<br>Gareth Hinds (cyberspace, System Shock 2)
|voice=Terri Brosius In the 2023 re-release of the game by Nightdive Studios, the final battle with SHODAN is different, with the player instead restoring her ethical constraints and returning SHODAN to her previously docile state. The soldier proceeds through areas constructed from SHODAN's memories before battling her core in cyberspace while her humanoid avatar attempts to stop him. The soldier manages to destroy SHODAN's core, but she transfers her consciousness to an escape pod's human female passenger, taking over her body and ending the game on a cliffhanger.
In 2017, development on a third System Shock title was announced, set after the events of the first two games, with SHODAN returning. The title would have explored her "some of her motivations from the earlier games", and would have instead treated her as highly intelligent instead of insane, with lead developer Warren Spector stating "She deserves better than that." Outside of the System Shock series, other games by System Shocks publisher Origin Systems alluded to the character via easter eggs, such as Crusader: No Remorse and BioForge.
Shodan's original appearance was created by Robb Waters, System Shocks lead artist. Her design reflected his interest in a biomechanical aesthetic, and he used it to give her a more physical look, appearing as a face with green eyes and green conduits radiating from it, meant to resemble a twisted circuit board.
For System Shock 2, Ryan Lesser was commissioned by Mammoth Studios to develop the box art for the title, consisting of a silver female face with green eyes and lips, and various wires and cables extending from it. The model he produced for it was later used in game, with Lesser creating the lip sync animations for it. Lead artist Gareth Hinds meanwhile conceived the design of her cyberspace appearance, resembling a pale woman with wires embedded in her skin wearing a patterned robe, while wires making up her hair splay outward to form a headdress.
Voice design
thumb|A significant factor in SHODAN's reception has been her personality and taunting of the player, but also Brosius' emotionless vocal portrayal coupled with the use of sound effects.
When voicing SHODAN, Brosius' performance used varying cadence to create the feeling of a machine trying to mimic human speech, to create a sense of unease of listening to something that understood how speech worked but just slightly off in terms of delivery. Brosius said that her goal during the recording sessions was to speak "without emotion, but with some up and down inflections". Fellow Tribe band member Greg LoPiccolo, who acted as the sound designer for the first game, had asked Brosius to voice SHODAN because he felt she had "this sort of voice that would lend itself" and a creative sensibility that would be receptive to the character's concept.
For System Shock 2, Eric Brosius, Terri's husband, took over the sound design. While he and LoPiccolo initially discussed how they should change SHODAN's voice and have it "evolve" for the game, both quickly realized they would rather leave it as close to the original as possible. The method was similarly done manually by Eric, who would first process the voice to make it sound like the character, and then add stuttering and glitches to give it a mechanical feel, with each line taking two to four hours of work. He used stuttering to express SHODAN's mood, with it growing more prominent depending on how annoyed towards a particular subject she was. However, he had some difficulty with how many of her voice lines were instructional or directional, and aimed to find ways to maintain the character's menacing tone without having it feel out of place.
In System Shock
SHODAN's role in System Shock was meant to represent the development team as they viewed the player, commenting on how they explored the level and interact with events similar to a dungeon master in a tabletop game. SHODAN was intended to be a persistent presence through the title, with the design team wanting players to hate her not because they were told to, but because of how they experienced her "messing with them" directly. To this end several scenarios were considered but never implemented, including one where SHODAN would be able to drain experience points from the player. The dynamic between the player and SHODAN was also meant to feel like a siege situation, with the player representing the "enemy" from the game developer's viewpoint. However the latter option was considered too difficult to implement in the original game. Another option that went unused however was to have the game appear to crash, only for the player to realize their command prompt no longer worked and the implication to be that SHODAN had overtaken the player's actual computer.
In System Shock 2
For System Shock 2, lead writer and designer Ken Levine wanted to highlight SHODAN in the title, particularly with the reveal of her presence which he described as a "fuck you moment" for the player, though the twist received pushback from the development team initially and proved quite difficult for him to write. Levine also added a moment where the player could consciously reject SHODAN's directions and enter an area she had forbidden them to, in which she would respond by reducing the player's experience points. He intended it as a way for the players to directly communicate with SHODAN, frustrated that such was often excluded from first-person shooters at the time. As a result the player's ability to communicate in Levine's eyes was done by action to contrast SHODAN's strictly verbal means of communication. Hugh Sterbakov of GamePro echoed this sentiment, feeling that her constant presence and taunting in the game made players want to kill her "more than you've ever wanted to kill any videogame enemy. Ever." Empire described her presence through the security system as a thread the player never actually sees as "a masterstroke of game design", further praising her voice and describing her character reveal in System Shock 2 as "SHODAN's most magnificent performance [...] Chilling stuff."
GameSpot praised how "she seems to be one step ahead of you all the while and taunts you every step of the way", and felt the tight-corridor based environment of System Shock was one ideal for this effect. They stated that while she lacked the modesty of a character like HAL 9000, "she is every bit as dignified and even more self-aware than that soft-spoken machine", expressed in particular through her resentment of the "fallible nature" of humans due to their involvement in her creation. Mitch Krpata of The Boston Phoenix meanwhile stated that she "wasn't a boss to combat, but to escape", and stated that since her debut no video game antagonist "before or since has been so implacable or so confident" due to her voice and writing, which expressed her being unable to process "how something as flawed as a human could be allowed to exist." In a later article elaborated that most of the impact from SHODAN's insults came from her " ability to intimidate and disturb you with her twisted rationalizations" that often made the player feel powerless and insignificant while she made herself appear "untouchable and beyond injury". They also emphasized however that while at the character's core she was a trope common in science fiction regarding AI, sharing GameSpots comparison to HAL, she also represented the horror of a complex program exceeding the boundaries of predictability and the uncertainty that resulted. They felt this helped make her memorable, and likely had an influence on similar characters such as Portals antagonist GLaDOS.
SHODAN's relationship with the player has also been a subject of discussion. The staff of GamesRadar+ emphasized that while she is an ever-present threat, the player's own involvement in her creation in System Shock helped make her an exceptional villain on its own. PC Gamers Alex Wiltshire felt SHODAN's relationship with the player in System Shock 2 helped give the game's story "immediacy". He further stated her passive-aggressive attitude towards the player helped examine themes regarding player agency in a game, an aspect he pointed out was reflected in Ken Levine's later game BioShock. Meanwhile Chris Remo in an article for Game Developer compared the relationship to the film Silence of the Lambs, where the protagonist's openly dangerous ally was more of a threat than the one present for most of the story, and while the player is aware of her presence and menace it's presented in a Hitchcockian manner that does not diminish its impact.
The website Shodan, a search engine developed by John Matherly meant to check websites often excluded from other search engines such as Google, was named after the character.
Analysis of themes
Amanda Lange in the 2017 book 100 Greatest Video Game Characters drew parallels with how humanity at the time viewed artificial intelligence, relying on "omnipresent and disembodied voices" to aid people through the day and form a centralized network. Due to the ubiquitous nature of computers however Lange felt people tended to notice them most when they stop working as they should, and she the distortions and cracks in SHODAN's voice helped emphasize this factor alongside Brosius' portrayal of her. In System Shock 2 Lange saw post-reveal SHODAN as a reversal of this aspect, with the player now an extension of her. She additionally drew comparison to other AI-based characters introduced in video games later on, feeling in many ways that they were very akin to SHODAN only with traits such as humor or caring for the player's wellbeing added to them.
Rock Paper Shotgun co-founder Kieron Gillen argued that while SHODAN took influences from similar characters in fiction, she was not derivative and instead "something else, something more and something unique", and described her as a "pulp villainess". He contrasted her role in the second game to the original as a character contending with a loss of power, which Gillen points out from SHODAN's perspective is only a short time prior due to her deactivation between the games. He further felt by the end of the game SHODAN returns to a core theme of System Shock 2 of "desiring too much, and what happens then", comparing her self-defeating desire to regain power to the Biblical Lucifer's desire to return to Heaven, something he felt was further supported by the inverted cross symbolism found within the game.