As the nameless Hacker, you must now dismantle SHODAN’s systems from within and ensure the station cannot be weaponised against the Earth. Greed and vanity set SHODAN loose, breathing into the artificial intelligence a God-complex which seeks to destroy the Earth and lead a cybernetic, mutant uprising. The Hacker awakens on a SHODAN-controlled space station in which robots now rule and all surviving humans are either dead, mutated, or have become the testing flock for SHODAN’s cyborg master race. Here they are blackmailed into taking the safety limiters off the station’s AI, leading to the emergence of the famous video game villain, the proto-GLaDOS, SHODAN. Players control the cybernetically enhanced Hacker who is transported to the Citadel space station against their will. System Shock comes to us like a loud smack delivered all the way from 1994, and has been a fascinating museum tour into a space station I wish to never return to. Now I’ve spent the better part of 20 hours with Nightdive Studio’s ambitious remake of the 28-year-old millennial whose “Shock”-ing namesake has come to occupy a revered status in the shooter canon. Well, I’ve since played this hallowed sequel and was impressed, but also left wondering why the legacy of the original game has been so outshone.

One day, I hoped, I would see what all the fuss was about. A sequel that apparently outshone its predecessor according to many of the think pieces of the time found in my gaming magazine collection. That and Half-Life were sewn into my adolescent brain as two of the most revolutionary first-person shooters of the 90s.

A titan among classic FPS games of the previous century.

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