As part of a backer update for their (successful) Kickstarter to "reboot" the game, the folks at Nightdive Studios this week released the source code for a Mac version of Looking Glass Studios' 1994 classic System Shock.

This is a fantastic opportunity to study the foundations of a pillar of the immersive sim genre, one built on an engine that was coded from scratch after Looking Glass shipped Ultima Underworld in 1992.

According to Nightdive, this source code is native to Power Mac and was initially discovered by the folks at OtherSide, the studio (staffed by Looking Glass vets like founder Paul Neurath and Warren Spector) currently working on both a new Underworld game and a new System Shock.

OtherSide handed the code to Nightdive, presumably to help the studio better understand how the game it's remaking works. And as the studio points out in its update, there are already a few neat things to be learned from the find, including that there appears to be commented out/disabled code that ties into a nonexistent level editor.

You can read more about that in the backer update, which also lays out how Nightdive is refocusing and continuing development (sans some staffers) on the System Shock remake after it put the project on hold in February.

For the source code itself (as well as a link to an emulator to run it if you don't happen to have a Power Mac handy), head over to Nightdive's new "shockmac" repo on Github.