This truly is an age of miracles. Of the myriad horror games I’d like to see get remade, remastered or sequel’d, I would not have expected to see the System Shock series pick up such considerable momentum so quickly. It’s almost as if there’s someone, or something pulling the strings on this. I’m not sure what the driving force behind this is, but this mysterious puppeteer has shown a level of efficiency that almost seems inhuman.
Oh, I get it. It’s SHODAN.
Without that artificial sociopath, System Shock 3 would’ve taken an additional 3-5 Call of Duty sequels to happen — or 5-7 Assassin’s Creed’s, for those of you who are on the Metric system.
Night Dive only recently acquired the rights to the series and they’re not wasting any time in reminding us exactly why we should care about its return. They’re going about it in a really clever way, starting with their treatment of the first game. It started small, with a remaster that doubled as a love letter to the game’s core audience, earning them the trust of longtime fans who had watched System Shock go neglected for far too long.
Their plan has gotten more ambitious since then, with the recent unveiling of a legit remake that should go a long way in selling a wider audience on it. If that game can appeal to the generations of horror enthusiasts who don’t yet know what it’s like to be torn asunder by SHODAN’s verbal abuse.
When Night Dive’s head of business development told us a month ago that a brand new sequel would only be possible if a third party developer got on board, he must’ve said that within earshot of Andrew Divoff, who probably used what’s left of his wish-granting powers to make it happen.
I want to believe that it was Andrew Divoff, even though it’s more likely that a certain narcissistic jumble of broken code is merely looking to make a comeback. In the first two games, SHODAN had what you might call a divine ambition. She was the almost-video game equivalent of SkyNet, if SkyNet had a wicked tongue and wasn’t quite as adept at wiping out the human race.
SHODAN’s legacy mostly consists of slinging stinging insults in a tone that shifted between how one might scold a child to how one might respond to a bag of garbage that had somehow come alive to describe, in gruesome detail, what it would like to do with all our moms.
System Shock faces a very special kind of obstacle that’s exclusively reserved for cult classics the world almost forgot about when we thought Y2K was killing our computers, or whatever. SHODAN broke me down when I was but a wee lad. I didn’t know you could tear someone apart with words until I had felt their devastating power firsthand. So of course I paused the game after every insult so I could cry into a snack cake for a few minutes.
I was always a sensitive boy, just ask my mom.
I haven’t sobbed into a treat in like, five months. My game is on point. SHODAN best not have gotten rusty, or this will be easy. I’m confident in my position as an adult man. I probably won’t even need one cry-break the next time she and I partake in verbal fisticuffs.
According to the official countdown clock, there’s more to come on Monday. Stay tuned!
