It's crazy to think artificial intelligence was once limited to the realms of science fiction when it's getting increasingly common in mundane scenarios in the real world. There's always been a concern that it might, either knowingly or unknowingly, decide to turn on its human creators and subjugate humanity, and for decades that fear was reflected in gaming in the form of evil AI villains. GLaDOS, 343 Guilty Spark, and The Patriots are some of the more recent ones, but before any of them was SHODAN.
Originating from the innovative 1992 cyberpunk FPS where you play as a hacker who's forced to reign in a space station's uppity femme AI, called the Sentient Hyper-Optimised Data Access Network. One neural hardware upgrade later and the hacker wakes up 6 months later, only to find SHODAN has gone rogue, killing or mutating the crew into cybernetic monstrosities and setting her sights on earth. As you fight to take back control over the space station and stop SHODAN's nefarious plans, she contacts the player throughout the game to fuck with and roast your fleshy ass.
Her domineering presence and striking design made her one of the most memorable video game villains of the nineties, inspiring countless other villains including the aforementioned GLaDOS from Portal, Frank Fontaine/Atlas in BioShock (i.e System Shock but underwater and set in the past), and Big Boss in the original Metal Gear. Also, evil AI mommy? Yes please. Her appearance on the cover of Game Developer magazine proves that gamers were horny for SHODAN even in the nineties.
System Shock 2 was well-recieved in 1999, where SHODAN returned to wreak havoc in a starship, but since then the franchise remained almost dormant. To this day, System Shock 3 has had a very rocky development, going from developer to developer and sadly lounging in development hell. Fortunately, SHODAN returned in a remake of the original System Shock for PC released about 2 weeks ago, which faithfully recreates just how helpless you are beneath her god-complex ass. While she doesn't actually have an ass in the game, she does in R34.
Have you guys played System Shock? Would you smash SHODAN, in as much as you smash an artificial intelligence? Leave your thoughts below!
