I got this feeling that these guys wanted to make their mark," Vogel says. "When I met with Ken and John Chey, the guys at Irrational, I got this scrappy, hungry feeling that I wanted to be part of. When Looking Glass and Irrational Games joined forced to design a sequel to System Shock, Vogel jumped ship from the former to the latter. Although Vogel enjoyed his time on Looking Glass' seminal stealth game, he says it "was not as customisable as I personally liked". System Shock 2 was the second game Vogel worked on. How does a designer juggle all of these different elements when building a level? Vogel boiled it down to a simple objective. And on top of that you want that feeling of emergence, of autonomy as a player." "We're giving you all the world-building, we're giving you all these new notions of who you are, what's going on with the ship, all these new mechanics, new weapons. "We had to do a lot In System Shock 2 with the first level," says Ian Vogel, a former level designer at Irrational, and the man who authored Med/Sci. The opening scenes of Med/Sci are were heavily inspired by Half-Life. But Med/Sci itself substantially influenced how the remainder of System Shock 2 was developed, as it's in this initial area where the ideas and atmosphere of the game are established, and where the player is grounded in its themes and modes of play. It has directly inspired games like BioShock, Dead Space and this year's Prey, while aspects of its design have found their way into dozens of other titles.
Med/Sci is the opening area of System Shock 2, one of the most influential games of its era. If you're lucky, you'll bludgeon him to death. No sooner have you made it through the airlock when you're attacked by a malformed crewmember, begging you to kill him. You rush to the airlock, crawling through a hamster run of corridors and access tunnels as you're given a brief rundown of how to play. There's an explosion, and Polito tells you to get out of cryobay, because soon there'll be another explosion, and then everything in the area will be sucked into space. Nearly everyone on the ship is either dead, or infected with a strange organism that mutates them and turns them hostile. Janice Polito, who summarises the situation. Illegal cybernetics have been implanted into your brain, and your memory has been wiped like a hard-drive. You awake in a cryotube on the medical deck of the spaceship Von Braun.
It's one of gaming's most terrifying introductions.
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