At his Paris GDC session exploring the development of 2K's critical success BioShock, lead programmer Chris Kline started off by saying his main point would be that "BioShock should've failed."

"In fact," he continued, "it did fail a lot, over the course of time. A series of big mistakes and corrections and slipped ship dates, but all of these helped make it a good game."

In early 2002, realizing that the team needed to make a big budget title, then-Irrational Games decided: "Here was our idea: Let's just make System Shock 2. This was easy because we'd already made System Shock 2. We knew it was a critical success, and we thought we knew all the things that kept it from being financially successful."

"I said this was going to be about failure," said Kline, "and the very first failure was that we wanted to base this whole thing on System Shock 2."