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A Looking Glass Half Empty, Part 2: A Series of Unfortunate Events


This article tells part of the story of Looking Glass Studios.

Coming out of 1998, the folks at Looking Glass Studios believed they had pretty good reason to feel optimistic about their future. With Thief, they had delivered not just their first profitable original game since 1995’s Flight Unlimited but their biggest single commercial success ever. They had no fewer than four more games slated for release within the next fifteen months, a positively blistering pace for them. Yes, all of said games were sequels and iterations on existing brands, but that was just the nature of the industry by now, wasn’t it? As long-running franchises like Ultima had first begun to demonstrate fifteen years ago, there was no reason you couldn’t continue to innovate under a well-known and -loved banner headline. Looking Glass closed their Austin office that had done so much to pay the bills in the past by taking on porting contracts. In the wake of Thief, they felt ready to concentrate entirely on their own games.

Then, just as they thought they had finally found their footing, the ground started to shift beneath Looking Glass once again. Less than a year and a half after the high point of Thief’s strong reviews and almost equally strong sales, Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner would be forced to shutter their studio forever.

We can date the beginning of the cascading series of difficulties that ultimately undid Looking Glass to March of 1999, when their current corporate parent decided to divest from games, which in turn meant divesting from them. Intermetrics had been on a roller-coaster ride of its own since being purchased by Michael Alexander in 1995. In 1998, the former television executive belatedly recognized the truth of what Mike Dornbrook had tried to tell him some time ago: that his dreams and schemes for turning Intermetrics into a games or multimedia studio made no sense whatsoever. He deigned to allow the company to return to its core competencies — indeed, to double-down on them. Late in the year, Intermetrics merged with Pacer InfoTec, another perennial recipient of government and military contracts. The new entity took the name of AverStar. When one looked through its collection of active endeavors — making an “Enterprise Information Portal” for the Army Chief of Staff; developing drainage-modeling software for the U.S. Geological Survey; providing “testing and quality-support services” for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts; writing and maintaining software for the Space Shuttle and other NASA vehicles — the games of Looking Glass stood out as decidedly unlike the others. Michael Alexander and his reconstituted team of managers, most of them grizzled veterans of the Beltway military-industrial complex, saw no point in continuing to dabble in games. In the words of Looking Glass programmer Mark LeBlanc, “AverStar threw us back into the sea.”

Just as is the case with Intermetrics’s acquisition of Looking Glass barely a year and a half earlier, the precise terms under which Alexander threw his once-prized catch back have never surfaced to my knowledge. It’s clear enough, however, that Looking Glass’s immediate financial position at this juncture was not quite so dire as it had been, thanks to the success of Thief if nothing else. Still, none of the systemic problems of being a small fish in the big pond of the games industry had been solved. Their recent success notwithstanding, without a deeper-pocketed parent or partner to negotiate for them, Looking Glass was destined to have a harder time getting their games into stores and selling them on their own terms.

The next unfortunate event — unfortunate for Looking Glass, but deeply tragic for some others — came about a month later. On April 20, 1999, two deeply troubled, DOOM-loving teenagers walked into their high school in the town of Columbine, Colorado, carrying multiple firearms each, and proceeded to kill thirteen of their fellow students and teachers and wound or terrorize hundreds more before turning their guns on themselves. This horrific event, occurring as it did before the American public had been somewhat desensitized to such massacres by the sheer numbing power of repetition, placed the subject of violence in videogames under the mass-media spotlight in a way it hadn’t been since Joseph Lieberman’s Senate hearings of 1993. Now Lieberman, a politician with mounting presidential ambitions, was back to point the finger more accusingly than ever.

This is not the place to attempt to address the fraught subject of what actual links there might be between violence in games and violence in the real world, links which hundreds of sociological and psychological studies have never managed to conclusively prove or disprove. Suffice to say that attributing direct causality to any human behavior outside the controlled setting of a laboratory is really, really hard, even before one factors in the distortions that can arise from motivated reasoning when the subject being studied is as charged as this one. Setting all of that aside, however, this was not a form of attention to which your average gaming executive of 1999 had any wish to expose himself. First-person action games that looked even vaguely like DOOM — such as most of the games of Looking Glass — were cancelled, delayed, or de-prioritized in an effort to avoid seeming completely insensitive to tragedy. De-prioritization rather than something worse was the fate of Looking Glass’s System Shock 2, but that would prove plenty bad enough for a studio with little margin for error.

The story of System Shock 2′s creation is yet another of those “only at Looking Glass” tales. In 1994, a 27-year-old Boston computer consultant named Ken Levine played System Shock 1 and was bowled over by the experience. A year or so later, he saw a want ad from the maker of his favorite game in a magazine. He applied and was hired. He contributed a great deal to Thief during that project’s formative period of groping in the dark — he is credited in the finished game for “initial design and story concepts” — and then was given a plum role indeed. Looking Glass had just won a contract to make an adventure game based on the popular new television series Star Trek: Voyager, and Levine was placed in charge of it.

Alas, that project fell apart within a year or so, when Viacom, the media conglomerate that owned the property, took note of the lackluster commercial performance of another recent Star Trek adventure game — and of recent adventure games in general — and pulled the plug. Understandably enough, Levine was devastated at having thus wasted a year of his life. Somewhat less understandably, he blamed the management of Looking Glass as much as Viacom for the fiasco. He left to start his own studio, taking with him two other Looking Glass employees, by the names of Jon Chey and Rob Fermier.

This is where the story gets weird, in an oh, so Looking Glass sort of way. Once they were out on their own, trading under the name of Irrational Games, the trio found that contracts and capital were not as easy to come by as they had believed they would be. At his wit’s end, facing the prospect of a return to his former life as an ordinary computer consultant, Levine came crawling back to his old bosses Lerner and Neurath. But rather than ask for his old job back, he asked to make a game with them, as a partnership between Irrational and Looking Glass that made use of the same Dark Engine that was to power Thief. Most bosses would have laughed in the face of someone who had poached two of their people in a bid to show them up and show them how it was done, only to get his comeuppance in such deserving fashion. But not Lerner and Neurath. They agreed to help Levine and his friends make a game in the spirit of System Shock, Levine’s whole reason for joining the industry in the first place. In fact, they even let them move back into Looking Glass’s offices for a while in order to do it. They soon succeeded in capturing the interest of Electronic Arts, the corporate parent of Origin Systems and thus the owner of the System Shock brand. Just like that, Levine’s homage became a direct sequel, an officially anointed System Shock 2.

The ironic capstone to this tale is that Warren Spector had recently left Looking Glass because he had been unable to secure permission to do exactly what the unproven and questionably loyal young Ken Levine was now going to get to do: to make a spiritual heir to System Shock. Spector ended up at Ion Storm, a new studio founded by John Romero of DOOM fame, where he set to work on what would become Deus Ex.

In the course of making System Shock 2, the Irrational staff grew to about fifteen people, who did eventually move into their own office. Nonetheless, the line separating their contributions from those of Looking Glass proper remained murky at best. As a postmortem written by Jon Chey would later put it, “the project was a collaborative effort between two companies based on a contract that only loosely defined the responsibilities of each organization.” It’s for this reason that I’ll be talking about System Shock 2 from here on like I might any other Looking Glass game.

The sequel isn’t shy about embracing its heritage. Once again, it casts you into an outer-space complex gone badly, horrifyingly haywire; this time you find yourself in humanity’s first faster-than-light starship instead of a mere space station. Once again, the game begins with you waking up disoriented, not knowing how you got here, forced to rely on narrations of the backstory that may or may not be reliable. Once again, your first and most obvious antagonists are the zombified corpses of the people who used to crew the ship. Once again, you slowly learn what really went down here through the emails and logbooks you stumble across. Once again, you have a variety of cybernetic hardware to help you stay alive, presented via a relentlessly diegetic interface. Once again, you meet SHODAN, the disembodied, deliciously evil artificial intelligence who was arguably the most memorable single aspect of the very memorable first game. And once again, she is brought to iconic life by the voice of Terri Brosius. In these ways and countless others, this apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

But even as it embraces its heritage in the broad strokes, System Shock 2 isn’t averse to tinkering with the formula, through both subtraction and addition. The most significant edit is the elimination of a separate, embodied cyberspace, which was already beginning to feel dated in 1994, having been parachuted in straight out of William Gibson’s 1984-vintage Neuromancer. Cyberspace has its charms in System Shock 1, but few would deny that it’s the roughest part of the game in terms of implementation; it was probably a wise choice for Ken Levine and company to focus their efforts elsewhere. More debatable are their decisions to simplify the hacking mini-games that you sometimes need to play to open locked doors and the like, and to eliminate the unique multi-variant difficulty settings of the first game, which let you turn it into whatever kind of experience you desire, from a walking simulator to an exercise in non-stop carnage to a cerebral pseudo-adventure game. System Shock 2 settles for letting you choose a single setting of “Easy,” “Normal,” “Hard,” or “Impossible,” like any standard-issue shooter of the era.

In fact, at first glance this game looks very much like a standard shooter. If you try to play it as one, however, you’ll be quickly disabused of that notion when you die… and die and die and die. This isn’t a stealth game to the same extent as Thief, but it does demand that you proceed with caution, looking for ways to outwit enemies whom you can’t overcome through firepower. If you can’t see your way to noticing and disabling the security cameras that lurk in many a corner, for example, you’re going to find yourself overwhelmed, no matter how fast and accurate a trigger finger you happen to possess.

By way of a partial replacement for the multi-variant difficulty settings of its predecessor, Irrational chose to graft onto System Shock 2 more CRPG elements. Theoretically at least, these give you almost as much control over what kind of game you end up playing. You can go for a combat-oriented build if you want more of a shooter experience — within reason, that is! — or you can become a hardcore tech-head or even a sort of Jedi who makes use of “psi” powers. Or you can judiciously mix and match your abilities, as most players doubtless wind up doing. After choosing an initial slate of skills at the outset, you are given the opportunity to learn more — or to improve the ones you already have — at certain milestones in the plot.

You create your character in System Shock 2 in a similar way to the old Traveller tabletop RPG, by sending him off on three tours of duty with different service branches — or the same one, if you prefer. (I fancy I can see some traces of the Star Trek: Voyager game which Ken Levine once set out to make in the vibe and the iconography here.) This is an example of how System Shock 2 can sometimes feel like it has a few too many ideas for its own good. It seems like an awful lot of effort to go through to establish a character who is about to get his memories erased anyway.

System Shock 2 is an almost universally acclaimed game today, perhaps even more so than its uglier low-res predecessor. There are good reasons for this. The atmosphere of dread builds and builds as you explore the starship, thanks not least to masterful environmental sound design; if anything, this game is more memorable for its soundscape than for its visuals. Although its emergent qualities are certainly nothing to sneeze at, in my opinion the peak moment of the game is actually pre-scripted. A jaw-dropping plot twist arrives about halfway through, one of the most shocking I’ve ever encountered in a game. I hesitate to say much more here, but will just reveal that nothing and no one turn out to be what you thought they were, and that SHODAN is involved. Because of course she is…

For all its increased resolution and equal mastery of atmosphere, however, System Shock 2 doesn’t strike me as quite so fully realized as the first System Shock. It suffers by comparison with Warren Spector’s own System Shock successor Deus Ex, which was released about nine months later. System Shock 2 never seems entirely sure how to balance its CRPG elements, which are dependent on character skill, with its action elements, which are dependent on player skill. Increasing your character’s skill in gunnery, for example, somehow makes your guns do more damage when you shoot someone with them; this is not exactly intuitive or realistic. Deus Ex just does so much of this sort of thing so much better. In that game, a higher skill level lets your character hold the gun steadier when you’re trying to shoot with it; this makes a lot more sense.

Unusually for Looking Glass, who seldom released a game before its time, System Shock 2 shows all the signs of having been yanked out of its creators’ hands a few months too early. The level design declines dramatically during the final third of the game, becoming downright sketchy by the time you get to the underwhelming finale. The overall balance of the gameplay systems is somewhat out of whack as well. It’s really, really hard to gain traction as a psi-focused character in particular, and dismayingly easy to end up with a character that isn’t tenable by choosing the wrong skills early on. I found a lot of the design choices in System Shock 2 to be tedious and annoying, such that I wished for a way to just turn them off: the scarcity of ammunition (another way to find yourself in an unwinnable cul de sac), the way that weapons degrade at an absurd pace and constantly need to be repaired, the endlessly respawning enemies that make hard-won firefights feel kind of pointless, the decision to arbitrarily deprive you of your trusty auto-map just at the point when you need it most.

Granted, some of this was also in System Shock 1, but it irritated me much more here. In the end, the two games provide very similar subjective experiences. Perchance this was just a ride I was only interested in going on once; perchance I would have a very different reaction to System Shock 2 if I had met it before its older sibling. Or maybe I’m just getting more protective of my time as I get older and have less and less of it left. (Ach… hold that morbid thought!)

Whatever its ratio of strengths to weaknesses, System Shock 2 didn’t do very well at all upon its release in June of 1999. Many folks from both Looking Glass and Irrational attribute this disappointment entirely to the tragic occurrence of two months earlier in Columbine, Colorado. Although the full picture is surely more nuanced — it always is, isn’t it? — we have no reason doubt that the fallout from the massacre was a major factor in the game’s commercial failure. According to Paul Neurath, Electronic Arts pondered for a while whether it was wise to put System Shock 2 out at all. He remembers EA’s CEO Larry Probst telling him that “we may just want to walk away from doing shooters because there’s talk of these shooters causing these kinds of events.” “We convinced them to release the game,” says Neurath, “but they did almost zero marketing and they put it in the bargain discount $9.95 bin 45 days after the game launched. It never stood a chance to make any money. That really hurt us financially.”

If System Shock 2 was to some extent a victim of circumstances, Looking Glass’s next game was a more foreseeable failure. For some reason, they just couldn’t stop beating the dead horse of flight simulation, even though it had long since become clear that this wasn’t what their primary audience wanted from them at all. Flight Unlimited III wasn’t a bad flight simulator, but the changes it introduced to the formula were nowhere near as dramatic as those that marked Flight Unlimited II. The most notable new development was a shift from the San Francisco Bay to Washington State, a much larger geographical area depicted in even greater detail. (Owners of the second game were given the privilege of loading their old scenery into the new engine as well.) Innovation or the lack thereof aside, the same old problem remained, in the form of Microsoft’s 800-pound-gorilla of a flight-simulation franchise, which was ready with its own “2000” update at the same time. Published by Electronic Arts in late 1999, Flight Unlimited III stiffed even more abjectly than had System Shock II.

On the left, we see Seattle-Tacoma International Airport as depicted in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2000. On the right, we see the same airport in Flight Unlimited III. The former modeled the whole world, including more than 20,000 airports; the latter tried to compete by modeling a comparatively small area better. Regardless of the intrinsic merits of the two approaches, Looking Glass’s did not prove a formula for marketplace success.

A comparatively bright spot that holiday season was Thief Gold, which added three new missions to the original’s twelve and tweaked and polished the existing ones. It did decently well as a mid-tier product with a street price of about $25, plus a $10 rebate for owners of the previous version of Thief and the promise of a $10 discount off the upcoming Thief II. But a product like this was never going to offset Looking Glass’s two big failures of 1999.

In truth, the Looking Glass goose was probably already more or less cooked as Y2K began. The only thing that might have saved them was Thief 2: The Metal Age turning into a massive hit right out of the gate. Sadly, there was little likelihood of that happening; the best that Looking Glass could realistically hope for was another solid half-million seller. There was already a sense in the studio as the final touches were being put on Thief 2 that, barring a miracle, this game was likely to be their swansong.

As swansongs go, Thief II acquits itself pretty darn well. It comes off as far more self-assured than its predecessor, being focused almost exclusively on stealth rather than monster-slaying through its fifteen cunningy crafted levels. Some of these spaces — a huge central bank, a sprawling warehouse complex, a rich art collector’s country estate — are intricate and beautiful enough that you almost wish there was an option to just wander around and admire them, without having to worry about guards and traps and all the rest. There’s a greater willingness here to use gameplay to advance the larger story: plot twists sometimes arrive in the midst of a mission, and you can often learn more about what’s really going on, if you’re interested, by listening carefully to the conversations that drift around the outskirts of the darkness in which you cloak yourself. Indeed, Thief II is positively bursting with little Easter eggs for the observant. Some of them are even funny, such as a sad-sack pair of guards who have by now been victimized by Garrett several times in other places, who complain to one another, Laurel and Hardy style, about their lot in life of constantly being outsmarted.

The subtitle pays tribute to the fact that the milieu of Thief has now taken on a distinct steampunk edge, with clanking iron robots and gun turrets for Garrett to contend with in addition to the ever-present human guards. Garrett now has a mechanical eye which he can use to zoom in on things, or even to receive the visual signal from a “scouting orb” that he’s toss out into an exposed space to get a better picture of his surroundings. I must confess that I’m somewhat of two minds about this stuff: it’s certainly more interesting than zombies, but I do still kind of long for the purist neo-Renaissance milieu I thought I was getting when I played the first level of Thief I.

The “faces” on the robots look a bit like SHODAN, don’t they? Some of the code governing their behavior was also lifted directly from that game. But unlike your mechanical enemies in System Shock 2, these robots have steam boilers on their posteriors which you can douse with water arrows to disable them.

Beyond this highly debatable point, though, there’s very little to complain about here, unless it be that Thief II, for all its manifest strengths, doesn’t quite manage to stand on its own. Oddly in light of what a make-or-break title this was for them, Looking Glass seems not to have given much thought to easing new players into this very different way of approaching a first-person action game; they didn’t even bother to rehash the rudimentary tutorial that kicks off Thief I. As a result, and as a number of otherwise positively disposed contemporary reviewers noted, Thief II has more the flavor of an expansion pack — a really, really well-done one, mind you — than a full-fledged sequel. It probably isn’t the best place to start, but anyone who enjoyed the first game will definitely enjoy this one.

Looking Glass’s problem, of course, was that none of what I’ve just written sounds like a ticket to id- or Blizzard-level success, which was what they needed by this point to save the company. As Computer Gaming World wrote in its review, Thief II “is a ’boutique’ game: a gamer’s game. It pays its dividends in persistent tension rather than in bursts of fear. It still pumps as much adrenaline, but it works on a subtler level. It’s the difference between Strangers on a Train and Armageddon, between the intimated and the explicit.”

Having thus delivered another cult classic rather than a blockbuster, Looking Glass’s fate was sealed. By March of 2000, when Eidos published Thief 2, Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner had been trying to sell their studio for a second time for the better part of a year. Sony was seriously interested for a while, until a management shakeup there killed the deal. Then Eidos was on the verge of pulling the trigger, only to have its bankers refuse to loan the necessary funds after a rather disappointing year for the company, in which the Tomb Raider train seemed to finally be running out of steam and John Romero’s would-be magnum opus Daikatana, which Eidos was funding and publishing for Ion Storm, ran way over time and budget. Not wanting to risk depriving their employees of their last paychecks, Neurath and Lerner decided to shut their studio down with dignity. On May 24, 2000, they called everyone together to thank them for their efforts and to tell them that Thief II had been Looking Glass’s last game. “We’re closing,” said Paul Neurath. What else was there to say?

Plenty, as it turned out. The news of the shuttering prompted paroxysms of grief throughout gaming’s burgeoning online ecosystem, frequently accompanied by a full measure of self-loathing. Looking Glass had been just too smart for a public that wasn’t worthy of them, so the story went. Many a gamer who had always meant to pick up this or that subtly subversive Looking Glass masterstroke, but had kept delaying in favor of easier, more straightforward fare, blamed himself for being a part of the problem. But no amount of hand-wringing or self-flagellation could change the fact that Looking Glass was no more. The most it could do was to turn having worked for the studio into a badge of honor and one hell of a line item on anyone’s CV, as a Looking Glass diaspora spread out across the industry to influence its future.

To wit: the tearful tributes were still pouring in when Ion Storm’s Warren Spector-led Deus Ex reached store shelves in June of 2000. Cruel irony of ironies: Deus Ex became a hit on a scale that Thief, Looking Glass’s biggest game ever, could scarcely have dreamed of approaching. Right to the end, Looking Glass was always the bridesmaid, never the bride.


Looking Glass was a cool group, and a lot of us put a lot of time and energy and a large part of our lives into it, and it’s sad when that doesn’t work out. So there’s some part of me that says, oh, that sucks, that’s not fair, but it’s the real world and it had a pretty good run.

— Doug Church

Without consciously intending to, I’ve found myself writing quite a lot of obituaries of gaming icons recently: TSR, Sierra On-Line, MicroProse, Bullfrog, the adventure-making arm of Legend Entertainment. Call it a sign of the millennial times, a period of constant, churning acquisition and consolidation in which it began to seem that just half a dozen or so many-tendriled conglomerates were destined to divide the entirety of digital gaming among themselves. Now, we can add Looking Glass to our list of victims of this dubious idea of progress.

A lot of hyperbole has been thrown around about Looking Glass over the past quarter-century. A goodly portion of it is amply justified. That said, I do think there is some room for additional nuance. (There always is, isn’t there?) At the risk of coming off like the soulless curmudgeon in the room, I’m not going to write about Looking Glass here as if they were a bunch of tortured artists starving in a garret somewhere. Instead I’m going to put on my pragmatist’s hat and go off on in search of some more concrete reasons why these remarkable games didn’t resonate as much as they may have deserved to back in the day.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner made some fairly baffling business decisions over the years. Their disastrous choice to try to make a go of it as an independent publisher against gale-force headwinds in 1995 can be all too easily seen as the precipitating event that sent Looking Glass down the road to closure five years later. Then, too, their insistence on persisting with the Flight Unlimited series must stand high on their list of mistakes. Incredibly, at the time Looking Glass was shut down, they were still at the flight-simulation thing, having spent a reported $3 million already on a fourth one, which was finally to add guns and enemy aircraft to the mix; this was half a million more than they had spent to make Thief 2, a game with a far more secure customer base. [1]After the closure, some Looking Glass staffers migrated to the nearby Mad Doc Software, where they incorporated much of their flight-simulation code into Jane’s Combat Simulations: Attack Squadron. Released in 2002, it was not positively reviewed.

Then again, this isn’t a Harvard Business School case study. What final words are there to say about the games themselves, the real legacy of this company that failed rather spectacularly at its business-school ambition of making a lot of — okay, any — money? How should we understand them in their full historical context?

As you probably know, historical context is kind of my jam. Writing for this site is for me a form of time travel. I don’t play modern games for lack of hours in the day, and I’ve long since settled into a more or less one-to-one correspondence between present time and historical time; that’s to say, it takes me about one year worth of articles on this site to fully cover one year of gaming history and matters adjacent. We’ve by now moved out of the era when I was playing a lot of games in my previous life, so most of what I encounter is new to me. I think this puts me in a privileged position. I can come pretty close to experiencing and appreciating games — and the evolution of the medium as a whole — as a contemporary player might have done. When I read in the year 2025 that Looking Glass was poorly rewarded for their uncompromising spirit of innovation, I can understand and even to a large extent agree. And yet, in my role as a time traveler, I can also kind of understand why a lot of gamers ended up voting with their wallets for something else.

The decade after Looking Glass’s demise saw the rise of what gaming scholar Jesper Juul has dubbed the Casual Revolution; this was the heyday of BejeweledZumaDiner Dash, and the Big Fish portal, which brought gaming to whole new, previously untapped demographics who dwarfed the hardcore old guard in numbers. In 2010, when this revolution was at its peak, Juul put forth five characteristics that define casual gaming: “emotionally positive fictions”; “little presupposed knowledge” on the player’s part; a tolerance for being played in “short bursts”; “lenient punishments for failing”; and “positive feedback for every successful action the player performs.” The games of Looking Glass are the polar opposite of this list. At times, they seem almost defiantly so; witness the lack of an “easy” setting in Thief, as if to emphasize that anyone who might wish for such a thing is not welcome here. Looking Glass’s games are the ultimate “gamer’s games,” as Computer Gaming World put it, unabashedly demanding a serious commitment of time, focus, energy, and effort from their players. But daily life demands plenty of those things from most of us already, doesn’t it? In this light, it doesn’t really surprise me that a lot of people decided to just go play something more welcoming and less demanding. This didn’t make them ingrates; it just made them people who weren’t quite sure that there was enough space in their life to work that hard for their entertainment. I sympathize because I often felt the same in the course of my time-traveling; when I saw a new Looking Glass game on the syllabus, it was always a little bit harder than it ought to have been for me to muster the motivation to take the plunge. And this is part of what I do for a living!

Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with gamer’s games. But they are by definition niche pursuits. The tragedy of Looking Glass (if I can presume to frame it in those terms in an article which has previously mentioned the real tragedy that took place at Columbine High School) is that they were making niche games at a time when the economics of the industry were militating against the long tail, pushing everyone toward a handful of tried-and-true mainstream gameplay formulas. After the millennium, the rise of digital distribution would give studios the luxury of being loudly and proudly niche, if that was where their hearts were. (Ironically, this happened at the same instant that ultra-mainstream casual gaming took off, and was enabled by the same transformative technology of broadband in the home.) But digital distribution of games as asset-heavy as those of Looking Glass was a non-starter throughout the 1990s. C’est la vie.

This situation being what it was, I do feel that Looking Glass could have made a bit more of an effort to be accessible, to provide those real or metaphorical easy modes, if only in the hope and expectation that their customers would eventually want to lose the training wheels and play the games as they were meant to be played. On-ramping is a vital part of the game designer’s craft, one at which Looking Glass, for all their strengths in other areas, wasn’t all that accomplished.

Another thing that Looking Glass was not at all good at, or seemingly even all that interested in, was multiplayer, which became a bigger and bigger part of gaming culture as the 1990s wore on. (They did add a co-operative multiplayer mode to System Shock 2 via a patch, but it always felt like the afterthought it was.) This was a problem in itself. Just to compound it, Looking Glass’s games were in some ways the most single-player games of them all. “Immersion” was their watchword: they played best in a darkened room with headphones on, almost requiring of their players that they deliberately isolate themselves from the real world and its inhabitants. Again, this is a perfectly valid design choice, but it’s an inherently niche one.

Speaking only for myself now I think this is another reason that the games of Looking Glass proved a struggle for me at times. At this point in my life at least, I’m just not that excited about isolating myself inside hermetically sealed digital spaces. If I want total immersion, I take a walk and immerse myself in nature. Games I prefer to play on the sofa next to my wife. My favorite Looking Glass game, for what it’s worth, is System Shock, which I played at an earlier time in my life when immersion was perhaps more of a draw than it is today. Historical context is one thing, personal context another: it’s damnably difficult to separate our judgments of games from the circumstances in which we played them.

Of course, this is one of the reasons that I always encourage you not to take my judgments as the final word on anything, to check out the games I write about for yourself if they sound remotely interesting. It’s actually not that hard to get a handle on Looking Glass’s legacy for yourself. Considering the aura of near-divinity that cloaks the studio today, the canon of widely remembered Looking Glass classics is surprisingly small. They seem to have had a thing for duologies: their place in history boils down to the two Ultima Underworld games, the two System Shock games, and the two Thief games. The rest of their output has been pretty much forgotten, with the partial exception of Terra Nova on the part of the really dedicated.

Still, three bold and groundbreaking concepts that each found ways to advance the medium on multiple fronts is more than enough of a legacy for any studio, isn’t it? So, let us wave a fondly respectful farewell to Looking Glass, satisfied as we do so that we will be meeting many of their innovations and approaches, sometimes presented in more accessible packages, again and again as we continue to travel through time.



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SourcesThe books Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd. ed.) by Richard Rouse III, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players by Jesper Juul, and the Prima strategy guide to Thief II by Howard A. Jones; Computer Gaming World of January 1999, November 1999, January 2000, February 2000, and June 2000;  Retro Gamer 60, 177, and 260; Game Developer of November 1999; Boston Globe of May 26 2000; Boston Magazine of December 2013.

Online sources include “Ahead of Its Time: A History of Looking Glass” and “Without Looking Glass, There was No Irrational Games” by Mike Mahardy at Polygon, James Sterrett’s “Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem on Looking Glass Studios,” GameSpy featurette by John “Warrior” Keefer, Christian Nutt’s interview with Ken Levine on the old Gamasutra site, AverStar’s millennial-era corporate site,

Where to Get Them: System Shock 2 is available for purchase in original or remastered form at GOG.com. Thief 2: The Metal Age is also available.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 After the closure, some Looking Glass staffers migrated to the nearby Mad Doc Software, where they incorporated much of their flight-simulation code into Jane’s Combat Simulations: Attack Squadron. Released in 2002, it was not positively reviewed.
 
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Posted by on October 17, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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System Shock

We approached games as immersive simulations. We wanted to build game environments that reacted to player’s decisions, that behaved in natural ways, and where players had more verbs than simply “shoot.” DOOM was not an influence on System Shock. We were trying something more difficult and nuanced, [although] we still had a lot of respect for the simplicity and focus of [the id] games. There was, to my recollection, a vague sense of fatalism about the parallel tracks the two companies were taking, since it was clear early on that id’s approach, which needed much less player education and which ran on adrenaline rather than planning and immersion, was more likely to be commercially successful. But we all believed very strongly in Looking Glass’s direction, and were proud that we were taking games to a more cerebral and story-rich place.

— Dorian Hart

We hope that our toiling now to make things work when it is still very hard to do effectively will mean that when it is easier to do, we can concentrate on the parts of the game that are less ephemeral than polygons per second, and distinguish ourselves by designing detailed and immersive environments which are about more than just the technology.

— Doug Church

In late 1992, two separate studios began working on two separate games whose descriptions sound weirdly identical to one another. Each was to make you the last human survivor on a besieged space station. You would roam its corridors in real time in an embodied first-person view; both studios prided themselves on their cutting-edge 3D graphics technology. As you explored, you would have to kill or be killed by the monsters swarming the complex. Yet wresting back control of the station would demand more than raw firepower: in the end, you would have to outwit the malevolent intelligence behind it all. Both games were envisioned as unprecedentedly rich interactive experiences, as a visceral new way of living through an interactive story.

But in the months that followed, these two projects that had started out so conceptually similar diverged dramatically. The team that was working on DOOM at id Software down in Dallas, Texas, decided that all of the elaborate plotting and puzzles were just getting in the way of the simpler, purer joys of blowing away demons with a shotgun. Lead programmer John Carmack summed up id’s attitude: “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” id discovered that they weren’t really interested in making an immersive virtual world; they were interested in making an exciting game, one whose “gameyness” they felt no shame in foregrounding.

Meanwhile the folks at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based studio Looking Glass Technologies stuck obstinately to their original vision. They made exactly the uncompromising experience they had first discussed, refusing to trade psychological horror in for cheaper thrills. System Shock would demand far more of its players than DOOM, but would prove in its way an even more rewarding game for those willing to follow it down the moody, disturbing path it unfolded.

It was in this moment, then, that the differences between id and Looking Glass, the yin and the yang of 1990s 3D-graphics pioneers, became abundantly clear.



Looking Glass arrived at their crossroads moment just as they were completing their second game, Ultima Underworld II. Both it and its predecessor were first-person fantasy dungeon crawls set in and around Britannia, the venerable world of the Ultima CRPG series to which their games served as spinoffs. And both were very successful, so much so that they almost overshadowed Ultima VII, the latest entry in the mainline series. Looking Glass’s publisher Origin Systems would have been happy to let them continue making games in this vein for as long as their customers kept buying them.

But Looking Glass, evincing the creative restlessness that would define them throughout their existence, was ready to move on to other challenges. In the months immediately after Ultima Underworld II was completed, the studio’s head Paul Neurath allowed his charges to start three wildly diverse projects on the back of the proceeds from the Underworld games, projects which were unified only by their heavy reliance on 3D graphics. One was a game of squad-level tactical combat called Terra Nova, another a civilian flight simulator called Flight Unlimited. And the third — actually, the first of the trio to be officially initiated — was System Shock.

Doug Church, the driving creative force behind Ultima Underworld, longed to create seamless interactive experiences, where you didn’t so much play a game as enter into its world. The Underworld games had been a big step in that direction within the constraints of the CRPG form, thanks to their first-person, free-scrolling perspective, their real-time gameplay, and, not least, the way they cast you in the role of a single embodied dungeon delver rather than that of the disembodied manager of a whole party of them. But Church believed that there was still too much that pulled you out of their worlds. Although the games were played entirely from a single screen, which itself put them far ahead of most CRPGs in terms of immediacy, you were still switching constantly from mode to mode within that screen. “I felt that Underworld was sort of [four] different games that you played in parallel,” says Church. “There was the stats-based game with the experience points, the inventory-collecting-and-managing game, the 3D-moving-around game, and there was the talking game — the conversation-branch game.” What had seemed so fresh and innovative a couple of years earlier now struck Church as clunky.

Ironically, much of what he was objecting to is inherent to the CRPG form itself. Aficionados of the genre find it endlessly enjoyable to pore over their characters’ statistics at level-up time, to min-max their equipment and skills. And this is fine: the genre is as legitimate as any other. Yet Church himself found its cool intellectual appeal, derived from its antecedents on the tabletop which had no choice but to reveal all of their numbers to their players, to be antithetical to the sort of game that he wanted to make next:

In Underworld, there was all this dice rolling going on off-screen basically, and I’ve always felt it was kind of silly. Dice were invented as a way to simulate swinging your sword to see if you hit or miss. So everyone builds computer games where you move around in 3D and swing your sword and hit or miss, and then if you hit you roll some dice to simulate swinging a sword to decide if you hit or miss. How is anyone supposed to understand unless you print the numbers? Which is why, I think, most of the games that really try to be hardcore RPGs actually print out, “You rolled a 17!” In [the tabletop game of] Warhammer when you get a five-percent increase and the next time you roll your attack you make it by three percent, you’re all excited because you know that five-percent increase is why you hit. In a computer game you have absolutely no idea. And so we really wanted to get rid of all that super opaque, “I have no idea what’s going on” stuff. We wanted to make it so you can watch and play and it’s all happening.

So, there would be no numbers in his next game — no character levels, no character statistics, not even quantifiable hit points. There would just be you, right there in the world, without any intervening layers of abstraction.

Over the course of extensive discussions involving Doug Church himself, Paul Neurath, Looking Glass designer and writer Austin Grossman, and their Origin Systems producer Warren Spector, it was decided to make a first-person science-fiction game with distinct cyberpunk overtones, pitting you against an insane computer known as SHODAN. Cyberpunk was anything but a novelty in the games of the 1990s, a time when authors like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson all occupied prominent places on the genre-fiction bestseller charts and the game developers who read their novels rushed to bring their visions to life on monitor screens. Still, cyberpunk would suit Looking Glass’s purposes unusually perfectly by presenting a credible explanation for the diegetic interface Church was envisioning. You would play a character with a neural implant that let you “see” a heads-up display sporting a life bar for yourself, an energy bar for your weapons and other hardware, etc. — all of it a part of the virtual world rather than external to it. When you switched between “modes,” such as when bringing up the auto-map or your inventory display, it would be the embodied you who did so in the virtual world, not that other you who sat in front of the computer telling a puppet what to do next.

System Shock‘s commitment to its diegetic presentation is complete. As you discover new software and gadgets, they’re added to the heads-up display provided by your in-world neural implant. This serves the same purpose that leveling up did in Ultima Underworld, but in a more natural, realistic way.

Dissatisfied with what he saw as the immersion-killing conversation trees of Ultima Underworld, Church decided to get rid of two-way conversation altogether. When the game began, there would be enticing signs that other humans were still alive somewhere on the space station, but you would be consistently too late to reach them; you would encounter them only as the zombies SHODAN turned them into after death. Of course, all of this too was highly derivative, and on multiple levels at that. Science-fiction fans had been watching their heroes take down out-of-control computers since the original Star Trek television series if not before; “I don’t think if you wrote the novel [of System Shock] it would fly off the shelves,” admits Church. Likewise, computer games had been contriving ways to place you in deserted worlds, or in worlds inhabited only by simple-minded creatures out for your blood, for as long as said games had existed, always in order to avoid the complications of character interaction; the stately isolation of the mega-hit adventure game Myst was only the most recent notable example of the longstanding tradition at the time System Shock was in development.

But often it’s not what you do in any form of media, it’s how well you do it. And System Shock does what it sets out to do very, very well indeed. It tells a story of considerable complexity and nuance through the artifacts you find lying about as you explore the station and the emails you receive from time to time, allowing you to piece it all together for yourself in nonlinear fashion. “We wanted to make the plot and story development of System Shock be an exploration as well,” says Church, “and that’s why it’s all in the logs and data, so then it’s very tied into movement through the spaces.”

Reading a log entry. The story is conveyed entirely through epistolary means like these, along with occasional direct addresses from SHODAN herself that come booming through the station’s public-address system.

Moving through said spaces, picking up bits and pieces of the horrible events which have unfolded there, quickly becomes highly unnerving. The sense of embodied realism that clings to every aspect of the game is key to the sense of genuine, oppressive fear it creates in its player. Tellingly, Looking Glass liked to call System Shock a “simulation,” even though it simulates nothing that has ever existed in the real world. The word is rather shorthand for its absolute commitment to the truth — fictional truth, yes, but truth nevertheless — of the world it drops you into.

Story is very important to System Shock — and yet, in marked contrast to works in the more traditionally narrative-oriented genre of the adventure game, its engine also offers heaps and heaps of emergent possibility as you move through the station discovering what has gone wrong here and, finally, how you might be able to fix it. “It wasn’t just, ‘Go do this sequence of four things,'” says Church. “It was, ‘Well, there are going to be twelve cameras here and you gotta take out eight of them. Figure it out.’ We [also] gave you the option [of saying], ‘I don’t want to fight that guy. Okay, maybe I can find another way…'”

Thus System Shock manages the neat trick of combining a compelling narrative with a completely coherent environment that never reduces you to choosing from a menu of options, one where just about any solution for any given problem that seems like it ought to work really does work. Just how did Looking Glass achieve this when so many others before and since have failed, or been so daunted by the challenges involved that they never even bothered to try? They did so by combining technical excellence with an aesthetic sophistication to which few of their peers could even imagine aspiring.

Just as the 3D engine that powers Ultima Underworld is more advanced than the pseudo-3D of id’s contemporaneous Wolfenstein 3D, the System Shock engine outdoes DOOM in a number of important respects. The enormous environments of System Shock curve over and under and around one another, complete with sloping floors everywhere; lighting is realistically simulated; you can jump and crouch and look up and down and lean around corners; you can take advantage of its surprisingly advanced level of physics simulation in countless ingenious ways. System Shock even boasts perspective-correct texture mapping, a huge advance over Ultima Underworld, and no easy thing to combine with the aforementioned slopes.

Each of the ten “levels” of System Shock is really multiple levels in the physical sense, as the corridors often curve over and under one another. Just as in Ultima Underworld, you can annotate the auto-map for yourself. But even with this aid, just finding your way around in these huge, confusing spaces can be a challenge in itself.

That said, it’s also abundantly true that a more advanced engine doesn’t automatically make for a better game. Any such comparison must always carry an implied addendum: better for whom? Certainly DOOM succeeded beautifully in realizing its makers’ ambitions, even as its more streamlined engine could run well on many more of the typical computers of the mid-1990s than System Shock‘s could. By no means do the engines’ respective advantages all run one way: in addition to being much faster than the System Shock engine, the DOOM engine allows rooms of arbitrary sizes and non-orthogonal walls, neither of which is true of its counterpart from Looking Glass.

In the end, System Shock wants to be a very different experience than DOOM, catering to a different style of play, and its own engine is designed to allow it to realize its own ambitions. It demands a more careful approach from its player, where you must constantly use light and shadow, walls and obstacles, to aid you in your desperate struggle. For you are not a superhuman outer-space marine in System Shock; you’re just, well, you, scared and alone in a space station filled with rampaging monsters.

A fine example of the lengths to which Looking Glass’s technologists were willing to go in the service of immersion is provided by the mini-games you can play. Inspired by, of all things, the similarly plot-irrelevant mini-games found in the LucasArts graphic adventure Sam and Max Hit the Road, they contribute much more to the fiction in this case than in that other one. As with everything in System Shock, the mini-games are not external to the world of the main game. It’s rather you playing them through your neural implant right there in the world; it’s you who cowers in a safe corner somewhere, trying to soothe your soul with a quick session of Breakout or Missile Command. You get the chance to collect more and better games as you infiltrate the station’s computer network using the cyberspace jacks you find scattered about — a reward of sorts for a forlorn hacker trying to survive against an all-powerful entity and her horrifying minions.

Taking the edge off with a quick game of Pong (in the window at lower left).

Sean Barret, a programmer who came to Looking Glass and to the System Shock project well into the game’s development, implemented the most elaborate by far of the mini-games, a gentle satire of Origin Systems’s Wing Commander that goes under the name of Wing 0. The story of its creation is a classic tale of Looking Glass, a demonstration both of the employees’ technical brilliance and their insane levels of commitment to the premises of their games. Newly arrived on the team and wishing to make a good impression, Barrett saw a list of mini-game ideas on a whiteboard; a “Wing Commander clone” was among them. So, he set to work, and some days later presented his creation to his colleagues. They were as shocked as they were delighted; it turned out that the Wing Commander clone had been a joke rather than a serious proposal. In the end, however, System Shock got its very own Wing Commander after all.

Still, there were many other technically excellent and crazily dedicated games studios in the 1990s, just as there are today. What truly set Looking Glass apart was their interest in combining the one sort of intelligence with another kind that has not always been in quite so great a supply in the games industry.

As Looking Glass grew, Paul Neurath brought some very atypical characters into the fold. Already in late 1991, he placed an advertisement in the Boston Globe for a writer with an English degree. He eventually hired Austin Grossman, who would do a masterful job of scattering the puzzle pieces of Doug Church’s story outline around the System Shock space station. There soon followed another writer with an English degree, this one by the name of Dorian Hart, who would construct some of the station’s more devious internal spaces using the flair for drama which he had picked up from all of the books he had read. He was, as he puts it, “a liberal-arts nobody with no coding skills or direct industry experience, thrown onto arguably the most accomplished and leading-edge videogame production team ever assembled. It’s hard to explain how unlikely that was, and how fish-out-of-water I felt.” Nevertheless, there he was — and System Shock was all the better for his presence.

Another, even more unlikely set of game developers arrived in the persons of Greg LoPiccolo and Eric and Terri Brosius, all members of a popular Boston rock band known as Tribe, who had been signed to a major label amidst the Nirvana-fueled indie-rock boom of the early 1990s, only to see the two albums they recorded fail to duplicate their local success on a national scale. They were facing a decidedly uncertain future when Doug Church and Dan Schmidt — the latter being another Looking Glass programmer, designer, and writer — showed up in the audience at a Tribe show. They loved the band’s angular, foreboding songs and arrangements, they explained afterward, and wanted to know if they’d be interested in doing the music for a science-fiction computer game that would have much the same atmosphere. Three members of the band quickly agreed, despite knowing next to nothing about computers or the games they played. “Being young, not knowing what would happen next, that was part of the magic,” remembers Eric Brosius. “We were willing to learn because it was just an exciting time.”

Terri Brosius became the voice of SHODAN, a role that fell to her by default: artificial intelligences in science fiction typically spoke in a female voice, and she was the only woman to be found among the Looking Glass creative staff. But however she got the part, she most definitely made it her own. She laughs that “people tend to get freaked out” when they hear her speak today in real life. And small wonder: her glitchy voice ringing through the empty corridors of the station, dripping with sarcastic malice, is one of the indelible memories that every player of System Shock takes away with her. Simply put, SHODAN creeps you the hell out. “You had a recurring, consistent, palpable enemy who mattered to you,” notes Doug Church — all thanks to Austin Grossman’s SHODAN script and Terri Brosius’s unforgettable portrayal of her.


As I think about the combination of technical excellence and aesthetic sophistication that was Looking Glass, I find one metaphor all but unavoidable: that of Looking Glass as the Infocom of the 1990s. Certainly Infocom, their predecessors of the previous decade on the Boston-area game-development scene, evinced much the same combination — the same thoroughgoing commitment to excellence and innovation in all of their forms — during their own heyday. If the 3D-graphics engines of Looking Glass seem a long way from the text and parsers of Infocom, let that merely be a sign of just how much gaming itself had changed in a short span of time. Even when we turn to more plebeian matters, there are connections to be found beyond a shared zip code. Both studios were intimately bound up with MIT, sharing in the ideas, personnel, and, perhaps most of all, the culture of the university; both had their offices on the same block of CambridgePark Drive; two of Looking Glass’s programmers, Dan Schmidt and Sean Barrett, later wrote well-received textual interactive fictions of their own. The metaphor isn’t ironclad by any means; Legend Entertainment, founded as it was by former Infocom author Bob Bates and employing the talents of Steve Meretzky, is another, more traditionalist answer to the question of the Infocom of the 1990s. Still, the metaphor does do much to highlight the nature of Looking Glass’s achievements, and their importance to the emerging art form of interactive narrative. Few if any studios were as determined to advance that art form as these two were.

But Looking Glass’s ambitions could occasionally outrun even their impressive abilities to implement them, just as could Infocom’s at times. In System Shock, this overreach comes in the form of the sequences that begin when you utilize one of those aforementioned cyberspace jacks that you find scattered about the station. System Shock‘s cyberspace is an unattractive, unwelcoming place — and not in a good way. It’s plagued by clunky controls and graphics that manage to be both too minimalist and too garish, that are in fact almost impossible to make head or tail of. The whole thing is more frustrating than fun, not a patch on the cyberspace sequences to be found in Interplay’s much earlier computer-game adaption of William Gibson’s breakthrough novel Neuromancer. So, it turns out that even the collection of brilliant talent that was assembled at Looking Glass could have one idea too many. Doug Church:

We thought [that] it fit from a conceptual standpoint. You’re a hacker; shouldn’t you hack something? We thought it would be fun to throw in a different movement mode that was more free-form, more action. In retrospect, we probably should have either cut it or spent more time on it. There is some fun stuff in it, but it’s not as polished as it should be. But even so, it was nice because it at least reinforced the idea that you were the hacker, in a totally random, arcadey, broken kind of way. But at least it suggested that you’re something other than a guy with a gun. We were looking at ourselves and saying, “Oh, of course we should have cyberspace! We’re a cyberpunk game, we gotta have cyberspace! Well, what can we do without too much time? What if we do this crazy thing?” Off we went…

By way of compounding the problem, the final confrontation with SHODAN takes place… in cyberspace. This tortuously difficult and thoroughly unfun finale has proven to be too much for many a player, leaving her to walk away on the verge of victory with a terrible last taste of the game lingering in her mouth.

Cyberspace was a nice idea, but its implementation leaves much to be desired.

Luckily, it’s possible to work around even this weakness to a large extent, thanks to another of the generous affordances which Looking Glass built into the game. You can decide for yourself how complex and thus how difficult you wish the game to be along four different axes: Combat (the part of the game that is most like DOOM); Mission (the non-combat tasks you have to accomplish to free the station from SHODAN’s grip); Puzzle (the occasional spatial puzzles that crop up when you try to jigger a lock or the like); and Cyber (the cyberspace implementation). All of these can be set to a value between zero and three, allowing you to play System Shock as anything from a straight-up shooter where all you have to do is run and gun to an unusually immersive and emergent pure adventure game populated only by “feeble” enemies who “never attack first.” The default experience sees all of these values set at two, and this is indeed the optimal choice in my opinion for those who don’t have a complete aversion to any one of the game’s aspects — with one exception: I would recommend setting Cyber to one or even zero in order to save yourself at lot of pain, especially at the very end. (The ultimate challenge for System Shock veterans, on the other hand, comes by setting the Mission value to three; this imposes a time limit on the whole game of about seven hours.)

If you really, really want to play System Shock as a DOOM clone, that’s okay with Looking Glass.

System Shock was released in late 1994, almost two full years after Ultima Underworld II, Looking Glass’s last game. It sold acceptably but not spectacularly well for a studio that was already becoming well-acquainted with the financial worries that would continue to dog them for the rest of their existence. Reviews were quite positive, yet many of the authors of same seemed barely to have noticed the game’s subtler qualities, choosing to lump it in instead with the so-called “DOOM clones” that were beginning to flood the market by this point, almost a year after the original DOOM‘s release. (One advantage of id Software’s more limited ambitions for their game was the fact that it was finished much, much quicker than System Shock; in fact, a DOOM II was already on store shelves by the time System Shock made it there.)

Although everyone at Looking Glass took the high road when asked about the DOOM connection, the press and public’s tendency to diminish their own accomplishment in 3D virtual-world-building had to rankle at some level; former employees insist to this day that DOOM had no influence whatsoever on their own creation, that System Shock would have turned out the same even had DOOM never existed. The fact is, Looking Glass’s own claim to the title of 3D-graphics pioneers is every bit as valid as that of id, and their System Shock engine actually was, as we’ve seen, more advanced than that of DOOM in a number of ways. No games studio in history has ever deserved less to be treated as imitators rather than innovators.

Alas, mainstream appreciation would be tough to come by throughout the remaining years of Looking Glass’s existence, just as it had sometimes been for Infocom before them. A market that favored the direct, visceral pleasures of id’s DOOM and, soon, Quake didn’t seem to know quite what to do with Looking Glass’s more nuanced 3D worlds. And so, yet again as with Infocom, it would not be until after Looking Glass was no more that the world of gaming would come to fully appreciate everything they had achieved. When asked pointedly about the sales charts which his games so consistently failed to top, Doug Church showed wisdom beyond his years in insisting that the important thing was just to earn enough back to make the next game.

id did a great job with [DOOM]. And more power to them. I think you want to do things that connect with the market and you want to do things that people like and you want to do things that get seen. But you also want to do things you actually believe in and you personally want to do. Hey, if you’re going to work twenty hours a day and not get paid much money, you might as well do something you like. We were building the games we were interested in; we had that luxury. We didn’t have spectacular success and a huge win, but we had enough success that we got to do some more. And at some level, at least for me, sure, I’d love to have huge, huge success. But if I get to do another game, that’s pretty hard to complain about.

Today, free of the vicissitudes of an inhospitable marketplace, System Shock more than speaks for itself. Few games, past or present, combine so many diverse ideas into such a worthy whole, and few demonstrate such uncompromising commitment to their premise and their fiction. In a catalog filled with remarkable achievements, System Shock still stands out as one of Looking Glass’s most remarkable games of all, an example of what magical things can happen when technical wizardry is placed in the service of real aesthetic sophistication. By all means, go play it now if you haven’t already. Or, perhaps better said, go live it now.

(Sources: the books Game Design Theory and Practice, second edition, by Richard Rouse III and System Shock: Strategies and Secrets by Bernie Yee; Origin’s official System Shock hint book; Origin’s internal newsletter Point of Origin from June 3 1994, November 23 1994, January 13 1995, February 10 1995, March 14 1995, and May 5 1995; Electronic Entertainment of December 1994; Computer Gaming World of December 1994; Next Generation of February 1995; Game Developer of April/May 1995. Online sources include “Ahead of Its Time: The History of Looking Glass” and “From Looking Glass to Harmonix: The Tribe,” both by Mike Mahardy of Polygon. Most of all, huge thanks to Dorian Hart, Sean Barrett, and Dan Schmidt for talking with me about their time at Looking Glass.

System Shock is available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)

 
 

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