System Shock was originally positioned as “Sonic in space”
System Shock served as a source of inspiration for many games, from such immersive simulators as Deus Ex, to direct spiritual heirs, such as Bioshock. Even Dead Space was originally conceived as System Shock 3. But according to the new report, the origin of the System Shock itself is more strange than you can imagine.
The report published by Rock Paper Shotgun tells the story of creating a game by the votes of its developers. And during his memoirs, designer Austin Grossman claims that the original source of inspiration for the game was none other than Sonic.
The first mention of the System Shock project, which I heard, was what someone said: "Oh yes, we are going to make Sonic the Hedgehog, but in space. It was an original concept. I don’t know whose concept it was, and why it seemed to them a super good idea.
This is a truly strange history of origin, which the executive producer of the game, Warren Spector, with difficulty recalls. "I don’t remember anything about it at all. Even looking back, I don’t see it. Strange".
Grossman continues to explain that this idea in the end "She came to naught", And then the System Shock was replaced by a more familiar cyberpunk challenge".
Everyone watched Ridley Scott’s films, and I was a big fan of William Gibson. After all the pretentiousness and compelled bizarre of the Ultima franchise, we just wanted everything to be dirty, erratic and futuristic for some time.
In the article you can find several more interesting facts about the origin of System Shock. Grossman, for example, belongs to the idea of telling a story using audio recordings, and the programmer Rob farm said: "There was a desire to make the mechanics a little more degest in nature". Grossman gives several sources of inspiration for the idea of an audio magazine, including the Pool of Radiance game and a scene from "Brotherhood of the Ring", "когда они находятся в Мории и Гэндальф зачитывает запись, которую гномы вели о своем падении". It also turned out that one of the alternative names for System Shock was Biosfear, "What looks like a computer BIOS, as well as "The biosphere"", – Clarifies the farm.