For me, the name Raphael Colantonio is basically synonymous with immersive sims, which for the record I love deeply. He founded Arkane, headed up Arx Fatalis, Dishonored, and Prey, and then proved immsims could work from an isometric perspective with the excellent Weird West.
So I was more than a little shocked when he said during a recent Quad Damage Podcast (via GamesRadar) that he gave up on the 2023 System Shock remake because, well, it was just "too hard."
The original System Shock, released in 1994, was one of the first games Colantonio tested while at Electronic Arts, which owned publisher Origin Systems. The experience was "fantastic," he said, because he was "a huge fan of Looking Glass," the game's developer; he also, appropriately and correctly, called out the groundbreaking Ultima Underworld, which came out a couple years ahead of System Shock, for helping inspire what would become his "passion for immersive sims."
"I was already hooked when I had a chance to playtest System Shock back then at EA," Colantonio said. "It was like some sort of destiny. I was so lucky, because I could not believe what was happening to me."
Given that formative experience, you might think Colantonio would be a big fan of Nightdive's brilliant 2023 remaster, an outstanding update of the original that we dubbed the Best Remake of 2023. But apparently that's not the case.
"I tried the one that came out a year or two ago," he said. "I got stuck in cyberspace. That gameplay was too hard. I was frustrated by it. But the rest was really cool, until then.
"It was a fun experiment, but it was not the best part of the game. I was avoiding it as much as possible."
In all fairness, the cyberspace bits in System Shock were kind of a hassle. Rejiggered as a Descent-like 6DOF for the remake, they're a big departure from the gameplay of the rest of the game, and for me at least they tended to land more as something I had to do than something I wanted to do.
Still, I can't help feeling a little, well, disappointed. Danny Glover was emphatically too old for this shit, but that didn't keep him from cleaning house when the need arose. Bruce Wayne was a broken-down old man when he kicked Superman's ass. And when the late, great Val Kilmer told Tom Cruise, "The kids need Maverick," well, the kids got Maverick. You know what I'm saying?
Of course, I'm kidding—mostly, anyway. And as someone who's walked away from a game or two because of time-wasting boss fights, a part of me appreciates hearing that other people too sometimes hit a wall in a game they otherwise dig and decide they've got better things to do.
And if nothing else, there's no questioning his commitment to the genre: Following the success of Weird West, Colantonio's WolfEye Studios is now working on a "retro sci-fi first-person" game that sounds like it might just have a little bit of Prey DNA running through its veins. You better believe I'll be jumping on that at the first opportunity.
