Looking Glass Interviews, Articles, and Oddments

[rusty_shackleford]

Oddment:
Feature article on Looking Glass in NEXT Generation Issue #4 April 1995

https://archive.org/details/nextgen-iss ... 1/mode/2up

[Tweed]

The buyout from Eidos didn't come because of the severe losses taken from Daikatana. Though I kept hearing that wasn't the real reason.

[Tweed]

Interview with Doug Church by Brandan Yee in System Shock Strategies and Secrets: https://archive.org/details/systemshock ... 7/mode/2up

Short and mostly surface level stuff.

Single page design notes in the back of I.C.E. Breaker official hint guide: https://archive.org/details/System_Shoc ... 9/mode/2up

Very basic, but another snippet about what they were trying to accomplish with Shock's design.

[DecadeRiptide]

Who is Looking Glass anyway? I have never heard of them.

Then you're too young.

Being young is no excuse. I know about and appreciate all kinds of **** from way before my time.

:autismdetected:

[Xenich]

Then you're too young.

Being young is no excuse. I know about and appreciate all kinds of **** from way before my time.

:autismdetected:

He is right though. Previous generations used to experience content of past generations and those works influenced those generations in the content they produced through a progression of improvement and innovation. There was a point where the new generations simply cut off any real interest in the past and simply consumed their own content which explains why those generations lack even the most fundamental understanding of various concepts that were already established years before.

[Tangerine]

Being young is no excuse. I know about and appreciate all kinds of **** from way before my time.

:autismdetected:

He is right though. Previous generations used to experience content of past generations and those works influenced those generations in the content they produced through a progression of improvement and innovation. There was a point where the new generations simply cut off any real interest in the past and simply consumed their own content which explains why those generations lack even the most fundamental understanding of various concepts that were already established years before.

He's brown. He doesn't understand anything beyond immediate gratification.

[Irenaeus]

Found an interesting article written by Neurath himself

The Story of Ultima Underworld
by Paul Neurath, Co-Founder of Looking Glass Studios

I started in the computer game industry in 1983, writing computer games by myself and with several other collaborators over the years. I got to work with many of the pioneers from that era, including Ned Lerner, Richard Garriott, Chris Roberts, the Carlson brothers, the Sir-tech guys, and even John Romero. This was a time when the industry was still a small, tight nit community.

Some of my favorite games at that time were the classic CRPGs, such as the Wizardry and Ultima series. I can fondly remember playing the original Wizardry with a group of friends huddled around an Apple II. However, with their abstract visuals, these games required a bit of imagination to achieve suspension of disbelief. In the latter 1980's a game called Dungeon Master was released on the Amiga. While the game play was fairly standard fare, its first person 3D perspective, with detailed bitmapped walls and animated sprite monsters, had more impact and immediacy than prior CRPGs. This game provided a glimpse into the future.

After finishing Space Rogue for Origin in 1989, I decided to try my hand at a traditional fantasy CRPG game, but with a new approach that would bring even more immediacy than Dungeon Master. I wrote a high level game design for what was then simply called Underworld, and contracted with Doug Wike, an x-Origin artist, to do concept artwork. It seemed promising.

In early 1990 I began to assemble the team, which included several recent MIT grads, notably Doug Church and Dan Schmidt. Doug and Dan were members of the infamous House of the 10 Dumb Guys, who were all but dumb. More of these "dumb" guys would later join the company. Doug Wike also joined the team as lead artist, and we soon had an in-house staff of 8 on the project. I found office space in idyllic Salem, New Hampshire (nearby America's Stonehenge no less), set up the company under the name of Blue Sky Productions, and was in business.

Our first technical hurdle was tackling texture mapping. I had toyed around with crude texture mapping algorithms on the Apple II in the late 80's, and was able to render a few frames a second with a single polygon. I suspected that it might be possible to do a full scene in real time on the faster IBMpc computers of the day. I got in contact with Chris Green, a talented IBMpc programmer I knew through my prior collaborations with Ned Lerner. Chris soon came up with a working texture mapping algorithm. For some unfathomable reason his test texture was a black and white photo of Abe Lincoln, so at first we got to see lots of twisted and distorted Abes starting back at you in 3D.

Within a few months we put together a prototype which demonstrated walking smoothly around a 3D dungeon rendered with texture mapping. Even though it was a rough prototype, nobody had seen anything like it before, and a lot of mouths gapped wide open. We shopped the game to a handful of publishers, including Origin, who we ended up signing a licensing agreement with that summer. Origin proposed that we leverage the Ultima brand, which we thought was a fine idea, and so the game was renamed Ultima Underworld.

Work progressed steadily, and the pieces started to come together. A world editor was built, the rendering pipeline was fleshed out and refined, physics and AI's implemented, and so forth. Often people on the team chipped in for a variety of roles. For instance, we split up responsibility for design for the dungeon levels. As the "veteran" game design hand on the team, I did the first two levels, but the other levels were done by a variety of programmers, artists, and designers on the team - and for most this was their fist game design experience. In hindsight, it was somewhat miraculous how well it all fit together in the end.

Development was not without its challenges. One challenge was running the company on a very tight budget. As a recall, Origin only advanced $30,000 towards development, yet the game ended up costing $400,000. Fortunately I was earning some royalties from Space Rogue, and my old collaborator Ned Lerner chipped in some funding as well. We got by in part by being cheap: for instance, I can remember buying vinyl window blinds for the office at K-Mart for $8.95 each.

Another challenge was working with a team which was mostly very young and had little prior game development experience. Fortunately, we had an incredibly talented and passionate team. Also, in some ways their not knowing what was possible let them do more than an experienced team may have tried to tackle. A lot of learning transpired, and for myself, there was enormous satisfaction in seeing the team learn and grow, ultimately producing a brilliant game.

A final challenge was maintaining a good working relationship with Origin. Things started out well with Richard Garriott's enthusiastic support of the project. As the keeper of all things Ultima, Richard was instrumental in helping integrate the Ultima fictional elements into the game up front. However, as the development progressed through 1990 and into 1991, we had less and less interaction with Origin. Origin had assigned two producers to be their liaison with us over that period, but neither had much involvement in the project, and each in turn left the company. When the second producer left, we only learned of his departure a month later when I called to find out why we had heard nothing from Origin in a while.

It was clear that Ultima Underworld was not getting much attention from Origin. Given that Origin was 2,000 miles distant, had only vested us once over the first year of the game's development, and was busy attending to its internally developed games, this was perhaps to be expected. We were at a low point, and had even begun to hear talk of Origin terminating the project.

I had worked with Warren Spector during the tail end of Space Rogue, respected him greatly, and so we proposed that he be assigned as our new producer. Warren understood immediately what we were trying to accomplish with the game, and became our biggest champion within Origin. Had not Warren stepped in this role at that stage, I'm not sure Ultima Underworld would have ever seen the light of day.

As is typical in game development, we crunched long hours during the final months. Unique to this crunch was our renting out temporary basement space just outside of Boston so as to get around the long commute much of the team had been enduring in their drive up to New Hampshire (in a Geo Metro no less). The basement "office" was a featureless, windowless room that always seemed to have air whistling underneath its doors. The furniture was Blue Sky cheap; $15 folding beach chairs and tables. Despite the austere working environment, the game came together amazingly well in the final stretch, and we delivered the Gold Master just about two years after we had started.

Ultima Underworld went on to sell nearly half a million copies, win all sorts of awards, and become one of the top Origin titles. Furthermore, it established a new genre, combining first person action with traditional role playing to deliver an immersive experience. LookingGlass would go on to explore new dimensions of this genre with System Shock and then Thief, but Ultima Underworld will always hold the special distinction of being the first of its kind.

Paul Neurath
6/23/2000

Interesting how the date of the article is the exact release date of Deus Ex: June 23rd, 2000.

[Tweed]

Then you're too young.

Being young is no excuse. I know about and appreciate all kinds of **** from way before my time.

:autismdetected:

We get it, you're way too low g to grasp LGS games. By MIT students for MIT students.

[Rand]

Being young is no excuse. I know about and appreciate all kinds of **** from way before my time.

:autismdetected:

He is right though. Previous generations used to experience content of past generations and those works influenced those generations in the content they produced through a progression of improvement and innovation. There was a point where the new generations simply cut off any real interest in the past and simply consumed their own content which explains why those generations lack even the most fundamental understanding of various concepts that were already established years before.

The same thing happened with films earlier.
How many movies pre-whichever decade did you ever watch?
I would bet that it's at most a few from the 1960s, and none prior.
I find earlier movies and shows generally unwatchable.
And it's clear that starting in the 2000s, most filmmakers had never watched them either, unlike the 70s and 80s directors.

[Xenich]

Being young is no excuse. I know about and appreciate all kinds of **** from way before my time.

:autismdetected:

He is right though. Previous generations used to experience content of past generations and those works influenced those generations in the content they produced through a progression of improvement and innovation. There was a point where the new generations simply cut off any real interest in the past and simply consumed their own content which explains why those generations lack even the most fundamental understanding of various concepts that were already established years before.

The same thing happened with films earlier.
How many movies pre-whichever decade did you ever watch?
I would bet that it's at most a few from the 1960s, and none prior.
I find earlier movies and shows generally unwatchable.
And it's clear that starting in the 2000s, most filmmakers had never watched them either, unlike the 70s and 80s directors.

Well, I watched everything back as far as the 1930's in my youth. The old horror movies (Boris Karlof, Peter Cushing, etc...) of the 30's - 40's, etc... were quite popular at my time (same with many of the old cartoons). You had early westerns in the 30's -40's which is where you got a lot of your 50's/60's award winning actors in the big films, and numerous war, dramas, and comedies. You also used to see the musicals of the early eras as well (Irving Berlin). Same with TV shows.

I have a rather extensive film collection going back to works as early as 1915, so I wouldn't say I was the norm, but many of my era did watch much of the older TV/Movies.

You are right though, most of the directors of the 2000's are pretty much ignorant of the earlier works and it shows in a lot of the garbage they regurgitated. It is like they just stopped caring about the art and took on their own idea of what was best while dismissing everything that was learned in the decades prior.

[Tweed]

You'd figure that people interested in doing something in a genre would also be interested in studying past efforts in said genre, especially things that defined it. I forget though that your modern student is trained to avoid most things, especially whatever has been branded problematic or gives them the ick.

[rusty_shackleford]

You'd figure that people interested in doing something in a genre would also be interested in studying past efforts in said genre, especially things that defined it. I forget though that your modern student is trained to avoid most things, especially whatever has been branded problematic or gives them the ick.

Can't be bothered to find it, but there was some small studio here where they had a page that posted the favorite games of each developer and the favorite games of everyone but the programmers were all made in the past 10 years

[DecadeRiptide]

I find earlier movies and shows generally unwatchable.

I find the same thing but for movies before the 2000s. I think I've only ever watched a handful of movies made before the 2000s. Most my favorite movies were either made around 1996-2004 or 2014-2016.

I think the reason I don't care about older games like those from Looking Glass is because they are graphically outdated compared to what we have now, so I do not care for them or find them interesting enough to look into. They are unplayable to me.

[NotAI]

Related:

https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/ ... Scott Card

Many of the ideas for immersive sims appeared in an early form in this sequence of essays.

[rusty_shackleford]

Recently learned that NightDive opensourced the System Shock code(Mac version) some years back
https://github.com/NightDive-Studio/sho ... r/ShockMac

All the line endings on github are broken, they could have at least fixed that first. Ah well, cleaned it up real quick, got some new stuff to read for a while.

[Faceless_Sentinel]

I find earlier movies and shows generally unwatchable.

I find the same thing but for movies before the 2000s. I think I've only ever watched a handful of movies made before the 2000s. Most my favorite movies were either made around 1996-2004 or 2014-2016.

I think the reason I don't care about older games like those from Looking Glass is because they are graphically outdated compared to what we have now, so I do not care for them or find them interesting enough to look into. They are unplayable to me.

I had the same feeling about old games and movies. But i am at a point, where objectively good graphics(high polygon count, soft shadows, dynamic light, ray tracing and path tracing) doesn't cover for ****** art design, ******* ****** color pallet, ugly npcs (UGLY NPC WITH HIGH POLYCOUNT! HOW? WHY?), non existent location design, gameplay that becomes more simplified every new games, storytelling so bad that i don't even know with what to compare it with, i honestly read fanfiction that's better written than modern games. Old games are better in summary. I think you will came to this conclusion sooner or later.

[Xenich]

I find earlier movies and shows generally unwatchable.

I find the same thing but for movies before the 2000s. I think I've only ever watched a handful of movies made before the 2000s. Most my favorite movies were either made around 1996-2004 or 2014-2016.

I think the reason I don't care about older games like those from Looking Glass is because they are graphically outdated compared to what we have now, so I do not care for them or find them interesting enough to look into. They are unplayable to me.

Which pretty much sums up why modern generations are pushing out garbage. They don't learn anything from what was done in the past and they place useless things like "graphics" as the key important factor to a games design. The result is a regurgitation of modern creators ignorant of history and hyper focused on useless crap that doesn't produce anything of quality.

[rusty_shackleford]

Found something pretty lost, I think

Interactive Entertainment CD ROM Episode 14, Jun 1995

They did a profile on Looking Glass Studios with interviews of the employees

► Show Spoiler

doug.rtf (also has LoPiccolo's bio?)

DOUG CHURCH is a project leader at the Company. Mr. Church was a
Richover Scholar (55 students in the US) in 1986, completed his MIT
course work in 3 years, and then worked at BBN SIMNET on war fighting
simulations from 1989 until joining Blue Sky Productions in 1990. He was
Blue Sky Productions third employee. Mr. Church\'s first professional
game experience was as lead programmer on Ultima Underworld I for Blue
Sky. Subsequently, he was project leader on Ultima Underworld II for
Looking Glass. Mr. Church is now working on his 3rd state of the art 3D
role playing game.

GREG LoPICCOLO is director of audio at the Company. A graduate of
Wesleyan University in 1983, Mr. LoPiccolo spend nine years as
songwriter/bassist for the alternative rock group Tribe, and recorded
two albums for Slash/Warner Brothers Records. Mr. LoPiccolo began
working as a contractor for Looking Glass in 1993, and created the music
and sound effects for System Shock, an award-winning 3D science fiction
game developed by Looking Glass for Origin Systems.

jerry.rtf

JERRY WOLOSENKO has broad microcomputer and video game industry
experience, having been involved in the creation and marketing of
microcomputer based games and products for the past 12 years. In 1981,
Mr. Wolosenko founded Apex Resources, a software and computer hardware
distribution company, where he was instrumental in establishing
relationships with many of the leading game design companies in the UK
and Europe. Since the sale of Apex Resources in 1987, Mr. Wolosenko has
been involved in other software publishing and marketing projects with
US and foreign software companies. In 1989, he established the North
American office of Psygnosis and has been the driving force behind the
broad success of the ***Lemmings**™*** product line in the US market.
Mr. Wolosenko's association with Psygnosis dates back to 1985 when he
helped to establish the Psygnosis brand name in the United States
through his distribution company.

Mr. Wolosenko holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees from the City
University of New York and is active in the computer and video game
industry.

ned.rtf

EDWARD A. (NED) LERNER, Chairman of the Board and Executive Vice
President

Edward A. Lerner started his first business in the 11th grade, fixing
and selling bicycles. He has been involved in the game business since
1980, writing The Arabian Nights, a role playing game for Fantasy Games
Unlimited. He has been involved in the software industry since 1981,
when he was an Assistant System Engineer for Motorola. He supported
Motorola software for the uptown Manhattan sales office. He became
involved with the computer game industry the following year, entering a
partnership with Paul Neurath to create Deep Space for the Apple II and
IBM. Deep Space was the first real time 3D polygon game for the Apple
II.

As an independent software author from 1985-1988, Mr. Lerner first
created Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer for the IBM and C64,
including a European cassette tape version, then managed the creation of
Apple II and Macintosh versions. AFT was the most successful computer
game in the history of Electronic Arts, the nation's largest computer
game publisher. Mr. Lerner was also the manager and creator of Chuck
Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer 2.0. Yeager was the first fast 3D
flight simulator for the IBM PC. Over 750,000 units already have been
sold of the Chuck Yeager product line.

From 1988-1992, Lerner was the Owner/President of Lerner Research, a
small game design group. He was responsible for designing and managing
F22 Interceptor Sega and Car & Driver PC. Car & Driver was the first
full 3D driving simulation. F22 was the first Sega flight simulator and
the best selling simulator of 1992.

Education: Wesleyan University, Bachelor of Arts, Middletown, CT,
Physics & History, 1981.

seam.rtf

JONATHAN (SEAMUS) BLACKLEY is a project at the Company. Mr. Blackley has
a B.D. from Tuft's University High Energy Physics Ph.D. program. Before
coming to Looking Glass Mr. Blackley worked at Fermilab, one of the
world's best Physics labs. Mr. Blackley joined the company in 1992 as
physicist, and is now project leader on Looking Glass's flight
simulation project Flight Unlimited™. Additionally, Mr. Blackley is an
avid aerobatics glider pilot.

Videos:

sean

paul

ned

jerry

doug

dan

TODO task: transcribe videos, summarize, categorize as interview/articles or oddment

[rusty_shackleford]

[DecadeRiptide]

I find earlier movies and shows generally unwatchable.

I find the same thing but for movies before the 2000s. I think I've only ever watched a handful of movies made before the 2000s. Most my favorite movies were either made around 1996-2004 or 2014-2016.

I think the reason I don't care about older games like those from Looking Glass is because they are graphically outdated compared to what we have now, so I do not care for them or find them interesting enough to look into. They are unplayable to me.

I think you will came to this conclusion sooner or later.

I don't think so.

and i never said anything about the games with ********

[rusty_shackleford]

Do you guys think Levine gets too much, too little, or exactly the right amount of credit for System Shock 2?

[rusty_shackleford]

The Making of System Shock 2, 2012
https://web.archive.org/web/20120820031 ... m-shock-2/

Pg 1

An inexperienced team working on the sequel to one of the most respected games in PC history. It sounds like a recipe for horror. And it was – but in a good way.
The lights are low. Everyone’s fighting in a panic against a seemingly impossible, oppressive deadline. At every turn there’s a crippling lack of resources. By any objective criteria, the small, inexperienced team doesn’t have the skills to achieve its aims and is crammed into a single room – half of one, in fact, since it’s one room bisected with screens. When you look at where and how Irrational worked on its first game, it’s easy to think of the claustrophobic horror of System Shock 2 as a pure product of its environment.

In fact, when looking at their situation in their early years, you begin to wonder why Irrational’s co-founders Ken Levine, Rob Fermier and Jonathan Chey splintered from Boston’s illustrious and much-missed Looking Glass Studios in the first place.

“Looking Glass was obviously a really impactful experience on me,” Levine explains. “It was my first job in the games industry. I’d met a lot of people who I really respected and admired – people whose legacy is more known to the intelligentsia of the gaming field, and is still being felt. I left because despite how talented the people were there, in some ways it was more like a university than a games company. There really was a dialogue about advancing the media, but not a lot about making successful products.”

Coming from a film-industry background, Levine felt the company needed to find a balance between art and commerce: “I thought, probably naively at the time, ‘Hey! I can do that’. I had no idea what that would actually mean, as I was a cocky guy who thought it’d be easy. We went off on our own and very quickly found it was challenging.” Almost fatally so. The company’s first project, a singleplayer version of early isometric shooter Fireteam, had been cancelled when its publisher decided to concentrate solely on multiplayer. This left Irrational at a loss, until Paul Neurath, head of Looking Glass, called with an opportunity. While they’d left Looking Glass, they were still on good terms with their previous employer. In fact, their half room was actually buried in a corner of the larger studio.

Neurath’s offer was incredibly open. Looking Glass had, in making Thief: The Dark Project, developed its own in-house engine. All of Irrational were experienced with it, having all worked on Thief. Why not make a game with it with us? Any game you fancy, really. “We immediately started designing,” Levine recalls.

“The three partners sat down, and we ended up with a game design which was basically our design for Shock 2, but in a totally different world. It was a kind of Heart Of Darkness story, with a military commander gone crazy and your mission was to go to this crazy spaceship and assassinate him.”

This was pitched around various publishers. The one that bit was Electronic Arts, which – through its purchase of Origin – was in possession of the System Shock IP. EA suggested that the game could, in fact, be System Shock 2. “And we said, ‘Um… sure’,” Levine laughs. “I rewrote the story and changed a few of the things, but the game design never changed.”

It was a rare opportunity. The original System Shock was one of the games that made Levine want to move into the videogame industry in the first place. What made it so special? “The feeling of being in a real place,” he raves. “The feeling of a mystery, of unraveling it – not in an adventure game way, but in the context of an action game. You arrive and… what happened? That’s a really good storytelling mechanism.” Austin Grossman and Doug Church’s original idea from Shock was something Irrational expanded in its sequel. “In Shock 1 you were a specific guy, you had a backstory,” Levine notes. “With Shock 2, I started you out with the classic ‘wake up with amnesia’.”

Abstract techniques and settings weren’t all the Shock license gave the team. It gave Irrational access to one of videogaming’s most startling antagonists, the hubristic artificial intelligence SHODAN. In the first System Shock, she frustrated and mocked the player at every turn, a rare case of a game’s primary antagonist being an almost constant presence.

Pg 2

“My job was to present SHODAN in a fresh way,” Levine says. “You’ve encountered her in the first game, and if she says the same things, why is it Shock 2? Why isn’t it Shock 1.5?” The result was to team SHODAN up with the player as a prickly, uncomfortable ally – but an ally nevertheless. “That was pretty daring for the time,” says Levine of the AI’s introduction. “Villains appeared in cutscenes, did their thing and then disappeared when you jumped on their head three times. It was really fun to try and do something more sophisticated. That twist at the beginning – even how she was introduced to you – was an important part of continuing her character and making sure the player knew what they were dealing with.”

In the working partnership with Looking Glass, Irrational provided the design, art and programming, while its old company provided the Dark Engine’s technology base and the services of its quality assurance team. Looking Glass also provided other talents, including sound maestro Eric Brosius (who has been involved with everything from Thief to Guitar Hero). His work on System Shock 2 is particularly memorable. “One of the reasons that he creates such powerful soundscapes is that he creates a soundspace which has a bit of ambiguity to it,” Levine argues.

“You can’t identify every single thing you can hear. Sounds, voices, things people are saying, things you can’t hear that are of unclear meaning. That creates a great deal of tension. It adds another element of mystery, another element of suspense.” Audio is undoubtedly one of System Shock 2’s highpoints, with designer, writer and wife of Eric, Terri Brosius, reprising her role as SHODAN, sitting alongside a host of memorable roles, from mutants to robots to… psionic monkeys?

moscalloutIt wasn’t just the team that was inexperienced; the Dark Engine itself was far from finished technology./moscalloutThe latter, while one of the most fondly remembered of the game’s cast, were actually an fortuitous accident. Finishing a mo-cap session two hours early, Levine was bullied by Jon Chey into just doing something to justify the time they’d paid for. “So I said [to the motion-capture actor]: ‘Do monkey motions’,” Levine says. “We had no monkeys in the game, but we did it anyway.” These assets had to find a home, and Levine hit on the idea of lab-experimented apes gaining sentience, and being justifiably annoyed about their treatment at the hands of Man.

“All those story elements we had to back-solve. I find I tend to write best in those situations, when I have a constraint set already,” Levine remembers. “I had these psychic monkeys… so I had to work out how and why, in a way which wasn’t ridiculous and hopefully kinda scary. When my back’s to a wall, I tend to work better.” Not that everyone saw the appeal of psychic monkeys from the outset: “Everyone else was: ‘Dude, you’re ****ing insane. We’re not having monkeys in the game!’”

That was about as easy as the development got. Every element was problematic. “No time. No money. I had no experience,” Levine states. “I’d never shipped a game before that.” In fact, of the three founders, only Chey had actually done so. “I think that only one or two people on the team had shipped a game before,” Levine adds. “That was a blessing and a curse. We had no idea what we were doing in some ways, but we also had no idea what we couldn’t do. That’s why the game feels innovative to some degree, as we were figuring it out as we went along.”

It wasn’t just the team that was inexperienced; the Dark Engine itself was far from finished technology, as Shock 2 was well under way before Thief came out. “It was still pretty broken,” Levine says. “It ended up giving us a lot of powerful things, but it constrained us in a lot of ways.” For example, the oft-ridiculed low-polygon models resulted from having to make a conservative guess at what the engine would definitely be able to manage and still be playable. There was also some misplaced effort in creating the co-op multiplayer which was patched into the game post release. “It was a real distraction,” Levine laments. “There are a number of people who really enjoyed it, but the amount of time versus the amount of reward for that versus what we could have done with the rest of the game… I don’t think it was a win. The singleplayer game would have been much, much, much stronger if we had that time back.”

Not that it hurt Shock 2’s critical standing; despite slender sales (“I don’t know the exact figures, but it certainly wasn’t a blockbuster”), the game has grown in people’s minds since, a key influence on the hype for Irrational’s BioShock. “When I first did it, people would just look at me unless they were the intelligentsia of the intelligentsia of the industry,” Levine says. “But now there’s so many people who know it. I’d imagine if the game was still available commercially, it’d still be selling – and would probably have been a small success at that point. It may have made money because it was so cheap to produce.”

Away from the matters of its financial performance, in terms of why it lingers in the imagination, Levine settles on the immaterial. Despite all the problems of its development, Shock 2 engaged with the imagination. “I think it has an atmosphere. Not a lot of games have atmosphere, and that really draws people,” he argues. “It’s not a Lord Of The Rings atmosphere, and I think people are drawn to that.”

[edit]
I seem to have found a similar, but not the same, article from 2008?

Making of: System Shock 2, 2008

https://web.archive.org/web/20210515153 ... em-shock-2

The lights are low. Everyone's panickedly fighting against a seemingly impossible, oppressive deadline. At every turn there's a crippling lack of resources. Viewed by any objective criteria, the small inexperienced team doesn't have the skills to achieve their aims. They're all crammed into a single room – in fact, half of one, since it's one room bisected with screens. When you look at where and how Irrational worked on their first game, it's easy to think of the claustrophobic horror of RPG/Shooter System Shock 2 as a pure product of its environment.

In fact, when looking at their situation in their early years, you begin to wonder why Irrational's co-founders of Ken Levine, Rob Fermier and Jonathan Chey splintered from Boston's illustrious and much-missed Looking Glass software in the first place. “Looking Glass was obviously a really impactful experience on me,” Levine says, “It was my first job in the games industry. I'd met a lot of people who I really respected and admired – people whose legacy is more known to the intelligentsia of the gaming field, and is still being felt. I left because despite how talented the people were there, in some ways it more like a university than a games company. There really was a dialogue about advancing the media, but not a lot about making successful products.”

You can imagine trying to explain this to your mum. No - it's not vomit. Its - er - an alien lifeform. Yes. That's right.
Coming from a film-industry background, Levine felt they needed to find a balance between art and commerce. “I thought – probably naively at the time – Hey! I can do that,” Levine says, “I had no idea what that would actually mean, as I was a cocky guy who thought it'd be easy. We went off on our own and very quickly found it was challenging.” Almost fatally so. Their first project, a single-player version of early isometric shooter Fireteam had been canceled, when its publisher decided to concentrate solely on multiplayer. This left Irrational at a loss, until Paul Neurath, head of Looking Glass, called them with an opportunity. While they'd left Looking Glass, they were still on good terms with their previous employers. In fact, their half room was actually buried in a corner of the larger company's studio.

Neurath's offer was incredibly open. Looking Glass had, in developing Thief: The Dark Project, developed their own in-house engine. All of Irrational were experienced with it, having all worked on Thief. Why not make a game with it with us? Any game you fancy, really. “We immediately started designing,” Levine says, “The three partners sat down, and we ended up with a game design which was basically our design for Shock 2, but in a totally different world. It was a kind of Heart of Darkness story, with a military commander gone crazy and your mission was to go to this crazy space-ship and assassinate him.”. This was pitched around various publishers. The one who bit was Electronic Arts, who – through their purchase of Origin – were the possessor of the System Shock IP. They suggested that the game could, in fact, be System Shock 2. “And we said... um... sure,” Levine laughs, “I rewrote the story and changed a few of the things, but the game design never changed.”

It was a rare opportunity. The original System Shock was one of the games which made Levine want to move into the games industry in the first place. What made it so special? “The feeling of being in a real place,” Levine says, “The feeling of a mystery, of unraveling it – not in an adventure game way, but in the context of an action game. You arrive and... what happened here? That's a really good storytelling mechanism.” Austin Grossman and Doug Church original idea from Shock was something Irrational expanded in their sequel. “In Shock 1 you were a specific guy, so had a backstory,” Levine says, “With Shock 2, I really started you out with the classic “you wake up with amnesia”.”

Abstract techniques and settings weren't all the Shock license gave them. It gave Irrational access to one of videogames' most startling antagonists, the hubristic Artificial Intelligence SHODAN. In the first System Shock, she frustrated and mocked the player at every turn, a rare case of the primary antagonist in a videogame being an almost constant presence. “My job was to try and work out how to present SHODAN in a fresh way to the player,” Levine recalls, “They've encountered her in the first game, and if she just says the same things she did then in the second, why is it Shock 2? Why isn't it Shock 1.5?” The resulting notion was to team up SHODAN with the player as an ally. An uncomfortable, prickly ally, but an ally nevertheless. “That was pretty daring for the time,” Levine talks of the initial appearance of SHODAN, “Villains only appeared in cut-scenes, do their thing and then disappear when you jump on their head three times. It was really fun to try and do something a bit more sophisticated. That twist at the beginning- even how she was introduced to you – was an important part of continuing her character and making sure the player knew what they were dealing with.”

In the working partnership with Looking Glass, Irrational provided the design, art and programming, while their old company provided the Dark Engine's technology base and the services of their Quality Assurance team. Looking Glass also provided other talents, including their Sound maestro Eric Brosius, (who has been involved in everything from Thief to Guitar Hero). His work on System Shock 2 is particularly memorable. “One of the reasons he creates such powerful soundscapes is that he creates a soundspace which has a bit of ambiguity to it,” Levine argues, “You can't identify every single thing you can hear. Sounds, voices, things people are saying, things you can't hear that are of unclear meaning.... That creates a great deal of tension. It adds another element of mystery, another element of suspense.” Sound is undoubtedly one of System Shock 2's highpoints, with Designer, Writer and wife of Eric, Terri Brosius reprising her role as SHODAN, sitting alongside a host of memorable roles, from mutants to robots to... psionic monkeys?

The latter, while one of the most fondly remembered of the game's cast, were actually an fortuitous accident. Finishing a motion-capture session two hours early , Levine was bullied by Jon Chey into just doing something to justify the time they'd paid for . “So I said [to the motion capture actor]... do monkey motions,” Levine says, “We had no monkeys in the game but we did it anyway”. These assets had to find a home, and Levine hit on the idea of lab-experimented apes, gaining sentience and being justifiably annoyed about their treatment at their hand of man. “All those story elements we had to back-solve. I find I tend to write best in those situations, when I have a constraint set already.” Levine says, “I have these psychic monkeys... so I had to work out how and why, in a way which wasn't ridiculous and hopefully kinda scary. When my back to a wall, I tend to work better”. Not that everyone saw the appeal of Psychic monkeys originally. “Everyone else was “Dude – you're ******* insane. We're not having monkeys in the game”,” Levine laughs.

That was about as easy as the development got. Every element was problematic. “No time. No money. I had no experience,” Levine states, “I'd never shipped a game before that.” In fact, of the three founders, only Chey had actually done so. “I think that only one or two people on the /team/ had shipped a game before,” Levine says, “That was a blessing and a curse. We had no idea what we were doing in some ways, but we also had no idea what we couldn't do. That's why the game feels innovative to some degree, as we were figuring it out as we went along.” It wasn't just the team that was inexperienced. The Dark Engine itself was far from finished technology, as Shock 2 was well underway before Thief came out. “It was still pretty broken,” Ken says, “It ended up giving us a lot of powerful things, but it constrained us in a lot of ways.” For example, the oft-ridiculed low-polygon models were resulting from having to make a conservative guess of what the engine would definitely be able to manage and still be playable. There was also some misplaced effort, in creating the co-op multiplayer which was patched into the game post release. “It was a real distraction,” Levine laments, “There are a number of people who really enjoyed it but the amount of time versus the amount of reward for that versus what we could have done on the rest of the game... I don't think it was a win. The single player game would have been much, much, much more stronger if we had that time back.”

Not that it hurt Shock 2's critical standing; despite slender sales (“I don't know the exact figures, but It certainly wasn't a blockbuster.”) its only grown in people's minds since, a key influence in people's anticipation for Irrational's Bioshock. “When I first did it, people would just look at me unless they were the intelligentsia of the intelligentsia of the game industry,” Levine says, “But now there's so many people who know it. I'd imagine if the game was still available commercially, it'll still be selling at this point. It'll probably have doubled in sales – and would probably have been a small success at that point. It may have made money because it was so cheap to produce.”.

Away from the matters of its financial performance, in terms of why it lingers in the imagination, Levine settles on the immaterial. Despite all the problems of its development, Shock 2 engaged with the imagination. “I think it has an atmosphere. Not a lot of games have atmosphere, and that really draws people.” Levine argues, “It's not a Lord of the Rings atmosphere, and I think people are drawn to that.”

[rusty_shackleford]

Dorian Hart is the only(?) guy credited on Ultima Underworld II, System Shock, System Shock 2, Thief, and Thief II in a design role.

I think that's the person with the most credits between all the games, I don't think anyone has a credit on all of them. Some of the LGS guys are credited on System Shock 2 in non-design roles, but I don't know how much they did, I suspect not much?

[rusty_shackleford]

The Making of System Shock 2's best level, 2017, Ian Vogel interview
https://web.archive.org/web/20220508082 ... best-level

It's one of gaming's most terrifying introductions. You awake in a cryotube on the medical deck of the spaceship Von Braun. Illegal cybernetics have been implanted into your brain, and your memory has been wiped like a hard-drive. You're contacted by Dr. Janice Polito, who summarises the situation. Nearly everyone on the ship is either dead, or infected with a strange organism that mutates them and turns them hostile. There's an explosion, and Polito tells you to get out of cryobay, because soon there'll be another explosion, and then everything in the area will be sucked into space.

You rush to the airlock, crawling through a hamster run of corridors and access tunnels as you're given a brief rundown of how to play. No sooner have you made it through the airlock when you're attacked by a malformed crewmember, begging you to kill him. All you've got to hand is a wrench. If you're lucky, you'll bludgeon him to death. He'll be the first of many.


Med/Sci is the opening area of System Shock 2, one of the most influential games of its era. It has directly inspired games like BioShock, Dead Space and this year's Prey, while aspects of its design have found their way into dozens of other titles. But Med/Sci itself substantially influenced how the remainder of System Shock 2 was developed, as it's in this initial area where the ideas and atmosphere of the game are established, and where the player is grounded in its themes and modes of play.


"We had to do a lot In System Shock 2 with the first level," says Ian Vogel, a former level designer at Irrational, and the man who authored Med/Sci. "We're giving you all the world-building, we're giving you all these new notions of who you are, what's going on with the ship, all these new mechanics, new weapons. And on top of that you want that feeling of emergence, of autonomy as a player."

How does a designer juggle all of these different elements when building a level? Vogel boiled it down to a simple objective. "My goal was to get an 88 in PC Gamer. And that was my only goal."

System Shock 2 was the second game Vogel worked on. The first was Thief. Although Vogel enjoyed his time on Looking Glass' seminal stealth game, he says it "was not as customisable as I personally liked". When Looking Glass and Irrational Games joined forced to design a sequel to System Shock, Vogel jumped ship from the former to the latter.

"When I met with Ken [Levine] and John Chey, the guys at Irrational, I got this scrappy, hungry feeling that I wanted to be part of. I got this feeling that these guys wanted to make their mark," Vogel says. "I loved the game design and I loved the theme, and I loved the original System Shock. So I was like, 'I want to make this my own, and I want to leave my imprint on this title.'"

System Shock 2 has a very different layout to Thief, and indeed most immersive sims. From the player's perspective it isn't constructed from individual levels. At least, not explicitly. The spaceship Von Braun does comprise several decks, each with a different form and function and separated by loading screens. But the environment is built through a more holistic approach, with the player required to traverse back and forth through the ship frequently. Indeed, if System Shock 2 did have a sequential structure, then Med/Sci would actually occur smack in the middle of the game.

It's from this perspective that Looking Glass and Irrational began development. "There wasn't a really great plan for Med/Sci at the time because we're all scrabbling to make the entire game at once, right?" says Vogel. "It was basically a flat basement space, and it just didn't feel like a spaceship. It didn't feel interesting. There weren't any nooks and crannies that were either architecturally true to what a ship could be. It just felt flat and kinda lifeless."


In Med/Sci, Vogel saw his chance to make his mark. He stepped forward and asked for creative control over the level. "I just owned it. I was like 'Lemme do this' and I rebuilt the level three or four times," he says. "I just wanted to welcome players and terrify them at the same time."

There were various sources of inspiration for the way Med/Sci introduces the player. From a structural and narrative standpoint, the primary influence was not Thief or the original System Shock, but Half-Life. "That had shipped I think a few months earlier, and I just remember their attention to narrative, their pacing, the mystery that you felt as the hero uncovering this world," Vogel says. "I wanted to use the emotional anchors and prods that Half-Life was looking at." This is particularly evident in the early moments of Med/Sci, when there are several scripted events that demonstrate the deteriorating condition of the ship.

Half-Life offered Vogel a framework for bringing the player into System Shock 2. But the tone and the atmosphere emerged from another source entirely. "We didn't have a clear North Star from a vision standpoint. We knew the game. We knew what we wanted the game to be. But we couldn't easily replicate it even to ourselves. And I was talking to the group one day, I'm like 'You know what this is, we need The Shining in space.'"

The particular nature of the horror in The Shining - a malevolent presence that doesn't simply attack but manipulates and infects over time - was the lynchpin in the atmosphere that Vogel and the team were grasping at. "That was the moment where everything clicked. It wasn't a literal recreation of The Shining. But it was that feeling of isolation, and hallucination and unreliable narrators," Vogel says. "Everything that happened with SHODAN later on, that had nothing to do with The Shining, but that atmosphere had everything to do with The Shining."

Where System Shock 2 diverged from The Shining (Vogel was inspired by both Stephen King's novel and Stanley Kubrick's film, though the two offer famously different approaches) is that there is not one malevolent force working inside the Von Braun, but two. What's more, these two forces are at war with each other, while the player is a pawn caught in the middle. On the one side is the imperious, manipulative AI SHODAN, and on the other, the aggressive, infectious hivemind of the Many. This battle between the synthetic and the organic becomes the defining theme of the game. And it's a theme that coagulates in the corridors of Med/Sci.


Take the basic layout of Med/Sci, which again has two sources of inspiration. The first, as Vogel explains, is Star Trek. "I would spend hours with Star Trek blueprints and I would just think about how a game level might be constructed, and I would look at where they put the toilets and I would look at where they put the research and I would look at how they built the decks relative to each other." Submarines and battleships were also useful references. Vogel wanted to imbue Med/Sci with a "dark and functional" feel and these naval vessels, both real and imagined, provided that cold and logical pragmatism Vogel sought.

But the other strand of inspiration for Med/Sci, as hinted at by the first part of the name, is a hospital. "If I go to a doctor here in Seattle, I'm usually shepherded down to a basement floor somewhere where there's tons of labs and there's signs but I still get lost. And there's 15 intersections along the way and I've already taken a left when I should have gone right, and now all of a sudden I gotta ask a nurse how to get to **** X-Ray and it was right in front of me the whole time," Vogel says. The point is, as Vogel further explains that hospitals aren't always built efficiently. They're vast, bustling and confusing places, almost hive-like in structure.

The resulting layout of Med/Sci is a disorienting blend of order and chaos, where every room and sub-section of the deck has a clearly defined purpose, but it's all connected by a twisting maze of corridors and staircases that's bewildering to anyone who doesn't live and work in it day-to-day. It's a combination of synthetic design and organic necessity, where efficiency and logic collides with the realities of working with the limited space available aboard a transportation vessel.

It would be nice and neat if there was a detailed timeline for how each room and corridor of Med/Sci was laid out. But development didn't work like that. Instead the design resulted from a more high-level process of gradually fleshing out the deck over many iterations. "We'd go a little bit from paper design, where we're figuring out some rough balances with the game, some rough introductions. We'll write design treatments which say, 'In this level, here's the plot, here's the sort of mystery, here's the gameplay mechanics we're going to introduce, here's the enemies we're going to introduce," Vogel explains. "Then, the easiest thing for me to do is just go build it, right? Even if it's ugly and untextured."

That said, Vogel does recall that the first version of Med/Sci was an empty shell, where he defined the layout and figured out what each area of the deck would be used for. From that point, subsequent iterations were about fleshing out that space, adding in storytelling cues, enemy patrols, and weapon placements.

Even in these smaller elements, the theme of synthetic and organic reveals itself. The first enemies the player faces are what Vogel terms the "pipe grunts" - former soldiers who have been brainwashed and mutated by the Many - and psionic monkeys which have escaped their containment in the medical research bay, and attack the player with telekinetic blasts. "Having these grunts that used to be soldiers, having these monkeys that used to be probably just normal animals, Med/Sci was a way to also bring in that sort of cyber-body fusion and create a little palette for it."


The monkeys were almost cut from System Shock 2, and were only saved by a last-minute intervention from Ken Levine. "I'm gonna confess something. I didn't like the monkeys. At first. We had some extra mo-cap time, and Ken and I were talking very briefly on the phone, and he was like 'I'm gonna do these monkeys, what do you think?'; And I'm like, 'I think they're stupid. Psionic monkeys, are you kidding me?' And he was like 'Why don't we give it a shot? We've got some extra time'". Yet when Vogel saw the monkeys in action, he liked how surprising and unsettling they were. In the end, he stripped out several other enemies from Med/Sci so that they focussed in on the monkeys as a key opponent in this early part of the game.

There were two other vital components to Med/Sci's design. The first was its need to accommodate for the player's various abilities by offering multiple ways to progress through the level. But Vogel didn't want the options to be so broad that the feeling of isolation and claustrophobia were lost. His approach to this problem was what is known as hub and spoke design. "You have a framework for how to gate aspects of the story, or the narrative, or the levelling. We don't want you to get too far ahead of yourself, but we don't want you to feel like you're on a linear rail either," he says. "That's where that hub and spoke comes in line. How you treat each threat. Do you choose to go down that hall or that hall first or second?...But at the end of the day you still gotta get the passcode to get out of the level."

The other important element of Med/Sci's design is that it's the central deck of the Von Braun, and as such you don't pass through it once, but multiple times. Hence, Vogel didn't want the level to feel dead and sterile, but alive and dangerous. Irrational decided that the enemies on the Von Braun should spawn semi-randomly, through a system that is tailored to balance tension and unpredictability with the skills of the player. "We didn't just slap down a bunch of spawners and play it, right?," Vogel says. "We really created the spawning around 'What's the level of intensity? What's the level of fear and exploration? What's that balance with the narrative and combat?'"

Again, here you see System Shock 2's thematic juxtaposition between organic and synthetic, of designing some encounters specifically, while letting others evolve naturally. It's a theme that cuts right down to a coding level, and is visible in almost every facet of the game. Even the name of Med/Sci is an abbreviated introduction to the concept, the treatment of living organisms, and the creation of synthetic materials and compounds, crashing head-on against each-other in a battle for supremacy.


Vogel cites designing Med/Sci as one of the best creative experiences he's had. Nevertheless, there are some parts of the level that, if he could, he would go back and change. His biggest regret is the information kiosks dotted around the level, which basically provide explicit text tutorials on how to play. "We had to create them to explain the game, which was a failure in my view. But they served the purpose at the time."

The design of Med/Sci influenced the remainder of System Shock 2 in several ways. The way it presented the Von Braun as falling apart, and how it seemed to be constantly moving and changing, were not major factors in the game until Med/Sci was finalised. "I remember pretty late into the game, until we did Med/Sci at that level, there was something missing, of movement, of alive-ness. And that includes things going wrong. That includes not just the patrols and the monsters and stuff. But things going wrong, things exploding."

In turn, Med/Sci's influence has spread throughout gaming. BioShock, a game that Vogel also worked on, was famously designed as a spiritual successor to System Shock 2. But then there are games like Dead Space, whose references to System Shock 2 are written in blood on the game's walls. The most recent homage to System Shock 2 is Prey, which Vogel is playing at the moment. "Dude, it's straight-up. I love it," he says. But what Vogel focusses on are not so much these big, earnest love-letters to Irrational and Looking Glass's work, but smaller elements that appear in games you might not think about being associated with System Shock.

"I dunno about you, but I've seen a lot of games with graffiti and blood on the walls, and hacking cameras and, you know, even little things like drinking booze and having a sort-of positive and a sort-of negative effect. Living people showing up behind windows that suggests there's life, but you're really not letting the player interact with it," he says. "It's just wonderful to feel that my original goal to get an 88 in PC Gamer ended up impacting all these wonderful teams and these wonderful games. Honestly, it's humbling."

System Shock 2 launched on August 11, 1999. It received a score of 95 in PC Gamer.

[rusty_shackleford]

I seem to have found a similar, but not the same, article from 2008?

If anyone knows more about this, feel free to tell the class

[rusty_shackleford]

[Oddment]

Jonathan Chey interview, 2014 (System Shock 2, Thief/Thief 2), doesn't seem to have much to do with the topic at hand
https://web.archive.org/web/20140905221 ... rd-hunter/

[rusty_shackleford]

[Subsequent Material, IRG, SS2]

System Shock 2 Deep Dives — Dorian Hart

In this Deep Dive bonus interview, Nightdive's Locke Vincent chats with Dorian Hart of Looking Glass Studios and Irrational Games. Topics include Dorian's experiences at Looking Glass Studios and Irrational Games, working on titles like Ultima Underworld II and Thief: The Dark Project, challenges with balancing a game like System Shock 2, and more!

[rusty_shackleford]

[Subsequent Material, IRG, SS2]

System Shock 2 Deep Dives — Mark LeBlanc

In this Deep Dive bonus interview, Nightdive's Locke Vincent sits down with Looking Glass Studios programmer/designer Marc LeBlanc to talk about his work on System Shock and System Shock 2, including how he got hired at Looking Glass Studios, his work on titles like Ultima Underworld, and designing key elements in System Shock and System Shock 2!

[rusty_shackleford]

[Subsequent Material, IRG, SS2]

System Shock 2 Deep Dives — Mauricio Tejerina

In this Deep Dive bonus interview, Nightdive's Locke Vincent sits down with Mauricio Tejerina, 3D artist on System Shock 2 at Irrational Games. Topics include how Mauricio first got involved with Irrational Games, what it was like as a 3D artist on a video game in the late 90s, art direction in System Shock 2, and more!

[rusty_shackleford]

[Subsequent Material, IRG, SS2]

Ken Levine on System Shock 2, Ghost Story Games, and Judas | Deep Dive

In this extra special Deep Dive bonus interview, Nightdive's Lawrence Sonntag sits down with the legendary Ken Levine, lead designer and writer on System Shock 2 and co-founder of Ghost Story Games (formerly Irrational Games), to talk about his work on System Shock 2, his approach to game writing and development, vision for Ghost Story Games' upcoming first-person shooter Judas, and more!