'My strongest motivation was not wanting to look like a fool, because we’d never done anything like this before in our lives.'

'It was probably the most pressure I’ve felt in my life,' says Jonathan Chey, one of its three lead developers. It was the first project by a new studio called Irrational Games, a chance to prove it could deliver a game that matched the calibre of Looking Glass, the developer of the original System Shock, Thief, and other PC classics. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. The game comes with the original manuals, a full soundtrack, concept artwork, maps, radio interviews with developer Ken Levine, and even the original pitch document used to sell the game's concept.This article was originally published in PC Gamer magazine. GOG.com is offering the game for $9.99-a price which gets you not only System Shock 2 repackaged to work correctly with modern Windows operating systems and computers (the game in its original form has issues running on computers with multicore CPUs), but also a set of excellent extras. Now, though, all of the rights have been gathered together again and entrusted to GOG.com, a site which has proven to be an excellent steward of the classic games of days gone by. Even making a sequel proved impossible, prompting Looking Glass alum Ken Levine to instead create BioShock, a game sharing many of System Shock 2's gameplay characteristics but none of the intellectual property. No single entity held all of the legal pieces necessary to package and publish the game. RockPaperShotgun has published the story of the multiyear battle waged to secure all of the rights necessary to digitally distribute the game, and it's an amazing read.ĭevelopment house Looking Glass Studios dissolved barely a year after System Shock 2's debut, and after the dissolution, the rights to the 'System Shock' name and the trademarks ended up with different companies-including, oddly enough, an insurance company. After years of limbo, however, GOG.com (formerly known as 'Good Old Games') has begun offering the game for sale. Unfortunately, it has been almost impossible to legally acquire the game for a number of years.

System shock 2