T H E M A K I N G O F . . .

VOID BASTARDS

How Irrational veterans mixed the spirit of System Shock with the structure of a Roguelike

By Jeremy Peel

Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Developer Blue Manchu Publisher Humble Bundle Origin Australia Release 2019

How did System Shock 2, a playable nightmare in which a mother AI is slowly smothered by her fleshy hivemind children aboard a ghost ship drifting through space, come to inspire a Douglas Adams-style Roguelike with cheeky Yorkshire swearing?

For over a year of its development, Blue Manchu’s procedural immersive sim Void Bastards was called Ghost Armada, and rather than cartoon visuals or dark comedy, its pitch document emphasised isolation and loneliness. “This is a game about hunger,” wrote the team at the time. “Alone in a damaged spaceship, you just want to get home.”

To some degree, Ghost Armada was a product of the headspace occupied by design director Jonathan Chey and art director Ben Lee, both formerly of Irrational Games. “The mood was intentionally depressing,” Lee says. “I think it’s because we were both kind of depressed, honestly. We weren’t in particularly happy places. We were piling grim misery on top of the mechanical hunger that you’re supposed to have in System Shock.”

In this early vision of the game, the long-suffering protagonist was constantly starving, emaciated and running out of air, to the point that Chey began to wonder whether anybody would find pleasure in extended play sessions – a question he raised during a meeting in his kitchen. “I don’t remember that conversation,” he says, “but I think it was very fortuitous, as the game probably would have been a bit po-faced and dull otherwise.” Blue Manchu considered ways it could make Ghost Armada more palatable. “And black comedy was the answer,” Lee says. “Specifically black comedy, not just making it a big joke. Jon and I aren’t slapstick guys. The sort of comedies we enjoy aren’t really like that.”

It was in this moment that Ghost Armada became Void Bastards: a satire on the horror of being a disposable cog in a corporate machine. “We’re making light of the situation, but we’re [also] acknowledging that you’re starving and being crushed by a corporation,” Lee says. “My main inspiration was 2000 AD in the ’80s, which was largely anti-Thatcher.”