I mostly just want to make you listen to Med Sci 1.
The worst thing I’ve ever read was this: « Just make sure you turn the music off before you start. » It was a throwaway forum post around the launch of Nightdive’s System Shock 2 remaster—advice given to a new player asking for tips before their first playthrough.
A crime, thoughtlessly suggested and thoughtlessly done. Cutting out SS2’s soundtrack would be like taking the Sun from the sky. The game’s sometimes-unhinged techno stylings are your only constant companion aboard the good ships Von Braun and Rickenbacker, acting alternately to spike your adrenaline and your cortisol as you run through the corridors.
But they also root the game in time. System Shock 2 released in the dog days of summer, 1999. Its contemporaries were games like Deus Ex, Half-Life 1, Thief: The Dark Project, and so on. It sounds like it.
Arranged by SS2’s audio director Eric Brosius, with input from composers Josh Randall and Ramin Djawadi (yep, the guy who scored Game of Thrones), SS2’s OST is a mix of heavy, frenetic techno and breathy ambient. Absolutely none of it feels like it would have been out of place in the sweaty clubs of the turn of the century. Or how I imagine those clubs to be. I was five; my vision of these places is defined by that one scene from Blade.
I’m a man who likes his history, and what I am perhaps most sceptical of in our remake-happy era is attempts to shear old games of all their cruft: all their oddities and points of friction, all that might not slide mildly down our 21st-century gullets. You’d never put SS2’s soundtrack in a game if you were making it today. That’s kind of the point—playing it should be a transporting experience. Muting the OST leaves you right here in 2025. Here are a few of my favourite tracks.Med Sci 1
If System Shock 2 had an anthem, it’d be Med Sci 1. I do have an anthem, and it’s Med Sci 1.
