Incredible, but true: Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio (known for his immersive simulator games) didn’t play the System Shock remake…

Raphael Colantonio’s name is best associated with evergreen simulators. Arkane is known for many games in this genre (Arx Fatalis, Dishonored, Prey), but Colantonio left to create Weird West. In doing so, he proved that an immersive simulator could work from an isometric perspective. In comparison, what Colantonio said during the Quad Damage podcast was quite surprising: he admitted that the 2023 System Shock remake was too hard for him!

The original System Shock, released in 1994, was one of the first games Colantonio tested while working at Electronic Arts. The publisher owned Origin Systems. The experience was fantastic for Colantonio because he was a big fan of Looking Glass, the development team behind System Shock. He added that Ultima Underworld was also a big influence on him. It was released before System Shock, and helped inspire what would become his passion for immersive simulators.

“I was already hooked when I had the chance to playtest the original System Shock at Electronic Arts. It was like fate. I was so lucky because I could not believe what was happening to me. I tried the remake that came out a year or two ago. I got stuck in cyberspace. The gameplay was too hard. I was frustrated by it. But the rest was really cool up to that point. It was a fun experiment, but it was not the best part of the game. I avoided it as much as I could,” Colantonio said.

In his defense, the cyberspace parts of System Shock could be quite distracting. In the remake, it was rebuilt with six degrees of freedom (full three-dimensional movement), and it was quite a departure from the gameplay of the rest of the game. In any case, Colantonio’s commitment to the genre cannot be questioned.

After the success of Weird West, Colantonio’s WolfEye Studios is now working on a retro sci-fi first-person game that sounds a bit like Prey…

Source: PCGamer