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INTERVIEW: KEN LEVINE | BETA
The Sky is falling Ken Levine likes to build utopian worlds and have them crash from cloud nine broken and blood-drenched. Rob Crossley gets inside the mind of the man at the helm of the BioShock Infinite project...
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young Ken Levine was spewed like vomit from Hollywood’s intestines. Flushed away with a blank filmography in hand, an agent who stopped returning his calls, a scriptwriting dream shattered. Today, some 20 years later, that devastation has become his muse; the bedrock inspiration of his output as creative lead at Boston-based Irrational Games. “I’ve actually been thinking a lot about my game ideas recently,” he tells Develop. “When I was jogging the other day I asked myself; why do I keep building these types of games? These perfect worlds where something goes wrong? It got me thinking about my own life, and how everyone tries to create their own little utopias.” Levine has helped advance the dialogue of video games. Not by their text and certainly not through cut-scenes, but by building living societies – fantasy worlds – and setting upon them the realities of man: paranoia, greed, corruption. In Levine’s most famous works Thief, System Shock 2 and his breakthrough game BioShock, the player is told stories, usually a series of waxen-wing parables, by interacting with the aftermath. “You have these dreams, these ideas, these creations of how good it’s all going to be, and you work your life towards those goals. They’re just hopes and ideas, they’re just things that spring from our heads, but they happen to define our whole lives,” says Levine. “Sometimes, we get stuck on that
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idea, that dream. We can’t see the reality of what’s really happening.” Eight years before he set foot in the first game studio he’d ever seen, Levine found his own Hollywood scriptwriting dreams crumbling like the walls of Rapture. It was the late ‘80s. After impressing his playwright peers at Vassar College in New York, Levine moved to LA with the single wish to become a great film writer. His self-belief – an essential trait for any creative entrepreneur – had put his work under the eyes of the world’s most powerful movie execs. The plan failed spectacularly.
I love it when developers say ‘in our game we have 800 lines of dialogue’. I mean, who fucking cares? Levine quickly found himself stranded from the industry he was desperately trying to be at the heart of; out of money, doubting his own talent, and fired from a last-chance writing gig. He had no choice but to crawl away from the Tinseltown dream. He was dejected. But worse, he was without purpose; a sense that his dream goal, though beautiful when achieved in his mind, was unrealistic. Levine’s journey from that world to the games industry was far from straight,
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