Changing up the classic chiptune soundtrack to something a bit more subtle is one way that Night Dive hopes to achieve that goal.ĭrawing inspiration from games that bear System Shock's influence, like Dead Space and even spiritual successor BioShock, might seem ironic. 'We've kind of shifted the tone from the original game of a horror adventure to more of a horror experience,' Kick says, naming Dead Space as an influence on the revamp of System Shock, which will otherwise maintain the original's story. But Kick says that the era's technical limitations kept the game from achieving its intended tone of alienation. There are few points of contact, with the most vocal being the artificially intelligent SHODAN.

The original game is meant to be a lonely experience players control an unseen, unnamed hacker on an uninhabited space station. He explains that these subtle additions or tweaks go toward crafting a feeling of 'extreme isolation.'Įvoking that sensation is something that modern technology affords System Shock now more than it did back in the '90s when Looking Glass Studios was working on it. That's the kind of grandiosity that's absent in the original System Shock, and, according to Kick, it's immersive touches like these that make this more than an upgrade. 'At the end of the video,' he says, 'you'll see this massive room with these windows spanning the length of the floor, and outside you'll see Saturn and galaxies surrounding the station' in which the game takes place. Fans might recognize the medical suite setting at first but, Kick tells us, Night Dive has made some large alterations.

The video above shows off the first two minutes of the game.

System shock 1 development