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.
Welcome to Soundtrack Sunday, where a member of the PC Gamer team takes a look at a soundtrack from one of their favourite games—or a broader look at videogame music as a whole—offering a little backstory and recommendations for tracks you should be adding to your playlist.
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. Med Sci 1 is the very first song you will encounter in System Shock 2 and, as album sequencing goes, it's like being woken up by a fist to the face, or kicking off a three-course meal with a full tablespoon of English mustard.
It goes hard, as the kids say. It's an absurd drum 'n' (the 'n' is important) bass thing, the kind my degenerate teenage pals would blare at parties the last time anything was good (2005). It tips you off to its approach with 20 seconds of repeated bars before going absolutely ham. I defy you, as a mere mortal with mere mortal limitations, not to break into a sprint (in the game) while bobbing your head (in real life) the second that drop hits.
It plays—no, really—a valuable role. SS2 is, on one of its layers, a horror game. It's quite an effective one. The warbles and pleas of your enemies are truly discomfiting. The once-lively, now-empty corridors of the starships are actually foreboding. If you're a scaredy cat, you might be tempted to switch the game off.
Then Med Sci 1 kicks in and infuses you with the power of god and you're off to the races. This is what I mean by the OST as a companion. Med Sci 1 damn-near holds your hand to get you over your nerves and into smashing men in the face with a wrench, and it's a bop.
Ops 1
Ops 1 is a track you will first hear many hours into System Shock 2 and it's also the first time the game's soundtrack calms the hell down. And why wouldn't it? This track coincides with the first time you realise how well and truly hosed you are. This is where SHODAN makes her initial appearance, and you realise that your options are 'death by parasitic larvae' or 'death by immortal machine goddess'.
And through it all, Ops 1 keeps a finger pressed against your spine, thrumming in your head like a heartbeat. It's a decidedly lower-tech track than the synth-filled pounders that precede it. If you transplanted it into a Thief game it wouldn't feel out of place.
Thief is an apt comparison. Ops 1 also works because it dovetails with the approach you're almost certainly taking at this stage of the game. Up to this point, you've been dealing with fodder—psychic monkeys and grunts with pipes and shotguns. They've been more of a threat to your psyche than your body. In Ops 1 you encounter the Cyborg Assassins for the first time. They are real bastards.
The tip-toeing tones of Ops 1 works here because you, too, are likely sneaking about the Von Braun for fear of awakening one of them and getting rapidly shuriken'd to death. It's just nice when things are consonant, isn't it?
Command 1
Command 1 is a piece of music designed for a shirtless man to ascend onto the stage of a Laserium to, but it somehow ended up in a videogame instead.
It is, I suppose, what you would call a sweeping piece. An empty, echoey soundscape reverberates with approaching synths threatening—but never quite managing—to crescendo.
It feels faintly psychedelic, which is only appropriate. The Command Deck of SS2 marks the game's transition into strange and heady territory. Long gone are the grunts and psychic monkeys of Med Sci; this is the time of the Psi Reaver—a brain-on-a-stick capable of projecting gruesome psychic hallucinations at you. They hurt. This is no time for pounding bass or sweaty dread. We are through the looking glass, man.
Or, you know, something like that. What I mean, really, is that all these tracks—and others—act in concert with the rest of System Shock 2's design to make all of its locations a complete sensory package. It's not just royalty-free CombatMusic.wav chucked in because the game's designers figured they should do something with your sound card. Turning it off would be like turning off the textures—surgically removing a key element of the game's identity for no discernible advantage.
And you'd miss out on the synths.
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