cut-scene. To us, giving players the ability, even if they don’t think of it as such, to go
their own way is where they’re going to be more likely to do something they remember
and care about. InShockwe certainly tried to build some systems like upgrades or the
security cameras where you had a fair amount of freedom in which order you did it and
how you did it, where it wasn’t just “Go do this sequence of four things.” It was “Well,
there are going to be twelve cameras here and you gotta take out eight of them. Figure
it out.” We gave you that option of “Well, that one seems like a mess” or “I don’t want to
fight that guy. OK, maybe I can find another way...”
I think that was our philosophy of design. We were very state-based as opposed to
event-based. We didn’t do a very good job on those early games, but we tried to do as
many things state-based as we could. Those cameras are a good example. It wasn’t a
matter of saying, “If you’ve destroyed these eight cameras in this order, then do this.” It
was much more a case of “When we are in this state, the following thing happens.” And
that way you give the player ability to get into that state however they want. Obviously
back then, with our incredibly remedial physics and so on, there was a limited amount of
that we could do, and obviously as we get worlds where you can do more stuff and more
interactions that becomes more powerful. But even back then we were thinking about
it that way, as much as we could at least.
System Shockseemed to be one of the earliest games of its type to use physics,
even in a pretty primitive form.
I think we saw that inUnderworld, where we had this incredibly remedial physics but
people still had fun throwing things and bouncing the superball around and trying to hit
targets with things. And we said, “Hey, let’s do more of that because worlds have phys-
ics.” On some level it’s still just a dungeon simulator, and we’re still just trying to
evolve that idea. I really do thinkSystem Shockis just the somewhat obvious evolution
ofUnderworld. We rewrote it all for 32 bit with Watcom, as opposed to the old 16-bit
stuff, and that gave us some more power and some more possibilities. But philosophi-
cally it was a refinement and a focusing of the previous thing.
It always seemed to me like a pretty significant step forward.
I think we certainly were attempting to refine and focus. This was the stuff we thought
we’d done OK on, which was primarily this idea of exploration, and how much players
liked doing their own thing and remembered spaces and places and stories that we told.
Some of the best stuff I think inUnderworldwas where there was no dialog. The story
was all told through what was on screen. A lot of people at the time remembered the
troll/knight battle. There was this room where we set up a bunch of debris and decals
and objects to make it look like there had been this big fight: skulls, broken swords, and
stuff were left all over the place. And you could talk to testers or people at trade shows
who had played the game or whatever, and they’d say, “Man, there was that big fight!”
And they’d tell you about the fight between the trolls and the knights even though we
never said anything about it, because they’d seen it. So we really thought that the
exploration and the visual context was really important to people. So inShockwe really
tried to focus on that, to do what we could to come up with other ways to let people
explore, and not do so much where we tried to tell them or force them. I thought it
512 Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church