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The Space Sim’s Last Hurrah

07 Nov

This article tells part of the story of space sims.

Amidst so much else, the 1990s saw the rise and fall of the narrative-driven space sim. The sub-genre was effectively invented in 1990, when Wing Commander dared to add a set-piece story line to the sturdy foundation of the more open-ended British classic Elite. It reached a peak of commercial and critical acceptance in 1994 with Wing Commander III and TIE Fighter, only to fall off the big publishers’ radar completely by shortly after the turn of the millennium. As you regular readers know, I’ve been writing the final installments to a lot of stories recently, a symptom of the period of churn and consolidation in which these histories currently find themselves. Now I’m on the verge of writing my last words on not just a company but a whole category of games as a mainstream commercial force — almost, I’m tempted to say, a whole subculture of gaming, one of the oddest of them of all when you stop to think about it.

Even the phrase “space sim” is kind of strange and misleading. What were these games supposed to be simulating? Definitely not any form of real spaceflight — not when they chose to implement atmospheric drag, meaning that your ship slows down if you let off the throttle in exactly the way that a real vehicle out in the vacuum of space doesn’t. Their developers started with the way space combat was presented in the Star Wars films, which had themselves happily ignored everything we know about the nature of real space travel in favor of dogfights borrowed from old Second World War movies. Then they just piled on whatever seemed fun and interesting to them, which often entailed delving deeper into the same wellspring as George Lucas. (It was no coincidence that Lawrence Holland, one of the foremost practitioners of the space sim, cut his teeth as a game developer on World War II flight simulators.) Space sims were known by that name because of their vibe alone — because they subjectively felt like simulators, no matter how divorced they were from the reality of space travel. (There are lessons to be drawn from this, if we choose to heed them. The fact is that almost every game which is labelled a simulator is less of one than it purports to be. This is worth remembering any time anyone encourages you to take any game too seriously as a reflection of the real world.)

Chris Roberts’s Wing Commander games made the space-sim formula still more uncanny, by interleaving the missions in space with potboiler relationship drama. It may have been weird on the face of it, seemingly more a product of some random butterfly somewhere flapping its wings than anything flown in on the wings of fate, but for the better part of a decade quite a lot of people loved it.

And then they didn’t so much anymore…

Wing Commander III includes a love triangle. Because of course it does…

Being an inveterate hiker when I’m not sitting behind a computer, I can tell you that it’s sometimes harder than you think it ought to be to realize when you’ve reached peak elevation in a landscape. The same is true in the landscape of media. As I noted above, the space sim reached its peak already in 1994, even though it would take a few years for everyone to cotton onto that fact. For this was the year that both the Wing Commander series and LucasArts’s Star Wars space sims, the eternal yin and yang of the sub-genre, released their best-remembered installments.

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger doubled down on creator Chris Roberts’s passion for the cinematic side of the experience by interleaving a fairly workmanlike space-combat game with a semi-interactive movie that featured digitized human actors, among them such established Hollywood talents as Jason Bernard, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies, and Tom Wilson. In what was arguably the greatest feat of stunt casting in the history of games, the star of the show was none other than Mark Hamill. Over a decade after he had last portrayed Luke Skywalker on the big screen, he portrayed here another space-fighter jock, the player’s own avatar, Colonel Christopher Blair. The presence of so many recognizable actors garnered Wing Commander III considerable attention in the glossy mainstream press. The “Siliwood” dream of Northern and Southern California joining forces to forge a new form of entertainment was nearing its frenzied peak in tandem with the space sim in 1994. Wing Commander III was widely hailed, notwithstanding its computer-generated sets and general B-movie aesthetics, as a proof of concept for the better, richer interactive movies that were still to come. Hyped inside the industry as the most expensive game yet made, it garnered a rare five-stars-out-of-five review from Computer Gaming World, and sold at least half a million copies in the United States alone, at an average street price of about $70.

If Wing Commander III was trying to capitalize on gamers’ love for Star Wars in some less-than-subtle ways, LucasArts’s TIE Fighter had the advantage of literally being Star Wars, coming out of George Lucas’s very own games studio. It also had the advantage of being a much better, deeper game where it really counted, eschewing digitized actors and soapy relationship drama to focus firmly on the action in the cockpit. It too was given a perfect score by Computer Gaming World, and sold in similar numbers to Wing Commander III, albeit without attracting the same level of attention from the mainstream press.

Alas, it was mostly downhill for the two franchises from there; such is rather the nature of peaks, isn’t it? In early 1996, barely eighteen months after Wing Commander III, Chris Roberts and his employer Origin Systems were ready with Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom. Despite the short turnaround time, it represented another dramatic escalation in budget and ambition on the cinematic side of the equation. (The combat engine, with which Roberts by now hardly bothered to concern himself, was largely unchanged.) Mark Hamill and most of the rest of the previous cast were back, for a production that was shot on film this time rather than videotape, on real sets rather than in front of green screens that were filled in with computer-generated backgrounds after the fact. Yet many gamers found the end results to be paradoxically less stunning. The filmed sequences of Wing Commander IV fell into a sort of uncanny valley, being no longer clearly part of a computer game and yet having nowhere near the production values of even the most modest Hollywood features of the standard stripe. Probably more importantly, the Siliwood cultural moment was quickly passing, leaving the game with something of the odor of an anachronism. The mainstream was becoming more interested in the burgeoning World Wide Web than the wonders of multimedia and CD-ROM, even as hardcore gamers were embracing the non-stop action of the first-person-shooter and real-time-strategy genres, having lost patience with the long cutscenes and endless exposition of interactive movies.

For a cost of more than three times that of Wing Commander III, Wing Commander IV sold a third as many copies. Origin’s management told Chris Roberts that any future games in the series would have to scale back the movie angle and try harder to refresh the increasingly stale gameplay. By way of a response, Roberts quit his job at Origin.

From here, the decline was steep for Wing Commander. In September of 1996, the USA television network debuted Wing Commander Academy, a Saturday-morning cartoon featuring the voices of Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Tom Wilson among other actors from the last couple of games. All of the parties involved had envisioned the show capitalizing on a hit game. Absent said hit, it disappeared from the airwaves after just thirteen episodes.

The franchise’s last hurrah as a game came with Wing Commander: Prophecy, which appeared at the end of 1997. “Wing Commander III and IV were both great products,” said Prophecy’s producer Adam Foshko, straining hard to be diplomatic toward his predecessor Chris Roberts, “but they are more like unequal halves. This is a much more synergistic product. It’s very team-driven. It’s not one person’s vision, and I think it shows.” At its best, Prophecy really did play better than any Wing Commander in years, evincing the far greater level of attention the team paid to the action in the cockpit. Less positively, the movie sequences were cheesier and more constrained, even as a plan to bring the game fully in line with the hardcore set’s current priorities by adding a multiplayer component ultimately came to naught. When Prophecy didn’t sell well, that was that for Wing Commander as a gaming franchise. The commercial prospects of an expansion pack that the team had been working on — a return to the old “mission disks” that had made Origin a bundle back before the former Luke Skywalker and his Hollywood friends had entered the picture — looked so dire that Origin just dumped the whole thing onto the Internet for free.

Meanwhile Lawrence Holland and his colleagues had been going through some travails of their own. After making a well-received TIE Fighter expansion pack and a “Collector’s CD-ROM” with yet more new missions to fly, Holland left LucasArts on amicable terms to start a studio called Totally Games, taking his technology and most of his team with him. From the average fan’s perspective, this was a distinction without a difference: Totally’s games would still be Star Wars space sims, and they would still be published by LucasArts.

Like their counterparts at Origin, the folks at Totally could totally see the potential in offering a multiplayer mode to keep up with the changing times. But unlike them, they stuck with the program. In fact, the next iteration of their series was designed to be multiplayer first and foremost. Holland and his people spent almost two years finding ways to make multiplayer work reliably despite all of the challenges of the high-latency, dial-up Internet of the era.

The result of those efforts landed with a resounding thud in the spring of 1997, becoming a case study in the dangers of failing to understand your customers. Holland’s X-Wing and TIE Fighter games may not have been interactive movies in the sense of Wing Commander III and IV, but people had nevertheless loved their unfolding campaigns, loved the sense of playing a part in what could easily have been a novel set in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The ingeniously titled X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter didn’t give them any of that; its single-player mode was little more than a place to practice for multiplayer matches. “The sad part is, I was really looking forward to this game,” wrote Computer Gaming World’s reviewer, echoing the sentiments of thousands upon thousands of deeply disappointed ordinary players. “After the high of TIE Fighter, I wanted another Star Wars experience that would be just as immersive and fun. And while my wish for multiplayer Star Wars action was fulfilled, my hope for an equivalent single-player experience wasn’t.” In a last-ditch attempt to save their baby, Totally put together an expansion pack whose sole purpose was to provide a single-player campaign of the old style. It did so competently enough, but inspired it was not, and it never had much chance of rescuing a base game that was already a fixture of bargain bins by the time the expansion appeared in January of 1998.

In contrast to Wing Commander, however, LucasArts and Totally’s space-sim series was afforded one more kick at the can after 1998. To hear Lawrence Holland talk about it when it was still in development, Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance was the be-all, end-all in space sims. For those who wanted a story-driven campaign, this game’s would be the biggest and best ever. For those who wanted multiplayer action, this game’s multiplayer mode would be more stable and convenient than that of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. For those who cared about graphics, this game’s would be the best yet, taking full advantage of the 3D-accelerator cards that were proliferating everywhere. It was an ambitious plan, especially considering that this old-school Star Wars game had to be finished before The Phantom Menace, the first new Star Wars movie in more than a decade and a half, reached theaters in June of 1999, bringing with it an onslaught of next-generation toys and games.

X-Wing Alliance met that goal, being released in March of 1999. The most remarkable thing about it is how many of its other lofty goals it managed to achieve against the strictures of time and budget. The story is almost Wing Commander-like in its elaborateness, presenting for the first time a named, strongly characterized protagonist, a youthful member of a trading family caught between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire. His story is told not only through the usual mission briefings but also through emails and radio chatter full of enough interpersonal drama to warm the cockles of Chris Roberts’s heart. The campaign begins on the ice-planet Hoth, is interwoven with the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and climaxes with you getting to fly the Millennium Falcon at the Battle of Endor. What dedicated Stars Wars fan could resist?


Sadly, further examination of X-Wing Alliance reveals some significant shortcomings. The individual missions are often unpolished, sometimes failing to even convey adequately what their goals are; trying to complete some of them feels like trying to read the designers’ minds. Ironically, this is the same general set of issues that dragged down the original X-Wing, upon which TIE Fighter did such a magnificent job of improving. It’s disheartening to see them making a return at this late date. Like so many flawed games, X-Wing Alliance might have been amazing if it had just been allowed a few more months in the oven.

That said, the biggest obstacle that X-Wing Alliance faced in the marketplace was probably just the tenor of the times. As I already noted, at a time when everyone was excited and optimistic about The Phantom Menace, the new face of Star Wars, this game was old-school. And yet that was only the beginning of the commercial headwinds it faced. Gamers in general were turning away from simulations in droves; real-world flight and combat simulators too, which had in some earlier years accounted for more than 20 percent of the computer-game industry’s total revenues, had now fallen markedly out of favor. Fewer and fewer gamers even owned joysticks anymore. (To what extent this was a cause and to what extent it was a symptom of simulators’ declining fortunes is a matter of debate.) Existing fans and would-be fans of simulations were being tempted away by other action-packed genres that were quicker and easier to pick up and play for the first time, while still offering plenty of long-term rewards for those who stuck with them. It seemed that fewer people had the patience for games that started by asking you to read a thick manual, then required you to go through a veritable digital flight school before you could start playing them for real.

At any rate, by Y2K both Wing Commander and the Star Wars space sims had been consigned by their publishers to the dustbin of history. Other titles in development that had dreamed of competing with the space sim’s dynamic duo head-on suffered the same fate. The most high-profile of the cancellations was a space sim from Sierra that took place in the universe of the recently concluded Babylon 5 television series. Created with heavy input from Christy Marx, a Babylon 5 scriptwriter who had earlier designed a couple of point-and-click adventure games for Sierra, it was supposed to “tart up a tired genre” and “radically change the face of gaming” with “non-linear, non-branching storytelling, a brilliant modular refit job on nearly five hours of [television composer] Christopher Franke’s music, plus an attention to the physics of space travel that will raise the high bar on space-combat games for years to come.” It got to within a few months of completion, got as far as having the box art prepared before falling victim in late 1999 to an uncongenial marketplace and to the chaos inside Sierra that had followed that venerable mom-and-pop company’s purchase by two separate corporate conglomerates in a period of just a few years.

Still, the space-sim diehards did get one last pair of classics from an utterly unexpected source before their favored sub-genre disappeared from the catalogs of the big publishers forever. In fact, many a grizzled joystick jockey will tell you even today that the second of the two Freespace games is the best of its type ever created — yes, better even than the hallowed TIE Fighter.

The first mover without whom Freespace would never have come to be was a native Chicagoan named Mike Kulas, whose early gigs as a game programmer included stints at subLogic of Flight Simulator fame and at Lerner Research, a precursor to the legendary Looking Glass Studios. At the latter workplace, he befriended one Matt Toschlog. “If this is what it means to run a company, we can do it too,” the friends decided after spending two years at the dawn of the 1990s on an ultimately unsatisfying racing game that was sold in the trade dress of Car and Driver magazine. “What’s the worst that could happen? It’ll fail and we’ll have to go back to work for somebody else.” Kulas and Toschlog moved out of the Boston area and back to Champaign, Illinois, also the home of subLogic. Champaign seemed a good place to open a new studio: it had the advantages of fairly cheap rents and a large pool of enthusiastic young tech talent, thanks to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the source of such innovations as the pioneering PLATO system of the 1970s and the point-and-click Mosaic browser that was popularizing the nascent World Wide Web at that very moment.

Kulas and Toschlog founded Parallax Software in June of 1993, six months before DOOM ignited a craze for immersive 3D action that would remake much of the industry in its image over the next few years. Luckily, Parallax was well-equipped to capitalize on the trend, what with the founders’ experience with 3D graphics and the passionate young sparks they were able to recruit from the nearby university. Descent, their very first game, put you behind the controls of a small flying vehicle and set you loose inside a series of 3D-rendered outer-space mining complexes, filled with robots gone haywire. It was different enough to stand out in a sea of DOOM clones, yet felt very much in step with the times in a broader sense. Upon its release in March of 1995, Descent became a surprise hit for its publisher Interplay, whose marketers were left scrambling to catch up to the buzz on the street with a port to the Sony PlayStation and television campaigns starring mid-tier celebrities. Made for less than half a million dollars, the game was one heck of a debut for Parallax. It and its almost-as-successful 1996 sequel were enough to make them think that winning fame and fortune in the games industry was actually pretty easy.

Matt Toschlog had never been happy in Champaign. Flush with all of that Descent cash, he wanted to move Parallax somewhere else. Mike Kulas, on the other hand, preferred to stay put. Unable to find any other way out of the impasse, the founders agreed to split the company between them. In late 1996, Toschlog moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to start Outrage Entertainment. Kulas decided to rename his half of the company Volition — “an intense act of will to accomplish something” — after stumbling across the word in a book. Outrage’s first project was to be the inevitable Descent3; Volition’s was to be Freespace, a space sim that would, as its name implied, take the player out of the asteroid mines and into the limitless inky-black freedom that lay beyond.

Freespace isn’t shy about displaying its influences. Created by a bunch of guys who adored LucasArts’s X-Wing and TIE Fighter sims, it hews unabashedly to their template. After the requisite flight training, you’re tossed into an interstellar war between your Terran Alliance and an alien race known as the Vasudans. Then another group of aliens shows up, a shadowy enigma that comes to be called the Shivans, who are so powerful that the old antipathies are quickly forgotten, and Terrans and Vasudans unite to face the greatest threat either of their races has ever known.

Although neither its core gameplay model nor its fiction is remotely revolutionary, Freespace stands out for how well it executes on this derivative material. The graphics are exceptional for their era, the possibility space behind the controls expansive, the mission design uniformly solid. Inspiration in game design is wonderful, but we should never forget the value of perspiration. The people who made Freespace loved what they were doing enough to sweat every small detail, and it shows. The only place where the game fell down a bit back in the day was a somewhat under-baked multiplayer mode.

Interplay insisted on calling the game Descent: Freespace (“From the creators of Descent!”) in the hope of riding the coattails of the publisher’s biggest hit in recent memory. Whatever else you can say about it, it certainly wasn’t their worst exercise in Descent branding. (That would be Descent to Undermountain, an ill-advised attempt to use the old Parallax engine for, of all things, a Dungeons & Dragons-licensed CRPG.) And who knows? Maybe the branding even did some good. Upon its release in June of 1998, Freespace sold well enough to be modestly profitable for its studio and publisher and convince Interplay to fund an expansion pack and a sequel. The only catches were that Volition had to turn both out quickly, without spending too much money on them.

The expansion pack, which they called Silent Threat, ended up being short and perfunctory, the definition of inessential. The full-fledged sequel, however, was a minor miracle. It defied every cynical expectation raised by its abbreviated development cycle when it shipped on September 30, 1999.

Freespace 2 — Interplay allowed the cleaner name this time, perhaps to avoid confusion with the recently released Descent3 — did everything its predecessor had done well that much better, then added a finishing touch that it had lacked: a real sense of gravitas, provided largely by the one significant addition to the development team. Jason Scott (not to be confused with the archivist and Infocom documentarian of the same name) was Volition’s first dedicated writer. He made his presence felt with a campaign that was sometimes exhilarating, sometimes harrowing, but always riveting. The outer-space kitty-cats of Wing Commander, even Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, paled in comparison to the Shivans after Jason Scott got his hands on them. “The universe is very impersonal,” he says. “Your character is referred to only as ‘Pilot’ or ‘Alpha 1,’ and you’re up against countless waves of a seemingly unbeatable, genocidal adversary that never communicates its goals or motives. In the briefings, we tried to convey the sense of a much larger conflict unfolding in multiple systems, while at the same time hinting that your commanders weren’t telling you the whole story.”


Freespace 2 was never going to single-handedly rescue the space-sim sub-genre, but it did ensure that it went out on a high note. It’s a demanding game even by the usual standards of its kind, one that uses every key on the keyboard and then some, one that is guaranteed to leave you wishing you had more buttons on your joystick, no matter how nerdily baroque it might already be. Some of its more counter-intuitive commands, such as “target my target’s target,” have become memes in certain circles. Yet the developers are unapologetic. “We wanted players to feel like pilots in control of a complex, powerful, responsive, and technologically advanced machine,” says Jason Scott. “Complexity was a virtue.”

I’m almost tempted to write here that this was a shame, in that it put such a high barrier to entry in front of what was actually one of the more sophisticated ludic fictions of its era. My experience with the game probably isn’t unique: I struggled with it for a while, reached a point where I couldn’t seem to hit any enemy that I shot at even as said enemies had become all too good at hitting me, and wound up watching the rest on YouTube, as you do these days. On the other hand, though, why shouldn’t unabashedly demanding games that aren’t quite for me have good writing too?

Because you deserve to hear from someone other than a dabbler like me before we move on, I’m going to take the liberty of quoting Lee Hutchinson, who is a good friend of this site, a stalwart voice of reason in these increasingly unreasonable times of ours through his day job as a senior editor at Ars Technica, and, most importantly for our purposes, a hardcore space-sim junkie in all the ways that I am not. He can explain better than I can what Freespace 2 came to mean to its biggest fans, how it melded gameplay and narrative into an unforgettable roller-coaster ride.

If you’ve seen one of those simplified “evolution of man” charts, showing a chimp-like predecessor far at the left and an upright tool-using human all the way at the right, you’ve got a good idea of how Freespace 2 capped off the genre. It was the culmination of everything that had come before it, and every single gameplay element was refined and polished to a razor-sharp gleam.

Freespace 2 lets players experience a tremendous variety of missions in different fighters with a gamut of capabilities. Each mission is connected by an overarching plot: you may be ambushed while escorting some capital ships in one mission, and then in the next mission you might switch to flying a bomber and be assigned to take those capital ships out. You might be temporarily attached to a special-operations wing flying a prototype starship, or have to fly captured Shivan fighters in a deep-cover mission to scope out an enemy staging point, or deal with total mission failure and objective changes right in the middle of doing dozens of other things. Capital ships fire ridiculously large, ridiculously powerful beam weapons at each other, slicing each other to ribbons and providing a fantastic Babylon 5-esque backdrop while the player duels enemy fighters.

The targeting system is complex and rich; the wingman and escort system is complex and rich; the comms system is complex and rich. Everything about Freespace 2 shows care, love, and craftsmanship — from the chatter going back and forth between your wingmen as you blindly scout a nebula looking for a lost frigate, to the amazingly well-acted mission briefings. In practically every way, it is the Platonic ideal of a space-combat sim.

Starting at about the halfway point, Freespace 2 drops the hammer on the player with a series of tightly linked missions that absolutely do not let up. The war against the Shivans isn’t going well. A faction of Quisling-like humans is trying to defect to the Shivans’ side, taking a large chunk of the human military with it. At several points throughout the long campaign, it feels like the game is about to come to a crashing climax — only it doesn’t end. Things just get worse, and it’s an absolute rush to experience — flying your guts out, desperately trying to fight a rear-guard action against an unknowable enemy that seems to be totally unable to feel remorse, pity, or even fatigue.

I’ve never felt quite the combination of awe, fear, and eagerness I felt as I pushed through to Freespace 2’s endgame. There are lots of gaming experiences I wish I could relive for the first time, but playing Freespace 2 tops the list. That’s as good a way as any to judge a game as the best in its genre.

In the short term at least, Volition wasn’t rewarded very well for creating this game that Lee Hutchinson and more than a few others consider simply the best story-driven space sim ever made, the evolutionary end point of Chris Roberts’s original Wing Commander of 1990. Mike Kulas insists that Freespace 2 didn’t actually lose money for its studio or publisher, but it didn’t earn them much of anything either. Plans for a Freespace 3 were quietly shelved. Thus Freespace 2 came to mark the end of an era, not only for Volition but for computer gaming in general: while not quite the last space sim to be put out by a major publisher, it was the last that would go on to be remembered as a classic of its form.

What with there being no newer games that could compete with it, those who still loved the space sim clung all the tighter to Freespace 2 as the months since its release turned into years. They were incredibly lucky that Volition was staffed by genuinely nice, fair-minded people who felt their pain and were willing to “pay it forward,” as the saying goes. In 2002, Volition uploaded the full source code to Freespace 2 to the Internet for non-commercial use.

They couldn’t possibly have envisioned what followed. As of this writing, 23 years after that act of spontaneous generosity, the Freespace 2 engine has been improved and modernized almost beyond recognition, with support for eye-bleedingly high resolutions and all of the latest fancy graphical effects that my humble retro-gaming computers don’t even support. You can use the updated engine to play Freespace 1 and 2 and the Silent Threat expansion pack, in versions that have been polished to an even shinier gleam than the originals by the hands of hundreds of dedicated volunteers. Even more inspiringly, folks have used the technology to create a welter of new campaigns — effectively whole new space sims that run off what remains the best of all engines for this type of game.

The people who made Freespace 1 and 2 all those years ago are themselves awed by what their pair of discrete boxed computer games have been turned into. Freespace proved to be as much a new beginning as an ending. Long may the space sim fly on in the hands of those who love it most.


Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: Sierra On-Line’s customer newsletter InterAction of Spring 1999; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of September 20 1996 and February 14 1997; Computer Gaming World of October 1994, February 1995, July 1997, April 1998, October 1998, November 1998, February 1999, July 1999, and January 2000; Retro Gamer 204.

Online sources include interviews with Jack Nichols and Randy Littlejohn on B5 Scrolls, “Growing Up Gaming: The Five Space Sims That Defined My Youth” by Lee Hutchinson at Ars Technica, an interview with some of the core members of the Freespace 2 team by the Space Game Junkie podcast, and a Game Informer documentary about Volition’s history.

Where to Get Them: Wing Commander I and II, Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, Wing Commander: Prophecy, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, X-Wing Alliance, Descent: Freespace, and Freespace 2 are all available as digital purchases on GOG.com.

I strongly recommend that you run the Freespace games through the Freespace Open engine, even if you’re primarily looking for a retro experience. Both on native Windows 10 and running through WINE on Linux, I found the original Freespace to be subtly broken: I was given only a fraction of the time I ought to have been given to complete the last training mission. (This was not good at all, considering I’m rubbish at the game anyway.) Freespace Open is quite painless to install and maintain using a utility called Knossos. It will walk you through the setup process and then deliver a glitch-free game, whilst letting you select as many or as few modern niceties as you prefer.

 
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Posted by on November 7, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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This Week on The Analog Antiquarian

24 Oct

Chapter 6: The Problem Child

Note that I won’t be publishing on The Digital Antiquarian on October 31. I’ll see you on November 7 instead. Happy Halloween!

 
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Posted by on October 24, 2025 in Uncategorized

 

A Looking Glass Half Empty, Part 2: A Series of Unfortunate Events

17 Oct
This article tells part of the story of Looking Glass Studios.

Coming out of 1998, the folks at Looking Glass Studios believed they had pretty good reason to feel optimistic about their future. With Thief, they had delivered not just their first profitable original game since 1995’s Flight Unlimited but their biggest single commercial success ever. They had no fewer than four more games slated for release within the next fifteen months, a positively blistering pace for them. Yes, all of said games were sequels and iterations on existing brands, but that was just the nature of the industry by now, wasn’t it? As long-running franchises like Ultima had first begun to demonstrate fifteen years ago, there was no reason you couldn’t continue to innovate under a well-known and -loved banner headline. Looking Glass closed their Austin office that had done so much to pay the bills in the past by taking on porting contracts. In the wake of Thief, they felt ready to concentrate entirely on their own games.

Then, just as they thought they had finally found their footing, the ground started to shift beneath Looking Glass once again. Less than a year and a half after the high point of Thief’s strong reviews and almost equally strong sales, Paul Neurath would be forced to shutter his studio forever.

We can date the beginning of the cascading series of difficulties that ultimately undid Looking Glass to March of 1999, when their current corporate parent decided to divest from games, which in turn meant divesting from them. Intermetrics had been on a roller-coaster ride of its own since being purchased by Michael Alexander in 1995. In 1998, the former television executive belatedly recognized the truth of what Mike Dornbrook had tried to tell him some time ago: that his dreams and schemes for turning Intermetrics into a games or multimedia studio made no sense whatsoever. He deigned to allow the company to return to its core competencies — indeed, to double-down on them. Late in the year, Intermetrics merged with Pacer InfoTec, another perennial recipient of government and military contracts. The new entity took the name of AverStar. When one looked through its collection of active endeavors — making an “Enterprise Information Portal” for the Army Chief of Staff; developing drainage-modeling software for the U.S. Geological Survey; providing “testing and quality-support services” for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts; writing and maintaining software for the Space Shuttle and other NASA vehicles — the games of Looking Glass stood out as decidedly unlike the others. Michael Alexander and his reconstituted team of managers, most of them grizzled veterans of the Beltway military-industrial complex, saw no point in continuing to dabble in games. In the words of Looking Glass programmer Mark LeBlanc, “AverStar threw us back into the sea.”

Just as is the case with Intermetrics’s acquisition of Looking Glass barely a year and a half earlier, the precise terms under which Alexander threw his once-prized catch back have never surfaced to my knowledge. It’s clear enough, however, that Looking Glass’s immediate financial position at this juncture was not quite so dire as it had been, thanks to the success of Thief if nothing else. Still, none of the systemic problems of being a small fish in the big pond of the games industry had been solved. Their recent success notwithstanding, without a deeper-pocketed parent or partner to negotiate for them, Looking Glass was destined to have a harder time getting their games into stores and selling them on their own terms.

The next unfortunate event — unfortunate for Looking Glass, but deeply tragic for some others — came about a month later. On April 20, 1999, two deeply troubled, DOOM-loving teenagers walked into their high school in the town of Columbine, Colorado, carrying multiple firearms each, and proceeded to kill thirteen of their fellow students and teachers and wound or terrorize hundreds more before turning their guns on themselves. This act of mass murder, occurring as it did before the American public had been somewhat desensitized to such massacres by the sheer numbing power of repetition, placed the subject of violence in videogames under the mass-media spotlight in a way it hadn’t been since Joseph Lieberman’s Senate hearings of 1993. Now Lieberman, a politician with mounting presidential ambitions, was back to point the finger more accusingly than ever.

This is not the place to attempt to address the fraught subject of what actual links there might be between violence in games and violence in the real world, links which hundreds of sociological and psychological studies have never managed to conclusively prove or disprove. Suffice to say that attributing direct causality to any human behavior outside the controlled setting of a laboratory is really, really hard, even before one factors in the distortions that can arise from motivated reasoning when the subject being studied is as charged as this one. Setting all of that aside, however, this was not a form of attention to which your average gaming executive of 1999 had any wish to expose himself. First-person action games that looked even vaguely like DOOM — such as most of the games of Looking Glass — were cancelled, delayed, or de-prioritized in an effort to avoid seeming completely insensitive to tragedy. De-prioritization rather than something worse was the fate of Looking Glass’s System Shock 2, but that would prove plenty bad enough for a studio with little margin for error.

The story of System Shock 2′s creation is yet another of those “only at Looking Glass” tales. In 1994, a 27-year-old Boston-area computer consultant named Ken Levine played System Shock 1 and was bowled over by the experience. A year or so later, he saw a want ad from the maker of his favorite game in a magazine. He applied and was hired. He contributed a great deal to Thief during that project’s formative period of groping in the dark — he is credited in the finished game for “initial design and story concepts” — and then was given a plum role indeed. Looking Glass had just won a contract to make an adventure game based on the popular new television series Star Trek: Voyager, and Levine was placed in charge of it.

Alas, that project fell apart within a year or so, when Viacom, the media conglomerate that owned the property, took note of the lackluster commercial performance of another recent Star Trek adventure game — and of recent adventure games in general — and pulled the plug. Understandably enough, Levine was devastated at having thus wasted a year of his life. Somewhat less understandably, he blamed the management of Looking Glass as much as Viacom for the fiasco. He left to start his own studio, taking with him two other Looking Glass employees, by the names of Jon Chey and Rob Fermier.

This is where the story gets weird, in an oh, so Looking Glass sort of way. Once they were out on their own, trading under the name of Irrational Games, the trio found that contracts and capital were not as easy to come by as they had believed they would be. At his wit’s end, facing the prospect of a return to his former life as an ordinary computer consultant, Levine came crawling back to his old boss Paul Neurath. But rather than ask for his old job back, he asked that Irrational be allowed to make a game in partnership with Looking Glass, using the same Dark Engine that was to power Thief. Most bosses would have laughed in the face of someone who had poached two of their people in a bid to show them up and show them how it was done, only to get his comeuppance in such deserving fashion. But not Neurath. He agreed to help Levine and his friends make a game in the spirit of System Shock, Levine’s whole reason for joining the industry in the first place. In fact, he even let them move back into Looking Glass’s offices for a while in order to do it. Neurath soon succeeded in capturing the interest of Electronic Arts, the corporate parent of Origin Systems and thus the owner of the System Shock brand. Just like that, Levine’s homage became a direct sequel, an officially anointed System Shock 2.

The ironic capstone to this tale is that Warren Spector had recently left Looking Glass because he had been unable to secure permission to do exactly what the unproven and questionably loyal young Ken Levine was now going to get to do: to make a spiritual heir to System Shock. Spector ended up at Ion Storm, a new studio founded by John Romero of DOOM fame, where he set to work on what would become Deus Ex.

In the course of making System Shock 2, the Irrational staff grew to about fifteen people, who did eventually move into their own office. Nonetheless, the line separating their contributions from those of Looking Glass proper remained murky at best. As a postmortem written by Jon Chey would later put it, “the project was a collaborative effort between two companies based on a contract that only loosely defined the responsibilities of each organization.” It’s for this reason that I’ll be talking about System Shock 2 from here on like I might any other Looking Glass game.

The sequel isn’t shy about embracing its heritage. Once again, it casts you into an outer-space complex gone badly, horrifyingly haywire; this time you find yourself in humanity’s first faster-than-light starship instead of a mere space station. Once again, the game begins with you waking up disoriented, not knowing how you got here, forced to rely on narrations of the backstory that may or may not be reliable. Once again, your first and most obvious antagonists are the zombified corpses of the people who used to crew the ship. Once again, you slowly learn what really went down here through the emails and logbooks you stumble across. Once again, you have a variety of cybernetic hardware to help you stay alive, presented via a relentlessly diegetic interface. Once again, you meet SHODAN, the disembodied, deliciously evil artificial intelligence who was arguably the most memorable single aspect of the very memorable first game. And once again, she is brought to iconic life by the voice of Terri Brosius. In these ways and countless others, this apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

But even as it embraces its heritage in the broad strokes, System Shock 2 isn’t averse to tinkering with the formula, through both subtraction and addition. The most significant edit is the elimination of a separate, embodied cyberspace, which was already beginning to feel dated in 1994, having been parachuted in straight out of William Gibson’s 1984-vintage Neuromancer. Cyberspace has its charms in System Shock 1, but few would deny that it’s the roughest part of the game in terms of implementation; it was probably a wise choice for Ken Levine and company to focus their efforts elsewhere. More debatable are their decisions to simplify the hacking mini-games that you sometimes need to play to open locked doors and the like, and to eliminate the unique multi-variant difficulty settings of the first game, which let you turn it into whatever kind of experience you desire, from a walking simulator to an exercise in non-stop carnage to a cerebral pseudo-adventure game. System Shock 2 settles for letting you choose a single setting of “Easy,” “Normal,” “Hard,” or “Impossible,” like any standard-issue shooter of the era.

In fact, at first glance this game looks very much like a standard shooter. If you try to play it as one, however, you’ll be quickly disabused of that notion when you die… and die and die and die. This isn’t a stealth game to the same extent as Thief, but it does demand that you proceed with caution, looking for ways to outwit enemies whom you can’t overcome through firepower. If you can’t see your way to noticing and disabling the security cameras that lurk in many a corner, for example, you’re going to find yourself overwhelmed, no matter how fast and accurate a trigger finger you happen to possess.

By way of a partial replacement for the multi-variant difficulty settings of its predecessor, Irrational chose to graft onto System Shock 2 more CRPG elements. Theoretically at least, these give you almost as much control over what kind of game you end up playing. You can go for a combat-oriented build if you want more of a shooter experience — within reason, that is! — or you can become a hardcore tech-head or even a sort of Jedi who makes use of “psi” powers. Or you can judiciously mix and match your abilities, as most players doubtless wind up doing. After choosing an initial slate of skills at the outset, you are given the opportunity to learn more — or to improve the ones you already have — at certain milestones in the plot.

You create your character in System Shock 2 in a similar way to the old Traveller tabletop RPG, by sending him off on three tours of duty with different service branches — or the same one, if you prefer. (I fancy I can see some traces of the Star Trek: Voyager game which Ken Levine once set out to make in the vibe and the iconography here.) This is an example of how System Shock 2 can sometimes feel like it has a few too many ideas for its own good. It seems like an awful lot of effort to go through to establish a character who is about to get his memories erased anyway.

System Shock 2 is an almost universally acclaimed game today, perhaps even more so than its uglier low-res predecessor. There are good reasons for this. The atmosphere of dread builds and builds as you explore the starship, thanks not least to masterful environmental sound design; if anything, this game is more memorable for its soundscape than for its visuals. Although its emergent qualities are certainly nothing to sneeze at, in my opinion the peak moment of the game is actually pre-scripted. A jaw-dropping plot twist arrives about halfway through, one of the most shocking I’ve ever encountered in a game. I hesitate to say much more here, but will just reveal that nothing and no one turn out to be what you thought they were, and that SHODAN is involved. Because of course she is…

For all its increased resolution and equal mastery of atmosphere, however, System Shock 2 doesn’t strike me as quite so fully realized as the first System Shock. It also suffers by comparison with Warren Spector’s own System Shock successor Deus Ex, which was released about nine months later. System Shock 2 never seems entirely sure how to balance its CRPG elements, which are dependent on character skill, with its action elements, which are dependent on player skill. Increasing your character’s skill in gunnery, for example, somehow makes your guns do more damage when you shoot someone with them; this is not exactly intuitive or realistic. Deus Ex just does so much of this sort of thing so much better. In that game, a higher skill level lets your character hold the gun steadier when you’re trying to shoot with it; this makes a lot more sense.

Unusually for Looking Glass, who seldom released a game before its time, System Shock 2 shows all the signs of having been yanked out of its creators’ hands a few months too early. The level design declines dramatically during the final third of the game, becoming downright sketchy by the time you get to the underwhelming finale. The overall balance of the gameplay systems is somewhat out of whack as well. It’s really, really hard to gain traction as a psi-focused character in particular, and dismayingly easy to end up with a character that isn’t tenable by choosing the wrong skills early on. I found a lot of the design choices in System Shock 2 to be tedious and annoying, such that I wished for a way to just turn them off: the scarcity of ammunition (another way to find yourself in an unwinnable cul de sac), the way that weapons degrade at an absurd pace and constantly need to be repaired, the endlessly respawning enemies that make hard-won firefights feel kind of pointless, the decision to arbitrarily deprive you of your trusty auto-map just at the point when you need it most.

Granted, some of this was also in System Shock 1, but it irritated me much more here. In the end, the two games provide very similar subjective experiences. Perchance this was just a ride I was only interested in going on once; perchance I would have a very different reaction to System Shock 2 if I had met it before its older sibling. Or maybe I’m just getting more protective of my time as I get older and have less and less of it left. (Ach… hold that morbid thought!)

Whatever its ratio of strengths to weaknesses, System Shock 2 didn’t do very well at all upon its release in August of 1999. Many folks from both Looking Glass and Irrational attribute this disappointment entirely to the tragic occurrence of four months earlier in Columbine, Colorado. Although the full picture is surely more nuanced — it always is, isn’t it? — we have no reason to doubt that the fallout from the massacre was a major factor in the game’s commercial failure. According to Paul Neurath, Electronic Arts pondered for a while whether it was wise to put System Shock 2 out at all. He remembers EA’s CEO Larry Probst telling him that “we may just want to walk away from doing shooters because there’s talk of these shooters causing these kinds of events.” “We convinced them to release the game,” says Neurath, “but they did almost zero marketing and they put it in the bargain discount $9.95 bin 45 days after the game launched. It never stood a chance to make any money. That really hurt us financially.”

If System Shock 2 was to some extent a victim of circumstances, Looking Glass’s next game was a more foreseeable failure. For some reason, they just couldn’t stop beating the dead horse of flight simulation, even though it had long since become clear that this wasn’t what their primary audience wanted from them at all. Flight Unlimited III wasn’t a bad flight simulator, but the changes it introduced to the formula were nowhere near as dramatic as those that marked Flight Unlimited II. The most notable new development was a shift from the San Francisco Bay to Washington State, a much larger geographical area depicted in even greater detail. (Owners of the second game were given the privilege of loading their old scenery into the new engine as well.) Innovation or the lack thereof aside, the same old problem remained, in the form of Microsoft’s 800-pound-gorilla of a flight-simulation franchise, which was ready with its own “2000” update at the same time. Published by Electronic Arts in late 1999, Flight Unlimited III stiffed even more abjectly than had System Shock 2.

On the left, we see Seattle-Tacoma International Airport as depicted in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2000. On the right, we see the same airport in Flight Unlimited III. The former modeled the whole world, including more than 20,000 airports; the latter tried to compete by modeling a comparatively small area better. Regardless of the intrinsic merits of the two approaches, Looking Glass’s did not prove a formula for marketplace success.

A comparatively bright spot that holiday season was Thief Gold, which added three new missions to the original’s twelve and tweaked and polished the existing ones. It did decently well as a mid-tier product with a street price of about $25, plus a $10 rebate for owners of the previous version of Thief and the promise of a $10 discount off the upcoming Thief II. But a product like this was never going to offset Looking Glass’s two big failures of 1999.

In truth, the Looking Glass goose was probably already more or less cooked as Y2K began. The only thing that might have saved them was Thief II: The Metal Age turning into a massive hit right out of the gate. Sadly, there was little likelihood of that happening; the best that Looking Glass could realistically hope for was another solid half-million seller. There was already a sense in the studio as the final touches were being put on Thief II that, barring a miracle, this game was likely to be their swansong.

As swansongs go, Thief II acquits itself pretty darn well. It comes off as far more self-assured than its predecessor, being focused almost exclusively on stealth rather than monster-slaying through its fifteen cunningly crafted levels. Some of these spaces — a huge central bank, a sprawling warehouse complex, a rich art collector’s country estate — are intricate and beautiful enough that you almost wish there was an option to just wander around and admire them, without having to worry about guards and traps and all the rest. There’s a greater willingness here to use gameplay to advance the larger story: plot twists sometimes arrive in the midst of a mission, and you can often learn more about what’s really going on, if you’re interested, by listening carefully to the conversations that drift around the outskirts of the darkness in which you cloak yourself. Indeed, Thief II is positively bursting with little Easter eggs for the observant. Some of them are even funny, such as a sad-sack pair of guards who have by now been victimized by Garrett several times in other places, who complain to one another, Laurel and Hardy style, about their lot in life of constantly being outsmarted.

The subtitle pays tribute to the fact that the milieu of Thief has now taken on a distinct steampunk edge, with clanking iron robots and gun turrets for Garrett to contend with in addition to the ever-present human guards. Garrett now has a mechanical eye which he can use to zoom in on things, or even to receive the visual signal from a “scouting orb” that he’s tossed out into an exposed space to get a better picture of his surroundings. I must confess that I’m somewhat of two minds about this stuff: it’s certainly more interesting than zombies, but I do still kind of long for the purist neo-Renaissance milieu I thought I was getting when I played the first level of Thief I.

The “faces” on the robots look a bit like SHODAN, don’t they? Some of the code governing their behavior was also lifted directly from that game. But unlike your mechanical enemies in System Shock 2, these robots have steam boilers on their posteriors which you can douse with water arrows to disable them.

Beyond this highly debatable point, though, there’s very little to complain about here, unless it be that Thief II, for all its manifest strengths, doesn’t quite manage to stand on its own. Oddly in light of what a make-or-break title this was for them, Looking Glass seems not to have given much thought to easing new players into this very different way of approaching a first-person action game; they didn’t even bother to rehash the rudimentary tutorial that kicks off Thief I. As a result, and as a number of otherwise positively disposed contemporary reviewers noted, Thief II has more the flavor of an expansion pack — a really, really well-done one, mind you — than a full-fledged sequel. It probably isn’t the best place to start, but anyone who enjoyed the first game will definitely enjoy this one.

Looking Glass’s problem, of course, was that none of what I’ve just written sounds like a ticket to id- or Blizzard-level success, which was what they needed by this point to save the company. As Computer Gaming World wrote in its review, Thief II “is a ’boutique’ game: a gamer’s game. It pays its dividends in persistent tension rather than in bursts of fear. It still pumps as much adrenaline, but it works on a subtler level. It’s the difference between Strangers on a Train and Armageddon, between the intimated and the explicit.”

Having thus delivered another cult classic rather than a blockbuster, Looking Glass’s fate was sealed. By March of 2000, when Eidos published Thief II, Paul Neurath had been trying to sell the studio for a second time for the better part of a year. Sony was seriously interested for a while, until a management shakeup there killed the deal. Then Eidos was on the verge of pulling the trigger, only to have its bankers refuse to loan the necessary funds after a rather disappointing year for the company, in which the Tomb Raider train seemed to finally be running out of steam and John Romero’s would-be magnum opus Daikatana, which Eidos was funding and publishing for Ion Storm, ran way over time and budget. Not wanting to risk depriving his employees of their last paychecks, Neurath decided to shut the studio down with dignity. On May 24, 2000, he called everyone together to thank them for their efforts and to tell them that Thief II had been Looking Glass’s last game. “We’re closing,” he said. What else was there to say?

Plenty, as it turned out. The news of the shuttering prompted paroxysms of grief throughout gaming’s burgeoning online ecosystem, frequently accompanied by a full measure of self-loathing. Looking Glass had been just too smart for a public that wasn’t worthy of them, so the story went. Many a gamer who had always meant to pick up this or that subtly subversive Looking Glass masterstroke, but had kept delaying in favor of easier, more straightforward fare, blamed himself for being a part of the problem. But no amount of hand-wringing or self-flagellation could change the fact that Looking Glass was no more. The most it could do was to turn having worked for the studio into a badge of honor and one hell of a line item on anyone’s CV, as a Looking Glass diaspora spread out across the industry to influence its future.

To wit: the tearful tributes were still pouring in when Ion Storm’s Warren Spector-led Deus Ex reached store shelves in June of 2000. Cruel irony of ironies: Deus Ex became a hit on a scale that Thief, Looking Glass’s biggest game ever, could scarcely have dreamed of approaching. Right to the end, Looking Glass was always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

Looking Glass was a cool group, and a lot of us put a lot of time and energy and a large part of our lives into it, and it’s sad when that doesn’t work out. So there’s some part of me that says, oh, that sucks, that’s not fair, but it’s the real world and it had a pretty good run.

— Doug Church

Without consciously intending to, I’ve found myself writing quite a lot of obituaries of gaming icons recently: TSR, Sierra On-Line, MicroProse, Bullfrog, the adventure-making arm of Legend Entertainment. Call it a sign of the millennial times, a period of constant, churning acquisition and consolidation in which it began to seem that just half a dozen or so many-tendriled conglomerates were destined to divide the entirety of digital gaming among themselves. Now, we can add Looking Glass to our list of victims of this dubious idea of progress.

A lot of hyperbole has been thrown around about Looking Glass over the past quarter-century. A goodly portion of it is amply justified. That said, I do think there is some room for additional nuance. (There always is, isn’t there?) At the risk of coming off like the soulless curmudgeon in the room, I’m not going to write about Looking Glass here as if they were a bunch of tortured artists starving in a garret somewhere. Instead I’m going to put on my pragmatist’s hat and go off on in search of some more concrete reasons why these remarkable games didn’t resonate as much as they may have deserved to back in the day.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner made some fairly baffling business decisions over the years. Their disastrous choice to try to make a go of it as an independent publisher against gale-force headwinds in 1995 can be all too easily seen as the precipitating event that sent Looking Glass down the road to closure five years later. Then, too, Neurath’s later insistence on persisting with the Flight Unlimited series must stand high on the list of mistakes. Incredibly, at the time Looking Glass was shut down, they were still at the flight-simulation thing, having spent a reported $3 million already on a fourth one, which was finally to add guns and enemy aircraft to the mix; this was half a million more than they had spent to make Thief II, a game with a far more secure customer base. [1]After the closure, some Looking Glass staffers migrated to the nearby Mad Doc Software, where they incorporated much of their flight-simulation code into Jane’s Combat Simulations: Attack Squadron. Released in 2002, it was not positively reviewed.

Then again, this isn’t a Harvard Business School case study. What final words are there to say about the games themselves, the real legacy of this company that failed rather spectacularly at its business-school ambition of making a lot of — okay, any — money? How should we understand them in their full historical context?

As you probably know, historical context is kind of my jam. Writing for this site is for me a form of time travel. I don’t play modern games for lack of hours in the day, and I’ve long since settled into a more or less one-to-one correspondence between present time and historical time; that’s to say, it takes me about one year worth of articles on this site to fully cover one year of gaming history and matters adjacent. We’ve by now moved out of the era when I was playing a lot of games in my previous life, so most of what I encounter is new to me. I think this puts me in a privileged position. I can come pretty close to experiencing and appreciating games — and the evolution of the medium as a whole — as a contemporary player might have done. When I read in the year 2025 that Looking Glass was poorly rewarded for their uncompromising spirit of innovation, I can understand and even to a large extent agree. And yet, in my role as a time traveler, I can also kind of understand why a lot of gamers ended up voting with their wallets for something else.

The decade after Looking Glass’s demise saw the rise of what gaming scholar Jesper Juul has dubbed the Casual Revolution; this was the heyday of Bejeweled, Zuma, Diner Dash, and the Big Fish portal, which brought gaming to whole new, previously untapped demographics who dwarfed the hardcore old guard in numbers. In 2010, when this revolution was at its peak, Juul put forth five characteristics that define casual gaming: “emotionally positive fictions”; “little presupposed knowledge” on the player’s part; a tolerance for being played in “short bursts”; “lenient punishments for failing”; and “positive feedback for every successful action the player performs.” The games of Looking Glass are the polar opposite of this list. At times, they seem almost defiantly so; witness the lack of an “easy” setting in Thief, as if to emphasize that anyone who might wish for such a thing is not welcome here. Looking Glass’s games are the ultimate “gamer’s games,” as Computer Gaming World put it, unabashedly demanding a serious commitment of time, focus, energy, and effort from their players. But daily life demands plenty of those things from most of us already, doesn’t it? In this light, it doesn’t really surprise me that a lot of people decided to just go play something more welcoming and less demanding. This didn’t make them ingrates; it just made them people who weren’t quite sure that there was enough space in their life to work that hard for their entertainment. I sympathize because I often felt the same in the course of my time-traveling; when I saw a new Looking Glass game on the syllabus, it was always a little bit harder than it ought to have been for me to muster the motivation to take the plunge. And this is part of what I do for a living!

Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with gamer’s games. But they are by definition niche pursuits. The tragedy of Looking Glass (if I can presume to frame it in those terms in an article which has previously mentioned the real tragedy that took place at Columbine High School) is that they were making niche games at a time when the economics of the industry were militating against the long tail, pushing everyone toward a handful of tried-and-true mainstream gameplay formulas. After the millennium, the rise of digital distribution would give studios the luxury of being loudly and proudly niche, if that was where their hearts were. (Ironically, this happened at the same instant that ultra-mainstream casual gaming took off, and was enabled by the same transformative technology of broadband in the home.) But digital distribution of games as asset-heavy as those of Looking Glass was a non-starter throughout the 1990s. C’est la vie.

This situation being what it was, I do feel that Looking Glass could have made a bit more of an effort to be accessible, to provide those real or metaphorical easy modes, if only in the hope and expectation that their customers would eventually want to lose the training wheels and play the games as they were meant to be played. On-ramping is a vital part of the game designer’s craft, one at which Looking Glass, for all their strengths in other areas, wasn’t all that accomplished.

Another thing that Looking Glass was not at all good at, or seemingly even all that interested in, was multiplayer, which became a bigger and bigger part of gaming culture as the 1990s wore on. (They did add a co-operative multiplayer mode to System Shock 2 via a patch, but it always felt like the afterthought it was.) This was a problem in itself. Just to compound it, Looking Glass’s games were in some ways the most single-player games of them all. “Immersion” was their watchword: they played best in a darkened room with headphones on, almost requiring of their players that they deliberately isolate themselves from the real world and its inhabitants. Again, this is a perfectly valid design choice, but it’s an inherently niche one.

Speaking only for myself now, I think this is another reason that the games of Looking Glass proved a struggle for me at times. At this point in my life at least, I’m just not that excited about isolating myself inside hermetically sealed digital spaces. If I want total immersion, I take a walk and immerse myself in nature. Games I prefer to play on the sofa next to my wife. My favorite Looking Glass game, for what it’s worth, is System Shock 1, which I played at an earlier time in my life when immersion was perhaps more of a draw than it is today. Historical context is one thing, personal context another: it’s damnably difficult to separate our judgments of games from the circumstances in which we played them.

Of course, this is one of the reasons that I always encourage you not to take my judgments as the final word on anything, to check out the games I write about for yourself if they sound remotely interesting. It’s actually not that hard to get a handle on Looking Glass’s legacy for yourself. Considering the aura of near-divinity that cloaks the studio today, the canon of widely remembered Looking Glass classics is surprisingly small. They seem to have had a thing for duologies: their place in history boils down to the two Ultima Underworld games, the two System Shock games, and the two Thief games. The rest of their output has been pretty much forgotten, with the partial exception of Terra Nova on the part of the really dedicated.

Still, three bold and groundbreaking concepts that each found ways to advance the medium on multiple fronts is more than enough of a legacy for any studio, isn’t it? So, let us wave a fondly respectful farewell to Looking Glass, satisfied as we do so that we will be meeting many of their innovations and approaches, sometimes presented in more accessible packages, again and again as we continue to travel through time.


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Sources: The books Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd. ed.) by Richard Rouse III, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players by Jesper Juul, and the Prima strategy guide to Thief II by Howard A. Jones; Computer Gaming World of January 1999, November 1999, January 2000, February 2000, and June 2000;  Retro Gamer 60, 177, and 260; Game Developer of November 1999; Boston Globe of May 26 2000; Boston Magazine of December 2013.

Online sources include “Ahead of Its Time: A History of Looking Glass” and “Without Looking Glass, There was No Irrational Games” by Mike Mahardy at Polygon, James Sterrett’s “Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem on Looking Glass Studios,” a GameSpy featurette by John “Warrior” Keefer, Christian Nutt’s interview with Ken Levine on the old Gamasutra site, and AverStar’s millennial-era corporate site.

My special thanks to Ethan Johnson, a fellow gaming historian who knows a lot more about Looking Glass than I do, and set me straight on some important points after the first edition of this article was published.

Where to Get Them: System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster (which includes the original version of the game as a bonus) and Thief II: The Metal Age are available as digital purchases on GOG.com.

Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 After the closure, some Looking Glass staffers migrated to the nearby Mad Doc Software, where they incorporated much of their flight-simulation code into Jane’s Combat Simulations: Attack Squadron. Released in 2002, it was not positively reviewed.
 
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Posted by on October 17, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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A Looking Glass Half Empty, Part 1: Just Lookin’ for a Hit

03 Oct
This article tells part of the story of Looking Glass Studios.

There was some discussion about it: “Wow, gosh, it’d sure be nice if we were making more money and selling more copies so we could do crazy games of the type we want, as opposed to having to worry about how we’re going to sell more.” Hey, I’d love it if the public was more into what I like to do and a little less into slightly more straightforward things. But I totally get that they’re into straightforward things. I don’t have any divine right to have someone hand me millions of dollars to make a game of whatever I want to do. At some fundamental level, everyone has a wallet, and they vote with it.

— Doug Church, Looking Glass Studios

Late in 1994, after their rather brilliant game System Shock had debuted to a reception most kindly described as constrained, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based studio Looking Glass Technologies sent their star producer Warren Spector down to Austin, Texas. There he was to visit the offices of Looking Glass’s publisher Origin Systems, whose lack of promotional enthusiasm they largely blamed for their latest game’s lukewarm commercial performance. Until recently, Spector had been directly employed by Origin. The thinking, then, was that he might still be able to pull some strings in Austin to move the games of Looking Glass a little higher up in the priority rankings. The upshot of his visit was not encouraging. “What do I have to do to get a hit around here?” Spector remembers pleading to his old colleagues. The answer was “very quiet, very calm: ‘Sign Mark Hamill to star in your game.‘ That was the thinking at the time.” But interactive movies were not at all what Looking Glass wanted to be doing, nor where they felt the long-term future of the games industry lay.

So, founders Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner decided to make some major changes in their business model in the hope of raising their studio’s profile. They accepted $3.8 million in venture capital and cut ties with Origin, announcing that henceforward Looking Glass would publish as well as create their games for themselves. Jerry Wolosenko, a new executive vice president whom they hired to help steer the company into its future of abundance, told The Boston Globe in May of 1995 that “we expect to do six original titles per year. We are just beginning.” This was an ambitious goal indeed for a studio that, in its five and a half years of existence to date, had managed to turn out just three original games alongside a handful of porting jobs.

Even more ambitious, if not brazen, was the product that Looking Glass thought would provide them with their entrée into the ranks of the big-time publishers. They intended to mount a head-on challenge to that noted tech monopolist Microsoft, whose venerable, archetypally entitled Flight Simulator was the last word — in fact, very nearly the only word — in civilian flight simulation. David-versus-Goliath contests in the business of media didn’t come much more pronounced than this one, but Looking Glass thought they had a strategy that might allow them to break at least this particular Microsoft monopoly.

Flight Unlimited was the brainchild of a high-energy physicist, glider pilot, and amateur jazz pianist named Seamus Blackley, who had arrived at Looking Glass by way of the legendary Fermi Laboratory. His guiding principle was that Microsoft’s Flight Simulator as it had evolved over the last decade and a half had become less a simulation of flight itself than a simulation of the humdrum routine of civil aviation — of takeoff permissions and holding patterns, of navigational transponders and instrument landing systems. He wanted to return the focus to the simple joy of soaring through the air in a flying machine, something that, for all the technological progress that had been made since the Wright brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, could still seem closer to magic than science. The emphasis would be on free-form aerobatics rather than getting from Airport A to Airport B. “I want people to see that flying is beautiful, exciting, and see the thrill you can get from six degrees of freedom when you control an airplane,” Blackley said. “That’s why we’ve focused on the experience of flying. There is no fuel gauge.”

The result really was oddly beautiful, being arguably as close to interactive art as a product that bills itself as a vehicular simulation can possibility get. Its only real concession to structure took the form of a 33-lesson flying course, which brought you from just being able to hold the airplane straight and level to executing gravity-denying Immelman rolls, Cuban eights, hammerheads, and inverted spins. Any time that your coursework became too intense, you always had the option to just bin the lesson plans and, you know, go out and fly, maybe to try some improvisational skywriting.

In one sense, Flight Unlimited was a dramatic departure from the two Ultima Underworld games and System Shock, all of which were embodied first-person, narrative-oriented designs that relied on 3D graphics of a very different stripe. In another sense, though, it was business as usual, another example of Looking Glass not only pushing boundaries of technology in a purist sense — the flight model of Flight Unlimited really was second to none — but using it in the service of a game that was equally aesthetically innovative, and just a little bit more thoughtful all the way around than was the norm.

Upon its release in May of 1995, Flight Unlimited garnered a rare five-stars-out-of-five review from Computer Gaming World magazine:

It’s just you, the sky, and a plane that does just about anything you ask it to. Anything aerobatic, that is. Flight Unlimited is missing many of the staple elements of flight simulations. There are no missiles, guns, or enemy aircraft. You can’t learn IFR navigation or practice for your cross-country solo. You can’t even land at a different airport than the one you took off from. But unless you’re just never happy without something to shoot at, you won’t care. You’ll be too busy choreographing aerial ballets, pulling off death-defying aerobatic stunts, or just enjoying a quiet soar down the ridge line to miss that stuff.

Flight Unlimited sold far better than System Shock: a third of a million copies, more even than Looking Glass’s previous best-seller Ultima Underworld, enough to put itself solidly in the black and justify a sequel. Still, it seems safe to say that it didn’t cause any sleepless nights for anyone at Microsoft. Over the years, Flight Simulator had become less a game than a whole cottage industry unto itself, filled with armchair pilots who often weren’t quite gamers in the conventional sense, who often played nothing else. It wasn’t all that easy to make inroads with a crowd such as that. Like a lot of Looking Glass’s games, Flight Unlimited was a fundamentally niche product to which was attached the burden of mainstream sales expectations.

That said, the fact remained that Flight Unlimited had made money for Looking Glass, which allowed them to continue to live the dream for a while longer. Neurath and Lerner sent a homesick Warren Spector back down to Austin to open a second branch there, to take advantage of an abundance of talent surrounding the University of Texas that the Wing Commander-addled Origin Systems was believed to be neglecting.

Then Looking Glass hit a wall. Its name was Terra Nova.

Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri had had the most protracted development cycle of any Looking Glass game, dating almost all the way back to the very beginning of the company and passing through dozens of hands before it finally came to fruition in the spring of 1996. At its heart, it was an ultra-tactical first-person shooter vaguely inspired by the old Robert Heinlein novel Starship Troopers, tasking you with leading teams of fellow soldiers through a series of missions, clad in your high-tech combat gear that turned you more than halfway into a sentient robot. But it was also as close as Looking Glass would ever come to their own stab at a Wing Commander: the story was advanced via filmed cutscenes featuring real human actors, and a lot of attention was paid to the goings-on back at the ranch when you weren’t dressed up in your robot suit. This sort of thing worked in Wing Commander, to whatever extent it did, because the gameplay that took place between the movie segments was fairly quick and simple. Terra Nova was not like that, which could make it feel like an even more awkward mélange of chocolate and peanut butter. It’s difficult to say whether Activision’s Mechwarrior 2, the biggest computer game of 1995, helped it or hurt it in the marketplace: on the one hand, that game showed that there was a strong appetite for tactical combat involving robots, but, on the other, said demand was already being fed by a glut of copycats. Terra Nova got lost in the shuffle. A game that had been expected to sell at least half a million copies didn’t reach one-fifth of that total.

Looking Glass’s next game didn’t do any better. Like Flight Unlimited, British Open Championship Golf cut against the dark, gritty, and violent stereotype that tended to hold sway when people thought of Looking Glass, or for that matter of the games industry writ large. It was another direct challenge to an established behemoth: in this case, Access Software’s Links franchise, which, like Flight Simulator, had its own unique customer base, being the only line of boxed computer games that sold better to middle-aged corporate executives than they did to high-school and university students. Looking Glass’s golf project was led by one Rex Bradford, whose own history with simulating the sport went all the way back to Mean 18, a hit for Accolade in 1986. This time around, though, the upstart challenger to the status quo never even got a sniff. By way of damning with faint praise, Computer Gaming World called British Open Championship Golf “solid,” but “somewhat unspectacular.” Looking Glass could only wish that its sales could have been described in the same way.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see all too clearly that Neurath and Lerner crossed the line that separates ambition from hubris when they decided to try to set Looking Glass up as a publisher. At the very time they were doing so, many another boutique publisher was doing the opposite, looking for a larger partner or purchaser to serve as shelter from the gale-force winds that were beginning to blow through the industry. More games were being made than ever, even as shelf space at retail wasn’t growing at anything like the same pace, and digital distribution for most types of games remained a nonstarter in an era in which almost everyone was still accessing the Internet via a slow, unstable dial-up connection. This turned the fight over retail space into a free-for-all worthy of the most ultra-violent beat-em-up. Sharp elbows alone weren’t enough to win at this game; you had to have deep pockets as well, had to either be a big publisher yourself or have one of them on your side. In deciding to strike out on their own, Neurath and Lerner may have been inspired by the story of Interplay Productions, a development studio which in 1988 had broken free of the grasp of Electronic Arts — now Origin System’s corporate parent, as it happened — and gone on to itself become one of the aforementioned big publishers who were increasingly dominating at retail. But 1988 had been a very different time in gaming.

In short, Neurath and Lerner had chosen just about the worst possible instant to try to seize full control of their own destiny. “Game distribution isn’t always based on quality,” noted Warren Spector at the end of 1996. Having thus stated the obvious, he elaborated:

The business has changed radically in the last year, and it’s depressing. The competition for shelf space is ridiculous and puts retailers in charge. If you don’t buy an end-cap from retailers for, say, $50,000 a month, they won’t buy many copies.

Products once had three to six months. The average life is now 30 days. If you’re not a hit in 30 days, you’re gone. This is predicated on your association with a publisher who gets your title on shelves. It’s a nightmare.

With just three games shipped in the last two and a half years — a long way off their projected pace of “six original titles per year” — and with the last two of them having flopped like a wet tuna on a gymnastics court, Looking Glass was now in dire straits. The only thing that had allowed them to keep the doors open this long had been a series of workaday porting jobs that Warren Spector had been relegated to supervising down in Austin, while he waited for the company to establish itself on a sound enough financial footing to support game development from whole cloth in both locations. Ten years on, after Looking Glass had been enshrined in gaming lore as one of the most forward-thinking studios of all time and Spector as the ultimate creative producer, the idea of them wasting their collective talents on anonymous console ports would seem surreal. But such was the reality circa 1997, when Looking Glass, having burnt through all of their venture capital, was left holding on by a thread. “I remember people walking into the office to take back the [rented] plants which the studio was no longer able to pay for,” says programmer and designer Randy Smith.

Ned Lerner abandoned what seemed to be a sinking ship, leaving Looking Glass to co-found a new studio called Multitude, whose focus was to be Internet-enabled multiplayer gaming. Meanwhile Neurath swallowed the hubris of 1995 and did what the managers of all independent games studios do when they find themselves unable to pay the bills anymore: looking for a buyer who would be able to pay them instead. But because Looking Glass could never seem to do anything in the conventional way even when they tried to, the buyer Neurath found was one of the strangest ever.

The Cambridge firm known as Intermetrics, Inc., was far from a household name, but it had a proud history that long predated the personal-computer era. Intermetrics had grown out of the fecund soil of Project Apollo, having been founded in March of 1969 by some of the engineers and programmers behind the Apollo Guidance Computer that would soon help to place astronauts on the Moon. After that epochal achievement, Intermetrics continued to do a lot of work for NASA, providing much of the software that was used to control the Space Shuttle. Other government and aerospace-industry contracts filled out most of the balance of its order sheets.

In August of 1995, however, a group of investors led by a television executive bought the firm for $28 million, with the intention of turning it into something altogether different. Michael Alexander came from the media conglomerate MCA, where he had been credited with turning around the fortunes of the cable-television channel USA. Witnessing the transformation that high-resolution graphics, high-quality sound, and the enormous storage capacity of CD-ROM were wreaking on personal computing, he had joined dozens of his peers in deciding that the future of mass-market entertainment and infotainment lay with interactive multimedia. Deeming most of the companies who were already in that space to be “overvalued,” and apparently assuming that one type of computer programming was more or less the same as any other, he bought Intermetrics, whose uniform of white shirts, ties, and crew cuts had changed little since the heyday of the Space Race, to ride the hottest wave in 1990s consumer electronics.

“This is a company that has the skills and expertise to be in the multimedia business, but is not perceived as being in that business,” he told a reporter from The Los Angeles Times. (It was not a question of perception; Intermetrics was not in the multimedia business prior to the acquisition.) “And that is its strength.” (He failed to elaborate on exactly why this should be the case.) Even the journalist to whom he spoke seemed skeptical. “Ponytailed, black-clad, twenty-something multimedia developers beware,” she wrote, almost palpably smirking between the lines. “Graying engineers with pocket protectors and a dozen years of experience are starting to compete.” Likewise, it is hard not to suspect Brian Fargo of Interplay of trolling the poor rube when he said that “I think it’s great that the defense guys are doing this. It’s where the job security is now. It used to be in defense. Now it’s in the videogame business.” (Through good times and bad, one thing the videogame business has never, ever been noted for is its job security.)

Alas, Michael Alexander was not just a bandwagon jumper; he was a late bandwagon jumper. By the time he bought Intermetrics, the multimedia bubble was already close to popping under the pressure of a more sustained Internet bubble that would end the era of the non-game multimedia CD-ROM almost before it had begun. As this harsh reality became clear in the months that followed, Alexander had no choice but to push Intermetrics more and more in the direction of games, the only kind of CD-ROM product that was making anyone any money. The culture clash that resulted was intractable, as pretty much anyone who knew anything about the various cultures of computing could have predicted. Among these someones was Mike Dornbrook, a games-industry stalwart who had gotten his start with Infocom in the early 1980s. Seeking his next gig after Boffo Games, a studio he had founded with his old Infocom colleague Steve Meretzky, went down in flames, Dornbrook briefly kicked the tires at Intermetrics, but quickly concluded that what he saw “made no sense whatsoever”: “They were mostly COBOL programmers in their fifties and sixties. I remember looking around and saying, ‘You’re going to turn these guys into game programmers? What in the world are you thinking?'” [1]Dornbrook wound up signing on with a tiny startup called Harmonix Music Systems, which in 2005, after years of diligent experimentation with the possibilities for combining music and games, altered the landscape of gaming forever with Guitar Hero.

Belatedly realizing that all types of programming were perhaps not quite so interchangeable as he had believed, Michael Alexander set out in search of youngsters to teach his old dogs some new tricks. The Intermetrics rank and file must have shuddered at the advertisements he started to run in gaming magazines. “We are rocket scientists!” the ads trumpeted. “Even our games are mission-critical!” When these efforts failed to surface a critical mass of game-development talent, Alexander reluctantly moved on to doing what he should have done back in 1995: looking for an extant studio that already knew how to make games. It so happened that Looking Glass was right there in Cambridge, and, thanks to its troubled circumstances, was not as “overvalued” as most of its peers. Any port in a storm, as they say.

On August 14, 1997, a joint press release was issued: “Intermetrics, Inc., a 28-year-old leading software developer, and Looking Glass Studios, one of the computer gaming industry’s foremost developers, today announce the merger of the two companies’ gaming operations to form Intermetrics/Looking Glass Studios, LLC. Through the shared strengths of the two entities, the new company is strategically positioned to be a major force in the computer-game, console and online-gaming industries.” Evidently on a quest to find out how much meaningless corporate-speak he could shoehorn into one document, Michael Alexander went on to add that “Looking Glass Studios immediately catapults Intermetrics into a leading position in the gaming industry by giving us additional credentials and assets to compete in the market. Our business plan is to maintain and grow our core contract-services business while at the same time leveraging our expertise and financial resources to be a major player in the booming interactive-entertainment industry.” The price paid by the rocket scientists for their second-stage booster has to my knowledge never been publicly revealed.

The acquiring party may have been weird as all get-out, but it could have worked out far worse for Looking Glass, all things considered. In addition to the obvious benefit of being able to keep the doors open, at least a couple of other really good things came directly out of the acquisition. One was a change in name, from Looking Glass Technologies to Looking Glass Studios, emphasizing the creative dimension of their work. Another was a distribution deal with Eidos, a British publisher that had serious retail clout in both North America and Europe. Riding high on the back of the massive international hit Tomb Raider, Eidos could ensure that Looking Glass’s games got prominent placement in stores. Meanwhile this idea of the Looking Glass people serving as mentors to those who were struggling to make games at Intermetrics proper — an excruciating proposition for both parties — would prove to mostly be a polite, face-saving fiction for Michael Alexander; in practice, the new parent company would prove largely content to leave its subsidiary alone to do its own thing. Now the folks at Looking Glass just needed to deliver a hit to firmly establish themselves in their new situation. That was always the sticky wicket for them.

The first game that Looking Glass released under their new ownership was Flight Unlimited II, which appeared just a few months after the big announcement. Created without the input of Seamus Blackley, who had left the company, Flight Unlimited II sought simultaneously to capitalize on the relative success of Looking Glass’s first flight simulator and to adjust that game’s priorities to better coincide with the real or perceived desires of the market. Looking Glass paired the extant flight model with an impressively detailed depiction of the geography of the San Francisco Bay Area. Then they added a lot more structure to the whole affair, in the form of a set of missions to fly after you finished your training. The biggest innovation, a first for any civilian flight simulator, was the addition of other aircraft, turning San Francisco International Airport into the same tangle of congested flight lanes it was in the real world. These changes moved the game away from being such a purist simulation of flight as an end unto itself. Still, there was a logic to the additions; one can easily imagine them making Flight Unlimited II more appealing to the sorts of gamers who don’t tend to thrive in goal-less sandboxes. Be that as it may, though, it didn’t show up in the sales figures. Flight Unlimited II sold better than Terra Nova or British Open Championship Golf, but not as well as its series predecessor, just barely managing to break even.

This disappointment put that much more pressure on Looking Glass’s next game to please the new boss and show that the studio could deliver a solid, unqualified hit. In a triumph of hope over experience, everyone had high expectations for The Dark Project, which had been described in the press release announcing the acquisition as “a next-generation fantasy role-playing game.” Such a description might have left gamers wondering if Looking Glass was returning to the territory of Ultima Underworld. As things worked out, the game that they would come to know as simply Thief would not be that at all, but would instead break new ground in a completely different way. It stands today alongside Ultima Underworld in another sense: as one of the three principal legs — the last one being System Shock, of course — that hold up Looking Glass’s towering modern-day reputation for relentless, high-concept innovation.

The off-kilter masterstroke that is Thief started with a new first-person 3D engine known as The Dark Engine. It could have powered a “low-brain shooter,” as the Looking Glass folks called the likes of the mega-hit Quake, with perfect equanimity. But they just couldn’t bring themselves to make one.

It took a goodly while for them to decide what they did want to do with The Dark Engine. Doug Church, the iconoclastic programmer and designer who had taken the leading role on System Shock, didn’t want to be out-front to the same extent on this project. The initial result of this lack of a strong authority figure was an awful lot of creative churn. There was talk of making a game called Better Red than Undead, mixing a Cold War-era spy caper with a zombie invasion. Almost as bizarre was Dark Camelot, an inverted Arthurian tale in which you played the Black Knight against King Arthur and his cronies, who were depicted as a bunch of insufferable holier-than-thou prigs. “Our marketing department wasn’t really into that one,” laughs Church.

Yet the core sensibility of that concept — of an amoral protagonist set against the corrupt establishment and all of its pretensions — is all over the game that did finally get made. Doug Church:

The missions [in Dark Camelot] that we had the best definition on and the best detail on were all breaking into Camelot, meeting up with someone, getting a clue, stealing something, whatever. As we did more work in that direction, and those continued to be the missions that we could explain best to other people, it just started going that way. Paul [Neurath] had been pushing for a while that the thief side of it was the really interesting part, and why not just do a thief game?

And as things got more chaotic and more stuff was going on and we were having more issues with how to market stuff, we just kept focusing on the thief part. We went through a bunch of different phases of reorganizing the project structure and a bunch of us got sucked into doing some other project work on Flight [Unlimited] and stuff, and there was all this chaos. We said, “Okay, well, we’ve got to get this going and really focus and make a plan.” So we put Greg [LoPiccolo] in charge of the project and we agreed we were going to call it Thief and we were going to focus much more. That’s when we went from lots of playing around and exploring to “let’s make this Thief game.”

It surely comes as no revelation to anyone reading this article that most game stories are power fantasies at bottom, in which you get to take on the identity of a larger-than-life protagonist who just keeps on growing stronger as you progress. Games which took a different approach were, although by no means unknown by the late 1990s, in the decided minority even outside of the testosterone-drenched ghetto of the first-person shooter. The most obvious exponents of the ordinary-mortal protagonist were to be found in the budding survival-horror genre, as pioneered by Alone in the Dark and its sequels on computers and Resident Evil on the consoles. But these games cast you as nearly powerless prey, being stalked through dark corridors by zombies and other things that go bump in the night. Thief makes you a stealthy predator, the unwanted visitor rifling through cupboards and striking without warning out of the darkness, yet most definitely not in any condition to mow down dozens of his enemies in full-frontal combat, Quake-style. If you’re indiscreet in your predations, you can become the cornered prey with head-snapping speed. This was something new at the time.

Or almost so. Coincidentally, two Japanese stealthy-predator games hit the Sony PlayStation in 1998, the same year as Thief’s release. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins cast you as a ninja, while Metal Gear Solid cast you as an agent of the American government on a top-secret commando mission. The latter in particular caused quite a stir, by combining its unusual gameplay style with the sort of operatically melodramatic storytelling that was more commonly associated with the JRPG genre. That said, Thief is a far more sophisticated affair than either of these games, in terms of both its gameplay and its fiction.

The titular thief and protagonist is a man known only as Garrett, who learned his trade on the streets of The City, a mixture of urban squalor and splendor that is best described as Renaissance Florence with magic — a welcome alternative to more typical fantasy settings. Over the course of a twelve-act campaign, Garrett is given a succession of increasingly daunting assignments, during which a larger plot that involves more than the acquisition of wealth by alternative methods does gradually take shape.

Although the mission tree is linear, nothing else about your experience in Thief is set in stone. It was extremely important to Looking Glass that Thief not turn into a puzzle game, a series of set-piece challenges with set-piece solutions. They wanted to offer up truly dynamic environments, environments that were in their own way every bit as much simulations as Flight Unlimited. They wanted to make you believe you were really in these spaces. Artist Daniel Thron speaks of the “deep sense of trust we had in the player. There isn’t a single solution to Thief. It’s up to you to figure out how to steal the thing. It’s letting you tell that story through gameplay. And that sense of ownership makes it unique. It becomes yours.” In the spirit of all that, the levels are big, with no clearly delineated through-line. These dynamic virtual spaces full of autonomous actors demand constant improvisation on your part even if you’ve explored them before.

Looking Glass understood that, in order for Thief to work as a vehicle for emergent narrative, all of the other actors on the stage have to respond believably to your actions. It’s a given that guards ought to hunt you down if you blatantly give away your presence to them. Thief distinguishes itself by the way it responds to more subtle stimuli. An ill-judged footstep on a creaky floor tile might cause a guard to stop and mutter to himself: “Wait! Did I just hear something?” Stand stock still and don’t make a sound, and maybe — maybe — he’ll shrug his shoulders and move on without bothering to investigate. If you do decide to take a shot at him with your trusty bow or blackjack, you best not miss, to steal a phrase from Omar Little. And you best hide the body carefully afterward, before one of his comrades comes wandering along the same corridor to stumble over it.

These types of situations and the split-second decisions they force upon you are the beating heart of Thief. Bringing them off was a massive technical challenge, one that made the creation of 3D-graphics engine itself seem like child’s play. The state of awareness of dozens of non-player characters had to be tracked, as did sound and proximity, light and shadow, to an extent that no shooter — no, not even Half-Life — had ever come close to doing before. Remarkably, Looking Glass largely pulled it off, whilst making sure that the more conventional parts of the engine worked equally well. Garrett’s three principal weapons — a blackjack for clubbing unsuspecting victims in the back of the head, a rapier for hand-to-hand combat, and a bow which can be used to shoot a variety of different types of arrows — are all immensely satisfying to use, having just the right feeling of weight in your virtual hands. The bow is a special delight: the arrows arc through the air exactly as one feels they ought to. You actually get to use your bow in all sorts of clever ways that go beyond killing, such as shooting water arrows to extinguish pesky torches — needless to say, darkness is your best friend and light your eternal enemy in this game — and firing rope arrows that serve Garrett as grappling hooks would a more conventional protagonist.

Looking Glass being Looking Glass, even the difficulty setting in Thief is more than it first appears to be. It’s wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that Thief is really three games in one, depending on whether you play it on Normal, Hard, or Expert. (Looking Glass apparently wasn’t interested in the sorts of players who might be tempted by an “easy” mode.) Not only do the harder settings require you to collect more loot to score a passing grade on each mission, but the environments themselves become substantially larger. Most strikingly, in a brave subversion of the standard shooter formula, each successive difficulty setting requires you to kill fewer rather than more people; at the Expert level, you’re not allowed to kill anyone at all.

Regardless of the difficulty setting you choose, Thief will provide a stiff challenge. Its commitment to verisimilitude extends to all of its facets. In lieu of a conventional auto-map, it provides you only with whatever scribbled paper map Garrett has been able to scrounge from his co-conspirators, or sometimes not even that much. If your innate sense of direction isn’t great — mine certainly isn’t — you can spend a long time just trying to find your way in these big, twisty, murky spaces.

When it’s at its best, Thief is as amazing as it is uncompromising. It oozes atmosphere and tension; it’s the sort of game that demands to be played in a dark room behind a big monitor, with the phone shut off and a pair of headphones planted firmly over the ears. Sadly, though, it isn’t always this best version of itself. In comparison to Ultima Underworld or System Shock, both of which I enjoyed from first to last, Thief strikes me as a lumpy creation, a game of soaring highs but also some noteworthy lows. I was all-in during the first mission, a heist taking place in the mansion of a decadent nobleman. Having recently read Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus and written quite a lot about Renaissance Florence, my receptors were well primed for this Neo-Renaissance setting. Then I came to the second mission, and suddenly I was being asked to fight my way through a bunch of zombies in an anonymous cave complex. Suddenly Thief felt like dozens of other first-person action games.

This odd schizophrenia persists throughout the game. The stealthy experience I’ve just been describing — the boldly innovative experience that everyone thinks of today when they think of Thief — is regularly interspersed with splatterfests against enemies who wouldn’t have been out of place in Quake: zombies, rat men, giant exploding frogs, for Pete’s sake. (Because these enemies aren’t human, they’re generally exempt from the prohibition against killing at the Expert level.) All told, it’s a jarring failure to stick to its guns from a studio that has gone down in gaming lore for refusing to sacrifice its artistic integrity, to its own great commercial detriment.

As happens so often in these cases, the reality behind the legend of Looking Glass is more nuanced. Almost to a person, the team who made Thief attribute the inconsistency in the level design to outside pressure, especially from their publisher Eidos, who had agreed to partially fund the project. “Eidos never believed in it and until the end told us to put in more monsters and have more fighting and exploring and less stealth, and I’m not sure there was ever a point [when] they got it,” claims Doug Church. “I mean, the trailers Eidos did for Thief were all scenes with people shooting fire arrows at people charging them. So you can derive from that how well they understood or believed in the idea.”

And yet one can make the ironic case that Eidos knew what they were doing when they pushed Looking Glass to play up the carnage a little more. Released in November of 1998, Thief finally garnered Looking Glass some sales figures that were almost commensurate with their positive reviews. (“If you’re tired of DOOM clones and hungry for challenge, give this fresh perspective a try,” said Computer Gaming World.) The game sold about half a million copies — not a huge hit by the standards of an id Software or Blizzard Entertainment, but by far the most copies Looking Glass had ever sold of anything. It gave them some much-needed positive cash flow, which allowed them to pay down some debts and to revel in some good vibes for a change when they looked at the bottom line. But most importantly for the people who had made Thief, its success gave them the runway they needed to make a sequel that would be more confident in its stealthy identity.


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Sources: The book Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd. ed.) by Richard Rouse III; Next Generation of March 1997 and June 1997; PC Zone of December 1998; Computer Gaming World of September 1995, June 1996, August 1997, April 1998, and March 1999; Retro Gamer 117, 177, and 260; Los Angeles Times of September 15 1995; Boston Globe of May 3 1995.

Online sources include the announcement of the Intermetrics acquisition on Looking Glass’s old website, InterMetrics’s own vintage website, “Ahead of Its Time: A History of Looking Glass” by Mike Mahardy at Polygon, and James Sterrett’s “Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem on Looking Glass Studios.”

My special thanks to Ethan Johnson, a fellow gaming historian who knows a lot more about Looking Glass than I do, and set me straight on some important points after the first edition of this article was published.

Where to Get Them: Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri and Thief Gold are available for digital purchase at GOG.com. The other Looking Glass games mentioned this article are unfortunately not.

Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 Dornbrook wound up signing on with a tiny startup called Harmonix Music Systems, which in 2005, after years of diligent experimentation with the possibilities for combining music and games, altered the landscape of gaming forever with Guitar Hero.
 
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Posted by on October 3, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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DOS Game Club

02 Oct

I had a long talk recently with some nice folks at the DOS Game Club podcast. Our subject was one from the early days of this site, the Infocom game Planetfall. Maybe some of you will find it interesting. You can get it from the DOS Game Club homepage, or more than likely wherever you get your other podcasts. My thanks to the hosts for their kind invitation, and to the other guests for their patience with my historical rambling! (I’m told that this is the longest episode of the podcast ever.)

See you tomorrow with some fresh written content!

 
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Posted by on October 2, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction, Modern Times

 
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