But pushing against these claustrophobic constraints is precisely what makes System Shock such a satisfying throwback to the mid ‘90s. There’s no disputing that Citadel is a maze of uncomfortably cramped corridors, cubbyholes and crawlspaces - a Japanese capsule hotel made massive.
Stick that in your dataset and print it, corporate evil. That I’d love my new life lived in the gaps between radioactive storage facilities and robot repair rooms. What Hammer probably didn’t predict is how much fun it would all be. And while I’d dispute Stacy’s characterisation of Citadel’s residents as rodents, I can’t deny I’ve spent more than a dozen hours skulking, scurrying between holes in the walls, and pulling away at the station’s wires without a full understanding of the consequences.
What Hammer calls stress and anxiety, I would call System Shock's tension and atmosphere. “I always knew something was off about this place!”, wrote Stacy to a colleague. In the early stages of Citadel’s construction, Hammer suggested that each level of the station be designed in such a way as to induce stress and anxiety, so that experts could study their impact on the human psyche during space travel.
Not an assault rifle or mini-pistol, but a decades-old email chain between her TriOptimum bosses and a psychologist named Jeffrey Hammer. Sometime before SHODAN’s ethical constraints were removed and the rogue AI set about converting the people of Citadel Station into cyborgs, a researcher named Stacy Everson found a smoking gun hidden among the blinking servers of the spaceship’s library.
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