want. But if I get to do another game that I find interesting, that’s pretty hard to com-
plain about. People certainly discussed it, it’s not like we weren’t aware of it. And every
so often someone would come in and say, “Why don’t we just doDoomwith this?” But
as a team I think we were pretty into the stuff we were doing.
TheFlight Unlimitedproject seemed to be a pretty big departure from what
Looking Glass had been doing up to that point.
WhenShockfinished,FlightandTerra Novawere in development. Most of theShock
team ended up onFlightfor a little while to help it ship and then they moved on toTerra
Novaand whatever else was going on at the time. Looking Glass was going through this
period of trying to do a lot of things at once and sort of overreaching itself and being a lit-
tle overambitious and a little cocky. The company was trying to establish itself as a
publisher at a time when that was very, very hard to do. All the other mid-sized publish-
ers were mostly going out of business or getting bought, while we were trying to
branch into new genres and do more things and start up an affiliate label and self-publish
Flightand all this other craziness. No one in the management chain of the company
really paid any attention toSystem ShockbecauseFlightwas going to be the first
self-published product, and fair enough. From a company standpoint,Flightwas the
product that had to be the hit, because it was the self-published title. Ned and Paul had
merged to become Blue Sky Research, which became Looking Glass, and Ned had obvi-
ously been into flight simulators, having worked on Chuck Yeager. And Seamus
[Blackley] obviously was into the whole flight simulator thing. The company’s focus
was the attempt to self-publish and get out of the treadmill of waiting for advances and
get a chance to get some solidity behind things so one can make forward-looking deci-
sions instead of just focusing on the short term. Obviously it did not work, but it’s easy
to criticize in retrospect, in that hindsight way. I think there was plenty of clarity up
front on some of the mistakes, but some of the mistakes were quite honest and quite
reasonable. You look at them and say, “Well, yeah, I can see why they did that.”
How did theThiefpro-
ject originate?
We had a bunch of
high-concept ideas about
game design which, in
practice, very few of actu-
ally happened in the final
game. We had a lot of
thoughts about having dif-
ferent factions. As I
discussed, we felt that
character and conversa-
tion were something that
was hard, to put it mildly.
So we had conceived of
factions of people in the
Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church 515
Thief