“The important legacy is the innovation and that we continue to push forward,” Neurath says. If you have played BioShock, Dishonored, Fallout 3, or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you know the allure of the Underworld formula. Using Looking Glass’s blueprint, other developers eventually found the blockbuster audience that had eluded the genre for so long. Looking Glass never expected their games to be remembered – “in that era, games tended to come and go pretty fast” – but their influence birthed the immersive sim genre.
“We didn’t quite know what we were building,” Neurath tells us. The original Ultima Underworld games, as well as Thief and System Shock, combined first-person immersion with dynamic worlds and thrived on the unexpected consequences of throwing you into them. The same approach to design was evident in the games made under Neurath at Looking Glass in the ‘90s.
