That was the mode we were in at that time, “god damnit we spent a few thousand dollars on this, we’re going to get value out of it. We spent quite a bit of money making that SHODAN head. I have a feeling we put SHODAN and the ship on the cover because they were the coolest pieces of art we had. So we actually decided that we were going to do the box cover ourselves, which wasn’t our job. I remember one of them, for some reason, had a picture of a piece of rope on it, like a hangman’s noose or something. It was EA’s job to do a cover for the game and they sent us a bunch of five or six cover concepts and they were some of the worst cover concepts I’ve ever … Well, actually I’ll say they were THE worst concepts I’ve ever seen.

Tim: Is that something that came as a surprise to you guys? Tim: Yeah, SHODAN’s reveal in the game was kind of a surprise, but sort of ruined by the fact that SHODAN’s face is … Shodan or rather ‘S.H.O.D.A.N’ stands for Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network, and 'she' is a genius and borderline unhinged artificial intelligence that acts as the antagonist for both System Shock games. Peter: I think Tim, you were wondering about having SHODAN on the box art?

System shock 2 shodan fight