system shock 2's developers all held degrees in "not having even seen someone hold a shotgun before" and given that the late 90s was a hotbed of videogame developers making gun-focused games without ever having looked at a gun one time in their life that is really an achievement, for the era
this is just making me think once again about the thing i've been thinking about for over 20 years: the magazine article i saw before half-life came out (unbelievable series of words.) i can't find it now - maybe it was PC Accelerator? - but, it showed valve's devs actually at a shooting range, firing guns, so they'd understand how they behaved. and yeah like, the gunplay in HL is pretty dated now, but for the time I remember it being incredibly visceral compared to the arcadey crap in most contemporary titles.
