LOS ANGELES -- As the creative director of Irrational Games, Ken Levine and his Boston-based development team has helped change the face of interactive entertainment. He’s also given 2K Games, which now owns Irrational Games, a solid game franchise. The original BioShock sold over 4 million copies, attracting core and mainstream gamers alike.
Rather than staying underwater with the franchise, Levine took to the skies, literally, with the 2012 release, BioShock Infinite. The new game leaves the claustrophobia of Rapture behind for the openness of the floating city, Columbia. Levine was in Los Angeles to preview a new level of the game and discuss the inspirations that make the BioShock games stand out from the crowded first-person shooter genre. He talks about the new game and the BioShock movie in this exclusive IndustryGamers interview.
IG: Where do you draw inspiration from for your BioShock games?
Ken Levine: I think of Irrational Games as a lot of over intellectually stimulated guys and girls. There are a lot of history buffs, film buffs, and art buffs. We don’t try to draw on history because that would be good for us. We’re just history nerds and art nerds and video game nerds we like to combine our different “nerderies” and bring them together. A lot of our games have nods to science, culture, and sociology. We’re a group of guys who have this fairly broad range of interests and we just like to bring that into the work.
IG: How did you choose your new setting for BioShock Infinite?
KL: We’ve established the franchise to make people understand that a BioShock game is going to involve aspects of history, science, culture and politics. We were looking for new fertile ground in that area. We did the Ayn Rand and art deco thing with the first game. BioShock Infinite takes place in 1912 and we were really interested in that period because there was so much going on from a historical, cultural and political standpoint. Yet no one had explored it. We first got tuned into it by a bunch of the artists who read a book called The Devil and the White City, which is about the 1893 World’s Fair and what that meant for the culture of the time. It launched this whole period of America finding it’s feet in the world. It was also where the technologies of the 20th Century were first on display.
IG: What excites you about developing games today?
KL: What excites me are the unknowns. I think a lot of people would get very nervous about change. It would be really nice to some degree to just keep doing the same thing over and over, making the same game with the same business model in the exact same manner. But I think change keeps us on our toes. We have to keep changing.
IG: How have you seen the game industry change and evolve over the years?
KL: When I started in games, I was making PC games with budgets of a half million dollars. Now we’re making these big budget PC and console titles. That may change again. Who knows what the future may bring? Maybe we’ll have to readjust and rethink how we do things, but I find that exciting. I play every kind of game out there. And I think if you don’t -- if you think today is going to be tomorrow, or you think yesterday is going to be tomorrow -- you have a real problem. Tomorrow is tomorrow and none of us really know what it is, but that can either cause you anxiety or you can enjoy that.
IG: What influences, if any, does Hollywood have on your storytelling and your games?
KL: I think that storytelling has an influence on you whether it’s a book or a movie or another game. There are parts of BioShock Infinite that are influenced by stories that are several thousand years old. I won’t say which ones, but there are some very old storytelling influences in this game. But we’ve always been very open to being influenced by great work of other people. If you don’t have your eyes for that you’re missing an opportunity. So we’re half in the history space and non-fiction space and half in the cultural and fictional space as well.
IG: BioShock had been optioned for a movie before but it didn’t work out. What are your thoughts about turning video games into films?
KL: I think we’re in the space now of building properties that are appealing to people, and there’s a version of BioShock that makes a great game and there’s probably a version of BioShock that makes a great movie. I think for us as a company, we don’t have any need to get a movie made. We’d like to have a movie made, but it would have to be the right one, and we’ve had the opportunity to get it made and unless all the right pieces are in place – it’s hard enough to get a movie made when all the right pieces are in place. If you don’t start with the right pieces, you don’t have a prayer. We’ve had a lot of great talks with great people about it. We got close to great people, but you always have to have all of those pieces in place and that’s going to be very challenging. It’s a moving puzzle, but I’m going to be continually talking to people about it. It’s definitely something that’s still in the conversation.
IG: And do you think at all about this with this new endeavor going to the big screen?
KL: Right now, I think mostly about the game. And when it’s done, and I have the story worked out completely -- every single detail of it, I’ll probably be more comfortable thinking about that. But right now I’m really just focused on BioShock Infinite as a game.
