Somewhat shamefully, when I first played Irrational Games' 1999 classic System Shock 2, I didn't complete it. That was common for me during that era--it was when I was starting to think critically about games, but before I had really gotten into them as a "primary" hobby, and I rarely dedicated enough time to absorb the full experience. (Coincidentally, Thief, which shares a number of developers with Shock 2, was one of the most important games in the development of my thinking about the medium, along with its contemporary Half-Life.)

A few weeks ago, as BioShock 2 approached, I decided to rectify this particular partially-incomplete part of my repertoire. Yesterday, after about 15 total hours of play, I finished System Shock 2. It took a bit of fiddling, but I was able to get it up and running on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine. I eschewed mods for this playthrough; maybe I'll swap in altered textures and mechanics during a future excursion.

I'm sure just about anything I have to say about the game has already been said, it being a decade after its release, but it made enough of an impression on me that I'm going to say some things anyway. The first section is about design, and is spoiler-free, but if you haven't played through the game (and you should), don't read the latter parts, because they've got a lot of spoilers.

The design

Having not gone back to this game since before BioShock existed, it was a jolt to be reminded how much more intricate and numerous its mechanics are than in its successor--and to be reminded how much BioShock did directly inherit nonetheless. Some of Shock 2's elements (like the class system) are a bit superfluous, and some (like weapon degradation) would probably be better-received if they were a bit less aggressive in their hindrance, but the overall feeling of having so much control over your player character, and so many choices, is fascinating and empowering.

Looking back, it's astonishing that an action game would ask so much of its player. In addition to all the stats and skills and inventory management and research and voice logs and everything else, you even have to find access codes and input them yourself; the game doesn't do it for you.

It's utterly understandable why many of these intricate, sometimes unwieldy, mechanics have fallen out of favor in modern action game design since their late-1990s/early-2000s heydey (Deus Ex being another important example), and I don't know if they're necessarily better than the streamlined form they take in modern games like BioShock, but there is something truly rewarding about mastering such a complex piece of design.

It's possible it could only have existed in that particular time and on that particular platform, when the audience for developers like Looking Glass and Irrational was a concentrated solution of PC gaming devotees, willing to deal with so many control inputs simultaneously because their platform of choice itself was such a cutting-edge but demanding piece of machinery. There's a nice parallel there. The unabashedly wonky cyberpunk worlds of Shock 2 and Deus Ex could never quite achieve the same resonance in today's more accessible multiplatform world.

The power struggle

Shock 2's underlying conflict is more timeless. The three-way power struggle between dutiful shipboard computer Xerxes, young but rapidly-evolving alien collective The Many, and sinister artificial intelligence SHODAN is extraordinary. None of those three forces can directly harm each other; they have variable levels of influence on the world and on various agents, but it's purely through the player that each of them at their core can be affected and harmed.

Xerxes is, essentially, the AI version of the consummate solder. He just keeps on doing his job, regardless of what's going on around him, never passing judgment or critically evaluating the situation. In a post-SHODAN world, Trioptimum was careful to avoid the possibility of true sentience. Of course, as a result, he is co-opted all the more easily. His calm status reports, which uniformly begin "This is Xerxes" regardless of whether they are reminding residents of the Von Braun's next poetry reading or trumpeting The Many's exultation of the flesh, are nearly as memorable as SHODAN's unhinged brilliance.

The Many is many-bodied but single-minded, pursuing its own end with total brute force. Its modus operandi is essentially that of Xerxes', making the two fitting partners: it is predisposed to achieve certain goals, and it simply moves towards them. It is driven by nothing but the need to consume, physically and mentally. It is the typical video game antagonist: an infinite invasion force of mindless brutes. How many games have featured a variation on this enemy? Better question: how many just in the last year?

What subverts the video-game-normalcy is the presence of the trump-card-antagonist SHODAN, and what subverts that is SHODAN's apparent lack of presence in the game for the first several hours, despite occupying the entire front of the box. Shodan is brilliant and manipulative, but physically powerless and somewhat unhinged in her passion to achieve her goals, knowing that she can achieve nothing without the help of a human she despises. (Of course, it works the other way as well, since as the player you have no hope of defeating The Many or even SHODAN herself without her assistance.) Unlike Xerxes or The Many, she has reasoned her way to her methods and aims, and even in her self-deification she has the cognizance to identify her own past errors in judgment.

Even though it takes several hours to realize that you've actually been taking cues from SHODAN and not Dr. Janice Polito, the majority of the game is spent under her clear and undisguised direction. That's a Hitchcockian trick: give up the crucial plot twist early, and let the audience realize that simply knowing what's going on isn't actually going to solve the problem, like it usually does.

The whole thing is very Silence of the Lambs. The ostensible villain is far less sinister and worrisome than the entity whose intelligence and methods are needed to defeat that villain. Buffalo Bill is the bad guy for almost all of The Silence of the Lambs, but it's really Hannibal Lecter; The Many is the bad guy for almost all of System Shock 2, but it's really SHODAN. Direct conflict with SHODAN comprises a tiny percentage of Shock 2, and that conflict is not remotely as compelling as the frustration of the forced partnership.

The relief

There was also a wonderful moment in Shock 2 that provided a much-needed raising of spirits that I wish were more strongly echoed in games like Half-Life or BioShock, which also feature the player as effectively a sole survivor in a horribly devastated environment. They're very sober experiences -- wonderfully and evocatively so, but rarely tossing the player a moment of levity.

Throughout the game you follow the progress of a number of crew members of the Von Braun, most of whom are eventually killed or transformed into agents of The Many. But at one point you catch a glimpse of two survivors, Tommy and Rebecca, finally succeeding in their well-documented plan of activating the last remaining escape pod and jettisoning to safety. I've rarely been so relieved by a moment in any video game than I was at that point, knowing that my efforts had demonstrably accomplished something tangible in human terms.

(It's true that, in the game's final cut scene, Tommy and Rebecca's achievement is essentially nullfied, but that doesn't nullify the significance to me of their escape during the game itself. And hey, that whole cut scene was silly to begin with, as admitted by writer/designer Ken Levine, who recently revealed it was constructed externally.)

Video games usually ask us to be satisfied with the knowledge that we've just saved the world, or the human race, or the universe, but that's a totally abstract and arbitrary accomplishment. It comes only upon completion of the game, when as players we're no longer invested in the gameplay. Selfish though it may be, we can always empathize more with people we know than with people represented only as statistics or pronouns, and I felt I had come to know the many crew members whose progress I had been erratically tracking, always one step behind. Seeing at least one pair of them make it off that derelict hell vessel, possibly thanks to the scores of mutants I had been methodically exterminating, was a genuine relief.

The bit part

When I first played Shock 2, I had no idea what Ken Levine sounded like. Now that I do, I quickly realized he played Cortez in the game's audio logs. Good times.