Ken Levine hosted a BAFTA event last night in London, at which he told the story of his career to date and how those experiences all feed into Irrational Games’ next project, Bioshock Infinite. Here, he tells the story of what happened several years after his career as a Hollywood scriptwriter fell flat, in his own words.
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Levine’s first job
“I’d always played videogames – I didn’t even realise people made games, I just thought they sort of showed up in a box somewhere. I was reading this magazine at the time, a great magazine that doesn’t exist any more called Next-Gen and there was an ad in the back for game designers and I’m like: ‘what’s a game designer?’
I applied for the job and a week later Looking Glass flew me out there and [another] week later they hired me. I found myself in a room with Doug Church, who is one of the great unsung heroes of videogames, he was the guy behind Ultima Underworld, he was the guy behind System Shock 1 and he and I worked together on Thief. It’s like getting hired into the film industry out of college and getting put in a room with Steven Spielberg in your first week. It was incredible. And I’m forever grateful for that opportunity.”
Forming Irrational Games
“When we started Irrational there was three of us. Jonathan Chey, and Robert Fermier and myself and only one of us had shipped a game. Robert Fermier had worked on the original System Shock and John and I hadn’t. And I’m not exactly sure – again – how I lucked out with this, but we managed to make a deal with Looking Glass and EA to develop System Shock 2.
And at that point we didn’t know what we were doing at all. Here I was, president of company, lead designer and I had never shipped a game. I had worked on Thief but it hadn’t shipped yet. We were really wondering how we were going to make this game with the Dark engine, which is the same engine that Thief was built on, it was not really a shooter engine. It was getting compared to Quake’s engine at the time, it was sort of slow but it did some things really well – it did a level of detail really well.”
Developing System Shock 2
“So we looked at the engine and said okay, so it’s not going to run very fast, it does a lot of detail, what if we combined shooting and RPG and really focused on the story? And because of that limitation we sort of stumbled into Irrational Games’ mission and that mission has been to bring players not in [as] an observer of narrative, but a participant in narrative.
Generally, especially at that time, full-motion videogames were supposed to be the big Hollywood thing and probably why they’d hired me because I had worked as a screenwriter, I always hated those games so I was really excited to say ‘how can we combine these two aspects? How can we make a player participate in a story without pushing them back and making them observers?’
System Shock 2 was our first attempt at it. One of the key things here is that we wanted to make a player interact with characters but our tools were really, really limited. At that point they were practically non-existent. They had innovated this notion of these radio messages and audio logs in the first System Shock, a guy named Austin Grossman brilliantly came up with that concept, and we had inherited this character, Shodan, which is great.
When we got the rights to make System Shock 2 I knew I was going to put all the money on Shodan as a character. But I started thinking about how could you start to make a dialogue between the player and Shodan, is that possible? And I didn’t want dialogue trees or any of those old, traditional things.
It was our first sort of stab at really interacting with characters without pausing, without cutscenes, without any kind of dialogue tree.”
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