TheSystem Shockremake of the 1994 action adventure of the same name by Looking Glass Studios is returning the vintagecyberspace aestheticto gamers’ field of vision.Nightdive Studiosis the team behind the reconstruction, returning the security hacker protagonist to take down the insidious artificial intelligence SHODAN, and this premise has become very meta in this day and age.
Nightdive Studios has made a name for itself reviving “abandonware” videogames for modern consoles, in a stance of advocacy for preserving retro titles. The list of rejuvenated classics includesTurok: Dinosaur Hunter,Doom64, andQuake. Focusing on System Shock’s return, the game’s director had an eye-opening opinion on the similarities between the Sci-Fi horror’s A.I. predicament and our own battle in the real world.
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In aninterviewwith GamesRadar, Nightdive co-founder and director, Stephen Kick, talked at length about System Shock’s enhanced horror elements, as he wanted to include “Dead Space levels of carnage.” Since horror games are a core element in Kick’s “personal DNA”, being raised on Lovecraft and named after prolific horror writer Stephen King, Nightdive wanted to push System Shock’s gore “to the extreme”. We called System Shock a “faithful remake, for better or worse” in our 6.2 out of 10review.
Joining horror as a fundamental theme in the remake is the story’s A.I. oppression, and this threat, sadly, exists in our reality as well. “The story of System Shock revolves around an artificial intelligence that has its ethical constraints removed. Which is, again, a very real issue that we have to think about and we have to talk about,” Kick highlighted.
A number of questions are raised when discussing the insurgence of A.I., including: “Is it going to see us as, like in System Shock, a bunch of insects and monkeys that are just kind of banging around on tools, there for the enjoyment of its experimentation?"
Ultimately, the state of our technological advancement has begun to resemble the futuristic worlds of Blade Runner andCyberpunk: 2077, and the consequences of A.I. growth bring I, Robot a little closer to home. Kick believes our path could follow a similar one to System Shock’s, explaining “At the end of the day, System Shock is a stark reminder that contemporary fears are largely unchanged. There’s a lot of unknowns in our future, and this is a potential future that we could be looking at."
Additionally, Kick thought System Shock’s release occurred at a “timely moment in history,” labeling A.I. concerns as “the other side of the horror coin” and noting the “existential dread" it spreads in our lives.
On a brighter note, Kick was asked if Nightdive had ever considered carving out an original IP instead of breathing new life into pre-existing titles. “Yeah, that’s been brought up a lot,” Kick admitted, and herevealed a premisethat had been mulled over in his mind for “the last 11 years” based on the studio’s title logo.
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