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, not a very big budget, and trying to put together a team and run a project and do things we’d never done before,” says Chey. “So most of the time we were just trying to stay afloat, and to come up with good ideas. We certainly didn’t have expectations about producing something that people would really enjoy, though of course you’re always hoping for the best.”
Character-building
But the team worked well together, dividing up responsibilities so that Chey managed the project, Levine was in charge of design and story, and Fermier was in charge of technology. And they all agreed on a very clear vision for what they wanted to make: a worthy follow-up to the original System Shock but with a stronger story and a greater focus on character building and mechanical progression. “System Shock was