worked pretty well. There’s obviously stuff one would change in retrospect, like with
anything one ever does, but I think we did a decent job of focusing. There’s still a lot
more focusing to do.
I always thought the idea of having the separate cyberspace mode inSystem
Shockwas pretty interesting. What were the motivations behind adding that?
We thought it just fit from
a conceptual standpoint:
you’re a hacker, shouldn’t
you hack something? We
thought it would be fun to
throw in a different move-
ment mode that was more
free-form, more action. In
retrospect we probably
should have either cut it
or spent more time on it.
There is some fun stuff in
it, but it’s not as polished
as it should be. But even
so it was nice because it at
least reinforced the idea
that you were the hacker,
in a totally random, arcade-y, broken sort of way. But at least it suggested that you’re
something other than a guy with a gun. Like I said, we were pretty intro-focused then.
We were looking at ourselves and said, “Oh, of course we should have cyberspace.
We’re a cyberpunk game, we gotta have cyberspace. Well, what can we do without too
much time? What if we do this crazy thing?” Off we went...
Though the Looking Glass games did pretty well commercially, they never
were massive hits like the id games that came out around the same time,
despite using similarly impressive technology. Was the company ever dis-
tressed by this?
I don’t know about distressed... Ingeneral, I think we were doing things which were
technically more aggressive. I certainly don’t mean to say in any sense we were techni-
cally better because it’s hard to imagine how one would write an engine that was more
efficient or powerful than one of Carmack’s engines. And John’s an incredibly bright
and amazingly talented guy. But if you look atWolfenstein, it was walls, no lighting, no
floors and ceilings, no look up and down, all flat, period, whileUnderworldhad slopes,
and lighting, and floor and ceiling textures, and jumping, and little physics stuff, and so
on. Now, does that make it a better game? Of course not. It has nothing to do with
whether the game is good or not. I think we were trying to do a little more than the
machines probably were ready to do or even that we were ready for. I think we were
pretty good programmers, but who knows, maybe someone else could have done it a lot
faster than we did. The fact that in general most people got to it a couple of years later
Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church 513
System Shock