Interviews// BioShock's Ken Levine

In general, while BioShock isn’t a multiple-path game, it does support sandbox-style experimentation which means there are vast numbers of different ways to progress. Here’s what the ever-quotable Ken Levine (General Manager and Creative Director of Irrational Games) himself has to say about it.


SPOnG: How would you categorise BioShock, as it has so much going on it?

Ken Levine: I think both as a category and how we developed it, it’s got to work as a great first-person shooter. That’s how we’re marketing it and that’s how we developed it – because you can’t say it’s a first-person shooter unless you get all the weapons right, and get that movement right. Fortunately, we’ve done a lot of first-person shooters at Irrational, so we’ve got a good basis in that. When it wakes up in the morning, BioShock is a first-person shooter first and foremost.


SPOnG: Can you talk us through some of the stuff that differentiates it from other first-person shooters?

Ken Levine: I understand why you’re going: 'What is it? Is it a first-person shooter?' I hope we’re looked at (with BioShock) in the same way as games like Gran Turismo. Before Gran Turismo came along, racing games didn’t have car tuning – you’d just race around a track. But once you had car tuning, you expected that from racing games. Half-Life introduced narrative elements; Grand Theft Auto introduced an open world. And with BioShock, what we want to say is that it’s not a linear corridor with monsters waiting to jump out at you - it’s a world that breathes a little bit. You can walk around it and everything in the world is a weapon – everything can be turned to your advantage. Every enemy can be turned into a friend; every friend can be turned into an enemy. It’s about improvisation, and that’s something which has been woefully missing from shooters.


SPOnG: A lot of people have claimed to have that in their games in the past, but none have really achieved it. Have you seen emergent behaviour in BioShock: things that happened which took you by surprise?

Ken Levine: That’s the thing: when you take this many elements in a game, you get a really good thing and a really bad thing. The really bad thing is that testing it is an absolute nightmare. But the really good thing is that you keep finding new stuff that you can do.

You saw Dean shoot proximity grenades at a barrel, then pick it up and turn it into a giant explosive. We found out we could do that, and use telekinesis to toss it at somebody. We didn’t know that could happen. Then somebody said: “Wait a minute. You know those bots you can hack and take control of – what if I could shoot a proximity grenade at that and it stuck?” Then we changed a few lines of code, and we had kamikazes that go after an enemy and blow up. So, because it’s built on an emergent underpinning, we keep discovering all this stuff.

One day I came in and somebody lit someone one fire, and he ran to the nearest water and threw himself in. I asked, “When did that happen?”

Everyone was like: “It’s all there – we just had to add a few lines of code and then a goal: you know, if I’m on fire, do this. If you build the underpinnings right, as BioShock does, it just keeps building and building. And my hope is that in BioShock 2 and BioShock 3, we keep building and building on this basis. Hopefully, other games will look at it and think: “Oh wait a minute, why am I just walking down this corridor with my machine-gun?”