Even reading through the original game pitch document for “Junction Point” (working title of the game) it becomes clear that Irrational Games and Looking Glass Studios were effectively looking at the first game and thinking – okay, but what if we made it more like Ultima Underworld, like we originally planned to do, and what if we upped the quality of visuals and audio and make the innovative interface work in the modern era of 1999? The setup is similar – you wake up on a gigantic space vessel (ship instead of a station this time) after several months of restoration after a cybernetic chip being installed in your head and find the place you’re in to be completely trashed and in chaos. System Shock 2, for all intents and purposes, feels like a remake of the original game. And I can sum up my experience in a very short review: Wow… And several years since I had a chance to replay all the Thief titles and a year and a half since I’ve first experienced the innovative undying beauty of the original System Shock, I finally had the chance to finish System Shock 2. Ever since then, all 3 games on the Dark Engine have been receiving updates and fixes making games not just playable again, but often better than they were originally. Until one day a mysterious person (often believed to be one of the ex-Looking Glass employees), released an updated version of the source code of the engine, which made things work again. After that for the longest all games on this in-house game engine made by Looking Glass Studios, along with the Thief 1 and 2, were borderline unplayable on most PCs. And even back then, just few years after the game release, it already worked with issues. I’ve attempted to play System Shock 2 ever since 2001, when I first got my own modern (for the time) PC. O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
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