It's a great time to be a fan of immersive sims, with Gloomwood still in early access, Fortune's Run coming out in September, and Amnesia: The Bunker and Nightdive's System Shock remake on the horizon. That last game is also getting the particularly fun Let's Play treatment, with former Looking Glass programmer Marc Leblanc streaming the first play of Nightdive's Citadel Station.

Although now an engineer at Riot Games, Leblanc was a programmer on the original versions of "System Shock" and "Thief," and Looking Glass Technologies (eventually Looking Glass Studios) His recollections about the game are a definitive highlight of playing the new versions of the games he helped create.

"If you had told me 30 years later that I would be playing a remake of this game and distributing it on the Internet, I would have said you are crazy. But here we are."

In the first stream of the game, Leblanc was impressed by Nightdive's visual overhaul and tactile detail, admiring the 3D modeling and animation work that was not feasible with Looking Glass at the time. LeBlanc said that watching the hacker swing his spatially simulated body into the medical-level healing pod was "something that could never have been done in 1994, because it would have been impossible to do that in the past."

The developer, however, seemed to miss the narration of the original game, which often involved non-professionals in and around the Looking Glass office. LeBlanc immediately shouted out the name of Helen Dunsmore, the original voice actress for the Mission Control character Rebecca Lansing: "She lived across the hall from us at MIT. She was part of the original D&D game from which Looking Glass was born." But LeBlanc was pleased to discover that musician and much-fancied voice actor Terry Brosius had been called back to re-record his lines for the role of Shodan. [LeBlanc also shared his own memories of the beginnings of the classic 0451 code. The number originally appeared in "System Shock" and became the calling card for "Looking Glass" and, by extension, the immersive sim genre. Warren Spector, the producer of "System Shock," claims that the code was not an intentional reference to Ray Bradbury's novel "Fahrenheit 451," but originated from an actual door code used in the Looking Glass offices.

"Just for the record, this is a quote from Ray Bradbury," LeBlanc claimed when the code was first used in System Shock. Warren said it wasn't, but it is."

"Chronologically, when the office was in Lexington, we set up 451 as a code. It was in the game for a long, long time." LeBlanc further argued that the use of 451 as the real-life door code for Looking Glass' second office was itself a reference to the game, as well as possibly a security risk. [And she made it the actual office door code. It's not a good security breach to reveal a door code in a video game." [Whatever the shadowy nature of 451 or the beginnings of the more popular 0451, LeBlanc is still working on a play-through of System Shock. His latest broadcast explored the Citadel's executive level and Delta Grove, and you can watch the developer's VOD on YouTube and Twitch. Joshua Warrens, in his review, calls it "the definitive play on system shocks after 2023."