Originally released in 1994, System Shock ushered in a new era of action gaming. Combining a compelling storyline with innovative RPG elements, System Shock was a ground-breaking title that would influence numerous other games such as BioShock and DeusEx. Now System Shock is being redone from the ground up for today’s PC and console players.

System Shock was one of the first 3D games that took a methodical approach to exploration while revealing a story driven narrative through audio logs and messages scattered throughout the game world. It was a revolutionary step forward for the medium in a time when developers first began experimenting with interactive story telling.

Players were trapped aboard Citadel Station as they fought to survive against the cyborgs and mutated crew members corrupted by a maniacal A.I. known as SHODAN, one of the most treacherous antagonists ever conceived. System Shock offered an unparalleled experience that would solidify it as one of the greatest games of all time.

Caught during a risky break-in, you become indentured to a greedy TriOptimum executive. After six months in a healing coma, you awaken to discover the surgeons are missing, the station is in disrepair, and the once-prime corporate facility now teems with mindless cyborgs, robots, and mutated beings, all programmed to serve a ruthless A.I.: SHODAN. There's scarcely time to think before it unleashes the first terror...

Hi everyone! Jason here this time to share some really important news. As some of you may have heard, we have officially switched our engine for System Shock to Unreal Engine 4. I know this seems like a risky move, and in some ways it is, but we’ve mitigated that risk by switching over early. To shed more light on how we reached this decision, I’ll need to go over a timeline. 

August: After listening to everyone during the Kickstarter campaign, it became clear that console support was very important to a lot of you. We took a hard look at what Unity could do on consoles, and what we wanted to achieve for both visual quality and performance. While Unity is a great engine, it was clear that we needed to use an engine that fit our project goals more closely. We took a few weeks to research various engines (mainly Lumberyard and Unreal). 

September: After the engine research and evaluating feedback on our visual style, we decided to try out Unreal and see what it had to offer. Around the same time, we needed to fill critical spots for the leads team. Recruiting takes time (actually, a lot of time, especially for the senior positions). I think we went through about 30+ interviews for various candidates from Sept-Dec. Most of the folks we selected were developers I had worked with on Fallout: New Vegas, so it made getting them up to speed on things pretty quick. 

October-December: During this time we focused on getting the nuts and bolts of the content inside of Unreal. Around the end of October, we were confident Unreal was the right way to go, but we didn’t want to announce the change just yet, since we wanted to prove to our backers (and ourselves) that we could deliver a slice of the game in Unreal with the updated visual direction. Couple that with the lengthy time recruiting/onboarding takes and we were steadily making progress towards our goal by the end of December. 

January: The next step before being ready to reveal our efforts was to establish a proper level using everything everyone had built up for Unreal. This is essentially for the “Vertical Slice” phase, but the early stages. I like using an iterative corner approach to vertical slice, meaning we would work on a small section of the vertical slice content, iterate and refine it until we were happy with the end result (typically finding problems and correcting them, tweaking things here and there, etc). Once the corner (in this case it was actually a series of rooms, a vent shaft, several hallways, and a lovable mutant named Marty) was finished, we would be ready to expand on the rest of the vertical slice content. 

February: After a lot of hard work, the corner was finally to a point we were happy with, which brings us to now! That pretty much paints a picture of where our heads were at with all of this. We didn’t make this decision lightly, and wanted to be sure we could do the game justice with this engine shift. Feel free to ask questions either in the comments or the Discord server. Let us know what you think! We want to ensure you feel we’re going in the right direction with all of this. 

- Jason Fader, Game Director

To help shape and direct the existing narrative of System Shock, we've enlisted the help of Chris Avellone, who is best known for his work on a number of role-playing games, including; Fallout: New Vegas, Wasteland 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, Planescape: Torment, and Fallout 2. Chris will be working closely with Stephen Kick (our Creative Director) and Jason Fader (our Project Director and Senior Producer from Fallout: New Vegas) as well as several other key developers from Fallout: New Vegas to bring modern AAA quality into the world of System Shock.

• General Features
  → A modern take on System Shock, a faithful reboot; it’s not Citadel Station as it was, but as you remember it. Many improvements, overhauls and changes are being implemented to capture the spirit of what the original game was trying to convey, and bring it to contemporary gamers.
  → Re-imagined enemies, weapons, and locations by original concept artist Robb Waters.
  → Terri Brosius reprises her role as SHODAN, and new VO will be recorded.
  → Brand new musical score composed by Jonathan Peros.
  → The user interface, game mechanics, enemies, and puzzles will be updated to reflect modern aesthetics and sensibilities, while maintaining the feel of the original.

We want this game to be as chilling to players today as the original System Shock was when it was released in 1994. What is most important to us is taking the essence of the original game, and emphasizing that as we present it to gamers today. With the knowledge and technological improvements over the last 22 years since the original, we can communicate the story of Citadel Station more effectively than ever.

System Shock will have a dramatic and modern take on a musical score. Combining its root sci-fi elements with dynamic acoustic elements à la BioShock, we are striving to set System Shock apart from other more action-based shooters as an atmospheric and dark experience.

Though computer music software has improved exponentially in the last decade, there is no equivalent to the breathtaking and visceral sounds that real instruments can produce. We have been working with Videri String Quartet, and we are in talks with Prague's FILMharmonic Orchestra about recording the score for System Shock. They're a very professional orchestra, having recorded scores for Civilization V, Thief, Hostel, Dream Theater, and many more projects. If we can reach the stretch goal required to afford everything that it takes to record a full orchestra, the game's musical experience will be much more expressive and terrifying than would ever be possible without.

Though for a modern game like System Shock, a more restrained and dramatic approach is called for, we are also really excited to bring the old System Shock tunes back to life in an updated way! With a roster of world-class musicians, we have set a stretch goal to release a remixed version of the original soundtrack intact! Please help us to make this a reality so that we cannot only provide a strong modern gameplay experience, but also give the old tunes the love that they deserve!