History VideoGame / SystemShock

* MovingTheGoalposts: As you begin dismantling SHODAN's plans, she attempts to undermine your progress by making your goal one step farther. For instance, to eject the Beta Grove on the Executive level, you need to first go into each Grove and pull their ejection switches, then find the master ejection failsafe and pull it, and then return to the Beta Grove's entrance and manually eject it from the station. Unfortunately, by the time you pull the master ejection failsafe you find that the switch is broken, and that you need to head down to Maintenance to fix it. The worst example of this is at the endgame- [[spoiler: During your attempt to enter into the Reactor Core, you come across a door with an elaborate six-digit code. You learn from a nearby audio log that the code is on every single room with a computer node on every floor from one to six, meaning you now need to backtrack through the entire game to find the code and input it.]]

* AteHisGun: In the remake you find more than one corpse sitting down in an out of the way place, missing a head and with a firearm lying on the floor next to them.

* MachineWorship: What SHODAN expects you to do. Cyborg Edward Diego and other cyborgs are already converts.

* AdaptationalExpansion: New audio logs were added in the latter half of the game, mainly in the Executive level, which expand on the game world with an eye towards being more inclusive and reflective of modern audiences. Another audio log mentions the surprising discovery of a wormhole in nearby space. Most likely this is meant to provide a plausible explanation for how the jettisoned garden grove made it to Tau Ceti at seemingly faster-than-light speed for the sequel.

** The final boss will automatically kill you if you take too long to kill it. The problem is that the rate at which this time goes down is tied to your CPU speed. Modern CPU's are exponentially faster than CPU's of the time the game was made were. In the classic edition, this makes the battle impossible to complete in the time given as you'll have to limit your DOS emulator's CPU speed to have any chance at it. The Enhanced Edition usually fixes this, thanks to the KEX Engine upgrade that natively adapts the game to modern computers, but if it doesn't work, enabling VSYNC in the options will generally do the trick.

** The final boss will automatically kill you if you take too long to kill it. The problem is that the rate at which this time goes down is tied to your CPU speed. Modern CPU's are exponentially faster than CPU's of the time the game was made were. This makes the battle impossible to complete in the time given. You'll have to limit your emulator's (the game only runs on DOS, unlikely to be natively installed on a modern machine) CPU speed to have any chance at it. The Enhanced Edition usually fixes this, but if it doesn't work, enabling VSYNC in the options will generally do the trick.

*** The anteroom to Security's elevator connecting with Systems Engineering locks behind you once you enter the Security level proper.

* StoryDifficultySetting: Inverted. The game features a gameplay mode which stripped out all story elements altogether, limiting all the information in the game to only what was relevant to the gameplay.

* AdaptationalExpansion: The remake adds a playable prologue in which you can explore the Hacker's apartment, and experience firsthand his kidnapping by Trioptimum and coerced deal with Diego. New audio logs were also added in the latter half of the game, mainly in the Executive level, which expand on the game world with an eye towards being more inclusive and reflective of modern audiences. Another audio log mentions the surprising discovery of a wormhole in nearby space. Most likely this is meant to provide a plausible explanation for how the jettisoned garden grove made it to Tau Ceti at seemingly faster-than-light speed for the sequel.

* DoubleEdgedBuff: Any patch that isn't medicinal (Medipatch, Detox) will have a drawback.
** Berserk patches increase your melee damage, but distort your colors to make it hard to see (in the original) or makes you see things that aren't actually there, but are also clearly hallucinations (remake).
** Sight Vision Enhancement patches will let you see in the dark easily without giving away your position like the headlight, or draining your power like the night vision. But after the effect ends, you'll struggle to see at all for a while as everything is much darker.
** Staminup Stimulants prevent you from using stamina (increasing your heart rate) while running. Once the effect wears off, you'll be winded for a ''lot'' longer than you would be if you'd just run out of stamina normally.
** Genius patches and Reflex Reaction Aids (which assist with puzzles and slow time respectively) don't have any drawbacks.
** Even the Detox patches can have a drawback: while active, ''any other patches'' will be completely negated, including the Medipatches. However, it also negates the side effects.

* NobodyPoops: A particularly notable example given the otherwise detailed setting. Citadel Station has vending machines, bedrooms, offices, a dining room, gardens, executive suites, and medical facilities - but no bathrooms. This became something of a RunningGag for the fandom after the game was released, and as such "There are no toilets on Citadel Station" became a common refrain. Perhaps SHODAN was so offended by the activity that she had them removed and hoped the Resistance would die of conspitation.

* ReasonableAuthorityFigure: Tri-Optimum has their anti-terrorism expert act as your MissionControl, allowed to provide you with confidential information, at least until SHODAN cuts the transmission.

* {{Retraux}}: The remake kept the pixellation and the retro-futuristic aesthetic, resulting in what look like to be an early Playstation 2 looking game with modern day shaders and lighting effects.

* BoobyTrap: Several places, usually involving SHODAN spawning in [[EliteMook Elite Mooks]] ambushing you at story-crucial moments[[note]]On Research, after you have prepared everything to disable the laser, you go in the laser room... only to be greeted by a bunch of cyborgs inside. This is not to mention the various landmines scattering around the room beforehand[[/note]]. Special mention goes to [[spoiler: SHODAN’s “Death Machine” on level R and an antennae room on Engineering]].

** The three Garden Groves, one of which must be jettisoned,[[/note]] (which becomes a NiceJobBreakingItHero moment if you know what happens in the sequel) after which you obviously can't enter it.[[note]] There are a few rare items in the grove that you jettison, but the extremely high rate of biological toxification, even with the level 2 hazard suit, makes exploration a risky prospect. There's nothing in there you can't get later, either.[[/note]] Later, the Bridge level jettisons itself with you on board from the self-destructing Citadel Station.

''System Shock'' by Creator/LookingGlassStudios is a groundbreaking FirstPersonShooter[=/=]ImmersiveSim with SurvivalHorror and RPGElements set in a {{Cyberpunk}} future. It wasn't exactly a smashing success in sales, but it was massively influencial and spawned one of the most memorable villains in all of video games. A sequel, ''VideoGame/SystemShock2'', was released on August 11, 1999.

* TheElevatorFromIpanema: Every time you enter in an elevator to go to another level [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KdpmJP6W-E a tune reminiscent of "The Girl from Ipanema plays]], it can create some hilarious SoundtrackDissonance when you open the elevator doors and a swarm of mutants attack you with this music playing on the background.

The game has circulated for a long time as the [[http://www.systemshock.org/index.php/topic,211.0.html "System Shock Portable"]] version, with an added mouse-look feature and UsefulNotes/DOSBox emulation, until the new copyright owners demanded the downloads to be taken down. It took Creator/NightdiveStudios years to solve this new predicament, but ultimately obtained the rights to the game and released an UpdatedRerelease titled ''[[http://www.gog.com/game/system_shock_enhanced_edition System Shock: Enhanced Edition]]'' on GOG.com on September 22, 2015, and on UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} one month later. The Enhanced Edition runs natively in Windows and incorporates features from Portable and other mods, including remappable keys, mouselook support and enhanced graphical resolution, and also solves some of the bugs of the original. Those who would rather enjoy the classic in its original form need not fret, though, since the Enhanced Edition also includes the original version with no enhancements, titled ''System Shock Classic''. The patches the were used in Portable where later made into a separate patching tool for the original game, aptly named "System Shock Portable Tool". In 2018, the Enhanced Edition was ported to Nightdive's [=KEX=] engine, allowing for smoothed, hardware accelerated graphics (allowing for variable FOV and widescreen and even ultra-widescreen) and porting in higher resolution character portraits from the Mac version.

* NiceJobFixingItVillain: In exchange for hacking SHODAN, Edward Diego provides the Hacker with military-grade cybernetic hacking interface and expunges all records of the Hacker's presence on the station (a later log explains that he wants the Hacker "on ice" so that he can use the Hacker later; there's zero altruism here). This ends up providing the Hacker with both the opportunity and ability to take down SHODAN.

* NonstandardGameOver: [[spoiler:Foolishly flipping switches aboard Citadel Station can result in firing the station's superweapon at Earth. Whoops]].
** On Hard plot difficulty, you have a hard time limit of six hours to complete the game. There is no way to increase this time limit, and if it runs out...Well, at least you tried[[note]]Completing the game if you know what you're doing can be done in a reasonable time frame of about 5-6 hours, but you really can't spend time looking around: you have to know where to go, what to do, and where things are to do it, and you can still get screwed over by random drops, like the Sparq Beam not showing up on the first level, making destroying cameras ''very difficult''.