cool. But by the timeWolfhad come out we were pretty much done withUnderworldso
it wasn’t like we were looking at them to get ideas, per se. They were kinda doing their
thing and we were kinda doing our thing. I don’t know if they respected our stuff or
liked it; we certainly respected and liked their stuff. But we weren’t like, “more of
that!” We certainly talked about how it was better and faster and cleaner thanUnder-
world, far more than we talked about any other game that was out. That was probably
one of our weaknesses at the time, that we were pretty introverted, and pretty much
doing our own thing in almost everything we were doing. We were doingTerra Nova,
which was obviously a weird hybrid game. And we were doingFlight Unlimited, which
in some sense was a weird hybrid game; non-shooting yet non-big commercial flight
simulator. We were kinda just doing our own stuff.
So you tried to avoid comparing yourself to whatever else was going on in
gaming?
It’s not that we didn’t play and like other games. We did. And we certainly thought about
what we did and didn’t like about them, and we certainly talked about games a lot. But I
don’t remember being in meetings and people saying, “Make it more like this other
thing.” We were kinda just doing the game we thought we should do. And, for good or
for bad, that was pretty much in reference to the games we had done already. And obvi-
ously we were seeing all the Origin stuff that was in development, and we were sort of
influenced by that RPG/story aesthetic that Chris [Roberts], Richard, and Warren had
been building up down there.
System Shock, likeUltima Underworldbefore it, was a pretty non-linear game
experience. Was that one of your primary design goals?
I think on both Under-
worldandShock, we didn’t
want to build games
where you clear out every
square on this level and
then you go on to the next
level.Underworldhad lots
of things that would cut
you off and you had to
come back to later, or at
least you should come
back to later. For example,
now that you’ve reached
level seven, you’re going
to have to go back to areas
that you couldn’t get to
before. Both games had
their four or five major checkpoints, but we’d always believed that player choice was
pretty central to what made it fun for people. And that player-centric stuff was what you
remember. You remember the clever little thing you did more than you remember some
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System Shock