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.

- Alex Wiltshire

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-fihorror 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.