My Life in Games: Chris Parbery

System Shock 2 (1999) – PC

Who knew that games could do a good job at storytelling? I certainly didn’t, and at the time it was revelatory.

For those who don’t know, System Shock is the predecessor to Bioshock. Ken Levine worked on both, and Bioshock is more or less ‘System Shock 2: Again, But This Time Underwater.’ That’s not to say that Bioshock isn’t an amazing game, but many of the things that it’s praised for were already done in System Shock 2, eight years earlier. In fact, if you played System Shock 2 today without knowing when it came out or that it was made by the same people who made Bioshock, you would likely think that it was just a really bad looking rip off of Bioshock set in space, because they are so astonishingly similar.

Like in Bioshock, you play a silent protagonist who receives the story through audio logs and radio calls. I had never seen a story told this way, and it made so much sense for a video game to deliver its narrative like this that I’m surprised nobody stole the idea in the eight years between this and Bioshock. It’s what kept me playing, because otherwise I would have stopped since the game is utterly terrifying. I still get goosebumps when I hear the groans of the zombie-like crew members echoing down the halls of the Von Braun, and I still get weirded out when they desperately warn me to run away as they get closer.