she could lock doors or sabotage you. And that helped the story a lot. The voice-over
was nice, especially when you actually had audio as opposed to text, for the logs,
because you could put in Foley and all that stuff, and I think that’s a huge part of what
makes the game work. I don’t think the floppy version works nearly as well, because
rather than just reading the text you’re hearing the explosions in the background and
the desperation in someone’s voice. There’s a lot of text in that game — it’s not short
on story. But even so, it’s not like every room you go into you’re in this endless conver-
sation you have to walk back and forth through. We were forced to tell this story and boil
it down into bite-sized chunks. And there are some that are too long; we didn’t catch all
of them. But the bite-sized chunks meant that we had to make them a little more digest-
ible. And that’s not why we did logs, we didn’t do logs to say “Hey, let’s have all these
little bite-size pieces of story so you don’t get overwhelmed but you feel like you’re
really putting the mystery together and it all ties together and we can have great Foley
to make it seem more emotional and blah blah blah.” But at the end of the day that’s
kind of what it did. And that was a huge help. I don’t think the story itself is so awesome
or spectacularly outrageous. I mean, it’s fine, but I don’t think if you wrote the novel it
would fly off the shelves.
It’s the way it was told.
I think the bite-sized chunks plus the Foley and ambience plus the continual pervasive
enemy. Even when you weren’t interacting with Shodan, you’d see a security camera
you had to take out. All those little actions become part of the story in some sense. And
the fact that you’re exploring the story as opposed to having the story force fed to you, I
think was a huge help as well. The fact that it’s not “You have to talk to me now.”
Instead you pick up this log but maybe you don’t read it right away or maybe you want to
think back on something so you can go back and bring the log up again and explore it.
It’s all smoke and mirrors, but I think it makes the player feel more central. And I think
that makes people take more possession of it and feel that it’s theirs more.
It seems likeSystem Shockwent out of its way to blend different game genres
together even more thanUltima Underworld. Was that intentional?
In all honesty I don’t think any of us really thought about that stuff very much, which
has been something that has always gotten us in trouble. But I think on some level, it
was “Hey, let’s make this game.” Obviously, for us, we said, “Hey,Underworldwas fun
but all that conversation stuff was kind of a pain and those stats seemed to be distracting
you and all that number and detail stuff. Can’t we streamline this a little bit? Can’t we
make it a little more action and a little more immediate?” And that was pretty much it. I
don’t think we were specifically thinking, “Hey, let’s do an action-RPG” or whatever. I
think it was more an evolution ofUnderworldmore than anything else.
Since the firstUnderworld,Wolfenstein 3Dhad come out and had become a huge
hit with a much more simple, action-oriented experience. Did you guys delib-
erately try to avoid the visceral shooter gameplay they had staked out?
No, I think we were just doing our own thing, frankly. We knew the id guys and obvi-
ously their stuff was awesome — we all were fans in the sense that we thought it was
510 Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church