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Ken Levine ’88, developer of the critically acclaimed video game BioShock, spoke at a panel as part of Vassar College’s 10th annual No Such Convention on Saturday, Feb. 20. Before his talk, The Miscellany News sat down with Levine to talk about his Vassar days, his career and the creative process behind his games.
Although gaming opportunities at Vassar in the pre-Internet ’80s were limited, Levine still found opportunities to play while at college. There were several arcade games in the College Center Multi-Purpose Room, he recalls, including Commando and Ikari Warriors, and he played several computer games, including Dark Castle, on his Mac. Levine. a drama major, wrote “a ton” of plays while at Vassar and produced several with the Philaletheis society. He also held a campus job with Computing and Information Services. “Basically everything I did professionally came from here one way or another,” said Levine.
After graduation, Levine worked briefly as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, then “drifted around for a couple of years,” writing plays and doing computer consulting work. In 1995 he got a job at Looking Glass Studios where he developed Thief: The Dark Project, a 1998 computer game with innovative stealth mechanics that went on to define the action-adventure genre, and System Shock, of which BioShock is considered the “spiritual successor.” After a few years, Looking Glass Studios fell into financial difficulties and eventually went out of business; Levine and several other former employees left the company to found Irrational Games, where the team started work on the game BioShock.
The story of BioShock’s development began with a location: an underwater city. “I like building worlds that are very self-contained,” as opposed to games that are, for example, “set in New York City, where you feel like you should be able to go to New Jersey but you can’t.” So Levine began with the idea of a modern-day Atlantis, called Rapture in the finished work, then proceeded to ponder “why on earth would there be an underwater city?” The answer: to establish a utopia completely removed from the modern world.
Utopian and dystopian narratives such as George Orwell’s novel 1984 and the film Logan’s Run were an initial source of inspiration for the game. “Can you make a perfect society?” Levine asked. “[Novelist Ayn] Rand wrote about it in Atlas Shrugged…I thought about what would happen if you really tried to do it.” Discussing Randian objectivism, Levine observed, “like all ideas, as soon as they hit reality they work out differently. In [Rand’s] books they all work out perfectly.”
Video games as a medium are fundamentally different from other forms of storytelling. “You have to be very humble as a writer to work in video games,” said Levine. “If you just want to tell a story and have people go and watch it, you might as well go make a movie.” In Atlas Shrugged, main character John Galt delivers a lengthy speech advocating for Randian objectivist philosophy; in BioShock, antagonist Andrew Ryan’s “John Galt speech” takes place during the 30-second bathysphere ride down to Rapture, said Levine.
Levine spoke about video games’ ability as a medium to incorporate nonlinear environmental storytelling. In BioShock, “visually the story’s being told all over” via details such as grand statues of “god-men” extolling the “sort of Randian idea…[that] man is God, basically,” juxtaposed with “people spray-painting graffiti on the wall with some kind of political message.” This became the “hallmark of the BioShock games— telling the story in the world as much as you can,” said Levine. “Ten years ago that wasn’t possible because you just didn’t have the rendering power.”
Irrational Games was in dire financial straits until the various video game publishers took interest; occasionally, Levine and the other founders cut into their own salaries to keep the company afloat. “[Irrational Games] didn’t have a pot to piss in,” said Levine, until the founders sold the company to publisher Take-Two Interactive in January 2006 and proceeded to release Bioshock for the PC and Xbox in August 2007. Since then, BioShock has won numerous awards for its story and writing, and has even won “Game of the Year” awards from Spike TV and Game Informer. As of summer 2009, it has sold approximately 3 million copies, making it one of the best-selling video games for the Xbox 360.
Levine declined to talk about Irrational Games’ new project. But, he assured The Miscellany News, “It’s cool. It’s super cool.”
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