“You move like an insect. You think like an insect. You are an insect… Take care not to fall too far out of my favour. Patience is not characteristic of a Goddess.“

SHODAN is the evil AI directly or indirectly responsible for most of the player character’s trials and tribulations throughout the System Shock and System Shock 2 games. She — although a genderless machine, SHODAN’s dominant voice and personality usually earns the female pronoun — is also one of the creepier and more memorable villains in the computer gaming world.

That’s not because she’s particularly powerful. Even in System Shock, she’s not particularly dangerous in her boss modes. What really gets the hairs on the back of your neck standing straight up is not her power or her intellect, but her personality.

SHODAN is other. The game rubs in your face that she’s not a human, and she doesn’t have normal human motivations. SHODAN isn’t just a megalomaniac, she knows she’s a deity, and she proves it. That’s the frightening part. That’s what makes a single voiceover far scarier than a dozen cat scares or monsters jumping from closets.

She watches you throughout the entire game. She knows what you are planning, and she will stop you once you stop being useful. You’re not a pawn to her; a pawn is smarter and more powerful. The player is nothing but an insect, to be carefully tapped toward a goal and crushed when the experiment is over.

It’s an excellent way to play on paranoia, and it works in ways the average psychotic killer or mustachioed megalomaniac would not.