Postmortems from Game Developer

Irrational Games’SYSTEM SHOCK 2

by jonathan chey

This is the story of a young and inexperienced company that was given the chance to develop the sequel to one of the top ten games of all time. The sequel was allotted roughly one year of development with its full team. To make up for the short development cycle and correspondingly small budget, the project was supposed to reuse technology. Not technology in the sense of a stand-alone engine from another game, but individual components that were spun off from yet another game, THIEF: THE DARK PROJECT. The THIEF technology was still under development and months away from completion when our team started working with it. To cap everything off, the project was a collaborative effort between two companies ...