Trivia / System Shock

• Author's Saving Throw: The remake's 1.2 update completely overhauled the final cyberspace segment where you fight SHODAN, in response to complaints that the fight was anti-climactic and didn't make proper use of the abilities you'd mastered throughout the game.
• Amateur Cast: The first and second games mostly had dev-team members as voice actors. Averted with the 2023 remake, which recast the roles with professional voice actors.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: A variant: as famous as the "Look at you, Hacker" quote is, it's never actually said in the game itself. The quote was from a sound test file for the DOS version of the game. It would first be spoken in-game as part of the intro to the sequel, which is where it took off with the fandom.
• Creator Backlash: The developers aren't particularly fond of the floppy disk version of the original System Shock. In fact, it was only released as a result of Executive Meddling, and Warren Specter has even gone as far as to speculate that its release may have hampered the sales of the game overall.
• Divorced Installment: The game was originally conceived and pitched by Warren Spector as a Wing Commander spin-off with the Working Title Alien Commander, and would be set on the wreckage of TCS Tiger's Claw. However, both Spector and project leader Doug Church decided that they wanted a greater degree of creative freedom with the game and to not be tied to an existing franchise, and so reconfigured the pitch into its own original setting very early into pre-production.
• Exiled from Continuity: The remake all but removed the references that link the game with Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: For many years, the game was absent from any digital distribution method and almost impossible to find legally, and the only "legal" copies were second hand. Thankfully that is no longer the case, as Nightdive Studios tracked down the rights and released a System Shock: Enhanced Edition with patches and updates to keep the game up to date with modern computers such as the addition of mouselook by default and support for higher resolution, fixed bugs from the original game, and more. The CD re-release of the game is also bundled with Enhanced Edition (and GOG.com also provides the original floppy disc version), allowing the DOS version of the game to be available digitally.
• Referenced by...: 198X ends with a battle against a blatant SHODAN Captai N Ersatz as it's very last boss.
• Role Reprise: Terri Brosius returns as SHODAN in the remake, more than 2 decades after the release of System Shock 2.
• Saved from Development Hell: The remake was announced in November 2015 with a mid-2018 planned release date, but it had a very troubled development that had to be stopped and restarted from scratch twice. It finally came out in May 2023, to very positive reviews.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The concept for the game was conceived mainly as 3D graphics of video games and computer technology were still at their bare minimums at the time of its release, making it difficult to render various characters at once (much less make them look like actual people). The result was a game were there's only one character fighting off against monsters, with audio logs describing the plot.
• Troubled Production: The remake had a number of hurdles.
  • Development began in 2015, and the Kickstarter was completed in 2016 with a planned 2017 release. As the Kickstarter project raised 50% more than its budget, Nightdive decided to placate the backers by adding in a Playstation 4 and Xbox One version. However developing for consoles with the Unity engine proved to be a pain so production was restarted in 2017 as they switched to Unreal Engine 4.
  • Production was rebooted again in 2018 when the entire creative staff (including higher-ups like director Jason Fader and writer Chris Avellone) were replaced, with CEO Stephen Kick citing Mission Creep severe enough that the game had become System Shock In Name Only and they were taking a hiatus. This was the final nail in the coffin for a lot of delay-weary, angry backers (with much speculation that the goal of the Kickstarter had actually been throwing together a tech demo to ship to publishers - this wasn’t unfounded and Kick admitted that he’d approved a lot of the changes to court a publisher who later backed out - and that they’d run out of money and were quietly shutting down development) and many sent death threats to the Nightdive staff and even went as far as to have them cited for fraud.
  • As 2020 hit, things seemed to have finally gone well but then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which caused the employees to work intermittently on the game and focus on outside projects. Three of its lead developers were working on Fall Guys and then Epic Games brought that game's developer. Epic had a non-competing clause (i.e. its employees can only work on Epic Games projects) Nightdive tried to curry favor with Epic by using the fact that they were using the Unreal Engine, only for Epic to rebut them. This forced them to assemble new employees to fill in the void. The game was finally released (to positive reviews) in 2023, some seven years after the Kickstarter was completed.
  • Meanwhile, System Shock 3 (headed by Warren Specter's Other Side Entertainment) languished in Development Hell for several years until it was finally canned in 2019 (probably due to the failure of Underworld Ascendant and the transferring of the rights to the game to Tencent) with nothing more to show for it than a Unity tech demo at E3.

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