When I start a new game, I usually check its achievements list right away. So after I picked up this year’s System Shock, Nightdive Studios’ remake/remaster/rebuild of the original 1994 dungeon crawler, I immediately spotted “In the Not Too Distant Future,” an achievement with a visible Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme. Naturally, as a MiSTie since small times, I had to get it. This is the story of how the MST3K Easter egg in System Shock came to be.
For context, the achievement involves tracking down an Easter egg in the movie theater on Citadel Station’s Executive Deck. You can not only find two broken robots and a dead human, arranged in the trademark MST3K seating order, but there’s an audio log nearby that features an original two-minute sketch by former MST3K performers Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett.
It’s an entertaining clip (and this article features mild spoilers for it, if you’d prefer to find it for yourself), but the more I thought about it, I wondered why it was there at all. I did some research, but couldn’t find anything that specifically connected any version of System Shock with either MST3K or Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett’s current project Rifftrax.
Screenshot by the Escapist
Then I remembered I’m technically a journalist. When I have questions like this, I can just go ask the people involved, and sometimes they’re willing to answer me.
“[Nightdive co-founder] Stephen Kick was the guy who contacted us,” Kevin Murphy told me via Zoom. “I think he first contacted a guy named David Martin, who’s our CEO, who has some background in the gaming industry. So does Peter Hunter, who helped develop Rifftrax: The Game. I think Stephen is a fan, so for an Easter egg, he thought it would be fun to have something from our camp – Mystery Science Theater, Rifftrax – and asked us if we could wrap our brains around something.”
That raised a couple of extra questions, so I proceeded to directly bother Stephen Kick about it.
“Well, as you may have guessed, I’ve been a huge MST3K fan since I was a little kid,” Kick said in another Zoom call. “I remember my dad and I had a routine growing up, where on Saturdays, we’d watch Tales From the Darkside, Tales From the Crypt, all those sorts of shows. One morning, when we were getting ready, I came across a Mike episode [of MST3K]. My dad and I just sat there watching it for a while. ‘What is going on? Who are these silhouettes up here and why are they making fun of the movie?’ We pretty much got instantly hooked, and became lifelong fans after that.”
Screenshot by the Escapist
Nightdive Studios spent the better part of six years working on the System Shock remake, following a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2015. During the development process, Kick ended up having a strange idea.
“I remembered [the original] System Shock had a movie theater on the executive level,” Kick said to me in another Zoom call. “We had a gold-plated robot for that level, as kind of a higher-end model, and I said, ‘You know, it’s kind of like a Crow T. Robot.’ And we’ve got the Serv-Bots, which are very Tom Servo-ish. So I had one of our level designers throw their bodies together, along with a human corpse in the front row, thinking that was going to be as far as that Easter egg would go.
“I decided to reach out to Rifftrax and see if they’d be interested in recording something so we could put it into an audio log. It evolved from there. They were really easy to work with. They asked if we had something specific we wanted or if they could just riff. I went in that direction, since I didn’t really want to influence anything that they had to say.”
The result ended up being the audio log “Where are we?”, in which Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett are suddenly transported to Citadel Station for no obvious reason. Corbett and Murphy also end up in new robot bodies, which Murphy theorizes has something to do “with our old job.”
The script was written by the Rifftrax team and recorded in their studio in Minneapolis, before being sent to Nightdive in Vancouver, Washington.
“[Kick] gave us some general guidelines and we worked back and forth a little bit to sort of spin it,” Murphy said. “We’re promoting Rifftrax, and he was hoping we’d get an allusion to MST3K. Hence in the script, two of us are turned into robots. It was just sort of a lark, and Easter eggs are great, because you can really do whatever the heck you want. After learning about the game, I thought, ‘What would we do if we were in that situation?’ That’s where the script came out.”
Murphy himself isn’t much into video games, but MST3K in general has a long history with first-person shooters, going all the way back to the original Doom.
“In the last few years of Mystery Science Theater, we had networked all our computers together, and what’s the first thing we do? We find a great way to waste time, and that’s by doing multiplayer first-person shooter games,” Murphy said.
“Doom was the one that was perfect for us, and we had a lot of fun with it. Then, when we made the Mystery Science Theater movie [This Island Earth, in 1996], the first things we had set up was our network, so in our downtime, we could play Doom with each other. Those things are great pressure releases for people who are under deadlines. We had a lot of stress, so it was a lot of fun to sit down between takes and have Mike kill you eleven times.”
Mike Nelson murdering the rest of the MST3K crew at Doom was a big enough part of the team’s original creative process that it quickly became part of the show’s fan culture.
“When we had our first convention, there was a competition that was very well-attended, which was ‘Play Mike at Doom,’” Murphy said. “He beat everybody. But then the last person to get up was a kid, maybe 10, 12 years old, and I don’t know what happened, but he beat Mike soundly.”
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Published: Aug 30, 2023 10:00 am