Thumb Culture Retrospective – Prey
For gamers of a certain age, the names Shodan and Xerxes are likely to trigger the urge to smash the nearest computer with a wrench. Long before Amazon’s Alexa was around to remind us to buy toilet roll, the megalomaniacal Artificial Intelligence of System Shock and its sequel ran amok in deep space, causing sleepless nights and the occasional nervous twitch for the players who stood against them. Xerxes did not care about your bathroom essentials; Xerxes wanted to eject you from an airlock and laugh as you crystalized in space. Not only a masterclass in sci-fi survival horror and storytelling, the System Shock games are also the spiritual predecessor to games such as Bioshock, Alien Isolation and Bethesda Softworks’ 2017 blockbuster, Prey. To say that Prey’s creation has been influe...