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BETA | INTERVIEW: KEN LEVINE
Bioshock Infinite is the most ambitious idea yet to come from the Boston-based Irrational Games
50 | OCTOBER 2010
scattered as it was by moments of opportunism, walkouts, failure and hope. His career seems like it was always just minutes away from straying elsewhere; a wild goose chase of life’s purpose, where game design was never the ultimate goal. Not at least until the eleventh hour. He was working at, of all places, a New York computer consultancy firm when destiny caught up with him. Screaming out from the opened page of a games magazine was an advert, a vacancy post. Looking Glass Studios – the house of System Shock and Warren Spector, the progenitor of Ion Storm and Irrational Games – just so happened to be looking for a new game designer. Coding experience an advantage. Hollywood contacts a necessity. Today Levine is a rising star of the games industry; an icon-in-waiting. Some of the greatest craftsmen of the entertainment industries see BioShock – built under his leadership at Irrational Games – as a vital, modern inspiration. Cliff Bleszinski says the industry “warmed down before Bioshock came along”. Gabe Newell said he had to ban the game from Valve’s offices. Steven Spielberg was said to be addicted. “BioShock is our passion at Irrational,” says Levine. “It’s our consuming life’s purpose, it’s what drives my life. For five years I’ve worked for it, and when you do what I do – and God bless my wife and her patience – there’s not really a distinction between work and home. My team get emails from me at all hours. And calls. It’s our lives.”
PLAY RIGHT But the designer – despite having built a game of award-winning narrative sophistication – doesn’t agree that story is higher up the pecking order than gameplay. Levine is not, he suggests, trying to relive the Hollywood dream through code. “I think my games fall into this interesting space between simulation and scripted elements. Our narratives are quite unique,
Our goal with Infinite is to present a world that is so different, strange and weird, that also has elements of familiarity. but I can definitely say the story isn’t more important to us than the game,” he says. “The two mediums are of completely different languages. It’s why I don’t do cutscenes. Going down that road is dangerous; the focus is the play. “I love it when developers say ‘in our game we have 800 lines of dialogue’. I mean, who fucking cares? That’s a standard? ‘We have 600 hours of cut-scenes’. So what? As a writer, bulk is the easy part.” “Making content is easy. But leaving enough out, looking at everything as an interactive piece, that’s the real ambition.”
Irrational’s BioShock Infinite, in terms of concept, is the most ambitious idea yet to come from the Boston-based Irrational. Studio Ghibli may have animated it, Jonathan Swift may have written it, but Irrational is going to build it; a breathtaking city in the sky. One buoyed above the clouds by airballoons the size of football stadiums. A utopian retreat that somehow lost its civil values and, stranded miles above the earth, became a beautiful, ghostly prison. It can only be said that, when it was demonstrated behind closed doors at this year’s Gamescom, BioShock Infinite became one of those rare projects that leaves an industry unanimously awestruck. Even executives from direct rival companies urged Develop to take a look at it. Why? Hard to explain, they said. You just have to see it. And yet one of the biggest challenges of the project came from how effortlessly beautiful the flying city of Columbia looks. Levine wants to turn this city, saturated as it is in fierce sunlight, into a vintage horror show. He agrees it’s an unconventional approach, but the payoff can be striking. “Our goal with Infinite is to present a world that is so different, strange and weird, that also has elements of familiarity. The mixture can be even more effective. “I was out the other night and saw this absolutely beautiful woman, and she turned her face and on the other side she had a… well, it must have been some kind of birth defect. What was striking about her is how she carried herself, because she was