System Shock

The game box

The game System Shock is not a part of the Ultima universe, however it is built on a (more advanced) version of the game engine used in Ultima Underworld and Ultima Underworld II and was developed by many of the same people. Developed by Looking Glass Studios, it was published by Origin, and thus Electronic Arts (who had bought Origin one and a half years earlier).

The Game[edit]

Story[edit]

In the year of 2072, a hacker runs afoul of the mega-corporation Tri-Optimum by hacking into their secret files about space station Citadel in Saturn orbit. However, the corrupt executive Edward Diego offers the hacker a deal. For a favor, he would arrange for the charges to be dropped and the hacker gets a modern cyberspace implant as a bonus. However, since it included removing ethical constraints from Shodan, the station's central AI, when the hacker awakes after six months in a medical coma, the consequences of that act become all too obvious...

Development[edit]

System Shock was created by Looking Glass building on all of the experiences with the Ultima Underworld titles and it was running in a modified and much more advanced version of the engine. That did shave off a lot off the required development time, thus allowing the studio to concentrate more on the game content itself. When it came to publishing, the old connections to Origin, who meanwhile were bought by Electronic Arts, got Looking Glass in contact with the latter. An agreement was made to publish the game via Origin.

However, near the end of development Electronic Arts pushed for a floppy disk release, despite the game having been planned for CD-Rom release. Thus Looking Glass had to release a cut-down version for floppy disk which was locked at 320x200 resolution, lacked all voice audio and had more primitive cutscenes. That version was released September 1994. The intended version with all features was released on CD-Rom on November 1994. It perhaps is also due to this publication history that sales of the game did not meet expectations.

Besides the original version for DOS, versions for the Macintosh and the PC-98 were created as well.

Trivia[edit]

Hints in other Origin games like the Wing Commander-series and Crusader do point at all those games taking place in the same universe, only at different points in time.
Looking Glass used the delayed CD-Rom release for some needed patching of some issues which had revealed themselves in the floppy release.
A remake of this game does exist; it was published in 2023. An anhanced version of the original game with a better control sheme was published in 2015.