System Shock 2 - Making of Opening Area

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Eurogamer looks back at one of the best games ever made: System Shock 2:

The making of System Shock 2's best level
Come play with us.

It's one of gaming's most terrifying introductions. You awake in a cryotube on the medical deck of the spaceship Von Braun. Illegal cybernetics have been implanted into your brain, and your memory has been wiped like a hard-drive. You're contacted by Dr. Janice Polito, who summarises the situation. Nearly everyone on the ship is either dead, or infected with a strange organism that mutates them and turns them hostile. 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.

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. No sooner have you made it through the airlock when you're attacked by a malformed crewmember, begging you to kill him. All you've got to hand is a wrench. If you're lucky, you'll bludgeon him to death. He'll be the first of many.

Welcome to Med/Sci.

Med/Sci is the opening area of System Shock 2, one of the most influential games of its era. 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. 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.

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