Trivia / Looking Glass Studios

• Acclaimed Flop: Something of a curse that dogged Looking Glass' games, in no small part because they were often ahead of their time when it came to game design ideas, and also didn't always have the best luck when it came to publishers and advertising.
  • The first System Shock was a subversion. It received some excellent and praise-filled reviews, developed something of an early fanbase, and only sold some 170 000 copies, a moderate commercial success at the time. Rather infamously, System Shock 2 did worse upon its release (some 58 671 copies sold between August 1999 and April 2000), despite being even better received than the first game. Many blamed EA for providing the game with basically no marketing. Among the accolades, the first game won about a dozen awards after release, and via word of mouth and greater sales is nowadays generally seen as Vindicated by History.
  • The Thief series has been more of an aversion. It was not only highly acclaimed by critics and gamers, but also earned a hefty amount of money compared with most other LGS projects. Some LGS devs were even quite serious when they mentioned that the first game probably helped save the studio from premature bankruptcy (after a period in the mid 1990s, when a cancelled Star Trek game development deal cost them a lot of lost time and money they invested into it).
• What Could Have Been: Many of their concepts were ditched in favour of different ones as engine testing and development went on over the years.
  • The predecessors of Thief alone went from a comedic tongue-in-cheek action game about communist zombies to an action roleplaying game set within a Darker and Edgier version of Arthurian Legend to what would eventually become a prototype for the first game in the series.
  • System Shock 2 wasn't even originally planned as a sequel, at all. It was supposed to be an unrelated survival horror RPG aboard a starship at first, until the devs changed their opinion and worked on tying the earlier game and this sequel together into the same universe.
  • Also, one of the many ambitious Gameplay Roulette sections originally planned, but ultimately scrapped, was a section involving a zero-G walk through the interiors, or a spacewalk through an area exposed to vacuum. Newer games like Dead Space or Alien: Isolation arguably pay homage to this abandoned idea, both being space survival horrors with spacewalk sections. A bit of a remnant of the concept is a part of the game where you reverse the artificial gravity aboard and walk on what was once the ceiling of several rooms.
  • Looking Glass Studios was planning on developing Ultima Underworld III and Thief III. The third Thief game, subtitled Deadly Shadows, was eventually developed by Ion Storm Austin (with a team that included many of the key Looking Glass developers) and published in May 2004. ArxFatalis, a spiritual successor to Ultima Underworld (replacing the original third installment plan), was developed by Arkane and published in 2002. In the 2010s, some of the veteran Looking Glass developers reunited and formed their own indie studio Otherside Entertainment, developing their own spiritual successor, Underworld Ascendant.
• Ramin Djawadi got his start as a sound engineer on the late games of Looking Glass Studios, including the first two Thief games and System Shock 2. You can notice his name in the credits of each (in the Thief II credits, he also has a brief mugshot, along with many other fellow devs).