EA’s first Dead Space game initially started development as System Shock 3 before eventually becoming the iconic horror franchise. While Looking Glass’ sci-fi immersive sim still inspired a few elements of EA’s horror series, developer Visceral Games didn’t spend that much time working with the license.

Today, System Shock 3 has still not released, although the game is seemingly in some form of production with Nightdive Studios. Originally in-development by Thick As Thieves studio Otherside Entertainment, the project is in development purgatory once again.

Speaking on an upcoming episode of the FRVR Podcast, Dead Space producer and writer Chuck Beaver explained that the original game “did sort of start as a System Shock [3],” but the rights to the project possibly weren’t locked down.

“I don’t know if we had the legal rights to it as an EA game,” Beaver said. “I’m not sure if we were using it as a mentor product or if we were literally going to make it as a [new game].” At the time, EA had the publishing rights to the System Shock franchise, but those rights lapsed, and the Dead Space team ended up being inspired by Capcom’s mind-blowing Resident Evil 4.

“Bioshock came out, and we were like: ‘Oh, we need to gave a better story.’”

“Resident Evil 4 came out,” Beaver said, “and that was a bit of a seminal [release]. There were a lot of really epic games from that time frame and we were, Bret [Robbins, the creative director], everyone kind of pivoted. “Let’s do Resident Evil 4 in space! That’s a really solid version’.”

Beaver explains that the game’s life as a System Shock sequel only really existed “in pre-pre-production” as the team was spit-balling ideas. “We must have abandoned it before we started doing much code in the engine,” he said. “Really just ideating what’s it going to be? What are the levels going to look life? What are we doing to do? Maybe as the strategic dismemberment system was being imagined.”

Nevertheless, Beaver explained that their work on System Shock did end up inspiring the design of Dead Space. While the game shifted to a Resident Evil 4-style action system—albeit trading the headshot focus of Leon Kennedy for the limb-chopping focus of Isaac Clarke—a few design elements from their time on the immersive sim franchise stayed.

“System Shock had already has an impact on our design,” he said. “If you recall, in System Shock 2, you would start in a central room and adventure towards the one door that was open, which would bring you back to the central room where another door had unlocked, and you would go now down another part of the ship and then we come back to the central hub and repeat that pattern as it would go. You can look at that in Dead Space, even though it does go tram-by-tram through the Ishimura. It had started with that hub-and-spoke design, and I think we ended up going with the trams a bit later.”

While the Resident Evil-ness of Dead Space has been often discussed by developers, Beaver reveals that Capcom’s horror franchise wasn’t the only major inspiration for the game. BioShock, which launched just a year-and-a-half before Dead Space, also served as a target, influencing design and narrative as Visceral continued to work on its debut horror title.

“We pivoted to Resident Evil 4 and then Bioshock came out,” Beaver recalled. “And we were like: ‘Oh, we need to gave a better story. We better do something.’ So then Nicole shows up as the dead girlfriend that he’s there to rescue.”

In its final form, Dead Space does share quite a few similarities with System Shock 2 specifically. The mind-altering hallucination scenes read similarly to SHODAN’s push to screw with the player’s pysche, the haunting graffiti on the walls decorates both games, and the Necromorphs could be seen as a new version of The Many.

“I don’t think we pulled those [the necromorphs] from System Shock,” Beaver explained. “By the time we had figured out we were doing strategic dismemberment, the Necromorphs were going to have regenerated dead tissue… it was creating all these crazy shapes that would serve strategic dismemberment.”

As Resident Evil tweaked the Dead Space gameplay formula, BioShock continued to alter its story for the better. Much like BioShock’s critically acclaimed “would you kindly” moment, Visceral made it so that Isaac Clarke’s girlfriend, Nicole, was dead the whole time, even renaming the levels so that the first letter of each level spelled out: “NICOLEISDEAD”.

“It was a flippant idea,” Beaver recalled. “Richard Carrillo, one of my producers, at the time pinged Brett [Robbins] and said, ‘Hey, what if the levels had spelled something’. And Brett was like, That’s a pretty good idea. So, then Brett went back and renamed all of the levels, and so that was just a late overwrite on what we’d been doing towards the end of that game.”