Gamespot wrote:

Rather than fighting dragons to rescue princesses, both games would have dramatic elements that suggested ill-fated characters in ruinous circumstances.

Levine recalls the irony of trying to give five-minute presentations for a game that can't be explained in five minutes.

"Movies don't scare me," the general manager explains matter-of-factly.

Rather than making players out to be extremely powerful, they would instead be fragile bit players caught up in a hostile world.

One of System Shock 2's more-bizarre enemies was the abused lab monkey. These unhappy chimps had been subjected to horrible experiments, causing them to become feral. Though they were extremely fast and difficult to kill, they came about in the game by almost pure coincidence. According to Levine, much of the game's animation was recorded with clunky old motion-capture equipment and an equally clunky old SGI-rendering machine. One day, the team was actually ahead of schedule, and they still had use of the equipment for several hours after the regular motion capture had been completed. Urged by his companions to make the most of the expensive equipment, Levine's first thought was, "well...I do like monkeys..." The rest, as they say, is history.