The hacker takes increasingly drastic measures to destroy her, he wins, and everything ends happily. As AIs are wont to do, she immediately goes power-mad and tries to wipe out humanity. At the behest of a corrupt executive, a hacker liberates the AI running the powerful TriOptimum Corporation’s space-based headquarters, Citadel Station. The initial premise of System Shock is straightforward. What if being a purposeful machine was preferable to being human and aimless? I lurked the mostly defunct Looking Glass Games forums, developed a twitch reaction to anything that sounded remotely like a hostile NPC, and pored over every single text and audio log to piece together the series’ story. But I threw all the enthusiasm I couldn’t muster for job applications into exploring the games’ complicated maps and facing off against the megalomanic artificial intelligence SHODAN.
By World of Warcraft or Skyrim addict standards, I was restrained. And success was something I worried about constantly.Įven if I wasn’t a particularly good player, System Shock and System Shock 2 offered the sense of agency that obsessively reading articles about millennial underemployment eroded. They’re tuned to make you like a brilliant sharpshooter and clever tactician, while still offering enough of a challenge that you feel like you’ve earned it. Most single-player shooters are the closest thing life offers to guaranteed success - the entire game is hurtling toward a single ending, usually either saving the world or something close to it. I knew how incredibly lucky I was to have as much opportunity as I did, but that only made me feel guiltier about not finding something I could feel proud of. But I was also supposed to be doing something I loved and building a career - anything else was betraying both the people who had given me a leg up and the entire American work ethic. I could read endless horror stories of people laid off at 50, unable to find work because they’d been replaced by 20-somethings willing to do the same thing for almost nothing. I’d left school in 2010, the tail end of the financial crisis, when there was overwhelming pressure to be grateful for any kind of job at all. So I set out to do something that, as a cyberpunk fan, I’d been meaning to for years: play the System Shock series.
But for the first time in years, I had time - lots of time. Like many recent graduates, I was unprepared for a life without quantified goals. When I finally made it out, I realized that all I’d really done was reach the end of the line.
Following the track was simple, but not easy, and slipping up seemed like a constant, fatal threat. I was in a career-focused program at a school full of ambitious people, and I’d aligned my life along a very specific academic track. After I graduated from college, I lost all sense of purpose and decided to make System Shock 3.
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