Hub, Spoke and Terror
We’ve sung praises for System Shock 2 time and again and well, we’re not going to stop any time soon. SS2‘s brilliance is especially blinding when you get a chance to peek behind the development curtain, as Eurogamer’s Rick Lane did recently when he spoke to level designer Ian Vogel about the ever-unsettling MedSci deck.
I would spend hours with Star Trek blueprints and I would just think about how a game level might be constructed, and I would look at where they put the toilets and I would look at where they put the research and I would look at how they built the decks relative to each other
– Ian Vogel for Eurogamer interview
Lane’s put together a great retrospective, where Vogel goes into a lot of detail about MedSci’s creation. For example, Vogel’s inspiration was a fusion of Star Trek, hospitals and submarines: