It has directly inspired games like BioShock, Dead Space and this year's Prey, while aspects of its design have found their way into dozens of other titles. Med/Sci is the opening area of System Shock 2, one of the most influential games of its era. If you're lucky, you'll bludgeon him to death. No sooner have you made it through the airlock when you're attacked by a malformed crewmember, begging you to kill him. You rush to the airlock, crawling through a hamster run of corridors and access tunnels as you're given a brief rundown of how to play. There's an explosion, and Polito tells you to get out of cryobay, because soon there'll be another explosion, and then everything in the area will be sucked into space. Nearly everyone on the ship is either dead, or infected with a strange organism that mutates them and turns them hostile. Janice Polito, who summarises the situation. Illegal cybernetics have been implanted into your brain, and your memory has been wiped like a hard-drive. You awake in a cryotube on the medical deck of the spaceship Von Braun.

It's one of gaming's most terrifying introductions.

The making of System Shock 2's best level

System shock 2 the many level sucks