System Shock 2's ending was initially very different, too. "I wasn't experienced enough to think that through."Ĭhey says that sums up the relationship between the pair: "He was like the idea generator, and I was like the filter." "He just gave me this heartbreaking speech about how much work it would be, and of course he was right," he says. Levine originally planned the level as a zero-gravity space walk between two ships, and remembers bringing the idea to Chey. It introduces lots of new ideas, and the team were too green to realize how much extra time it would take to do them justice. There are still whole sections of the game Levine isn't happy with, including the character creation, which he says was too text-heavy, as well as the level set in the body of The Many, the biological hive mind created by antagonist SHODAN. System Shock 2 was certainly no exception." Unless you're Blizzard, and you have an alpha three years ahead of time that is anybody else's finished game, games aren't fun until quite late. "That's an important thing for a game developer. "I think I'm lucky in the sense that I can fall in love with things even if they're not worthy of that much love yet," he says. I was very driven by fear of failure, I didn't want to embarrass myself…even though we were enjoying the work, there was a lot of tension and a lot of worry." It was our company, our names and reputations as game developers on the line. "This is the first game we'd done as a team. "You'd have these moments where you'd think: 'What are we doing? This doesn't look competitive.' The motion capture data was full of glitches that couldn't all be cleaned up, for example, leading to characters' hands getting stuck at strange angles. That explains why there are things in the game that aren't that great: We didn't have time to redo it."Ĭhey worried about polish during development. "We were just trying to make it from the very beginning. "We just had to start building the game, because there wasn't any time to prototype," he explains. They had just over a year to play with, Chey recalls, leaving no time to iterate. It wasn't a lot, and they had no choice but to hire junior developers: The many interfaces were all built by 19-year-old Mike Swiderek, who later worked on Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite. Irrational got roughly $650,000 to make System Shock 2, just over $1m in today's money. System Shock 2 was certainly no exception. Unless you're Blizzard, and you have an alpha three years ahead of time. They also remember why, ultimately, it was all worth it. They remember the six-and-a-half-day work weeks, the ending they had to cut, the game-breaking bugs they failed to fix, and wrestling with an unfinished game engine. The human story behind it, as told by Ken Levine and Jonathan Chey, is less glamorous. Years later, System Shock 2 is one of the most celebrated PC games of all time. But it was only the start of the hard work. Just like that System Shock 2 was born and Irrational was pulled back from the abyss. "I'm pretty sure it was our idea to bring back the System Shock license… 'hey, you guys already have this world, and it was really cool, why don't we use that instead of trying to invent an entirely new franchise here?'" " was just a science-fiction shooter game called Junction Point," he says. The team smelled an opportunity, says Jonathan Chey. And EA, it just so happened, owned the rights to System Shock, which Looking Glass developed in 1994. Irrational, who knew the engine, seemed like a natural fit, and so Looking Glass asked them to come up with an idea for a game.Īfter Irrational built a crude prototype of an RPG-shooter hybrid-Levine says the team mastered how to show it off "just exactly the way where it wouldn't explode"-Looking Glass presented it to EA, which was impressed. Looking Glass had built an engine for Thief: The Dark Project, and he wanted to spread the cost by making other games with it too. It was Looking Glass co-founder Paul Neurath, who threw Irrational a lifeline. Ken Levine, who went on to be creative director on BioShock and BioShock Infinite (Image credit: Irrational Games)
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