How one phone call saved a tiny new studio and gave the world System Shock 2

Unless you're Blizzard, and you have an alpha three years ahead of time... games aren't fun until quite late. System Shock 2 was certainly no exception.Irrational got roughly $650,000 to make System Shock 2, just over $1m in today's money. It wasn't a lot, and they had no choice but to hire junior developers: The many interfaces were all built by 19-year-old Mike Swiderek, who later worked on Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite.

Levine was seemingly more relaxed."I think I'm lucky in the sense that I can fall in love with things even if they're not worthy of that much love yet," he says."That's an important thing for a game developer. Because games aren't fun. Unless you're Blizzard, and you have an alpha three years ahead of time that is anybody else's finished game, games aren't fun until quite late. System Shock 2 was certainly no exception.

Enemies could patrol and search an area on their own but it was difficult to make them perform specific actions, or even walk where the team wanted them to. Small changes in pathfinding or character movement could play havoc with these cutscenes, making characters walk, for example, to the wrong side of a desk. Chey says that"getting the camera work and the timing of things right when you've got this constantly changing [behavior] is really hard.

The short development cycle inevitably led to crunch. Chey recalls the workload being"insane": He was essentially working three jobs, managing the project, programming the AI and carrying out company administration such as payroll and taxes."It was out of control. I was working six-and-a-half days a week, I don't really remember having a holiday during that time."

Despite the rough edges and long hours, System Shock 2's brilliance was slowly beginning to emerge. There came a time where Chey could look past the missing polish and see individual ideas—the storytelling, the player customisation, the stealth, the crafting, the exploration—coming together."There was a richness to the game," he says."[At the time] shooters were barebones, hyper-action focused.

But when is it coming out.

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