Interviews// BioShock's Ken Levine

SPOnG: Another striking aspect is the Art Deco visual theme. Presumably you had that from the word go – where did it come from?

Ken Levine: Well, actually, it wasn’t from the word go – it took a while for us to get there. A few months before E3 last year, we did a prototype, and I brought it to my new corporate masters at Take 2 and I showed it to them, and they asked me what did I think. I said: “I think it’s terrible actually, and we need to start over.” The great thing about having a company like Take 2 is that they said: “OK, go ahead and start over.”

I always loved New York, with the look of the buildings like the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, and we just started again on the visual side. A lot of things started to come together at that point. We built one room that we liked, and said: “Let’s focus on that one room.” It’s still in the game – in fact, you come into a restaurant near the beginning; that room has been there since we focused on that Art Deco thing. It’s evolved a lot over time, and I think it makes a nice visual – it’s very bold and polygonal, Art Deco, and it evolved very nicely.


SPOnG: So you built a city from one room?

Ken Levine: Yeah. You have to get that one room right, first, you know. The Big Daddy was the first thing we got right, then the room, and we just kept building and building.


SPOnG: What are the likes of Jack Thompson going to make of a game that has little girls in it and guys shooting themselves in the arm with syringes?

Ken Levine: You know, guys like Jack Thompson will make whatever they want to make out of it, and it’s not my job as an artist or games developer to think about those guys. But just to think about making things that I think are morally responsible, that I think are entertaining, that I think could pose questions and make people think about morality. There’s always going to be somebody who’s going to try to take an opportunity to aggrandise themselves off somebody else’s work.


SPOnG: I could still see some knee-jerk outrage surrounding the game because of that, which seems unfair because you have to use your brain to negotiate it.

Ken Levine: If they follow the story, they’ll learn about the moral ambiguities. They’ll learn about the woman who created them, who was actually in a concentration camp, and her experience of how she became a monster and created these little girls. And the changes she has in her life – and the choices the player gets. We really give the player moral choices, and you can’t do that without letting him make a bad choice.


SPOnG: The point is that it’s no corridor-shooter, and games are always derided as being mindless. Did you set out to make a game that is intelligent?

Ken Levine: We did late-stage focus-testing on the game, and I’m always surprised. Even gamers you don’t think of as the smartest guys – you know, young, 19-year-old guys – they got the story – it’s a Utopia. They may not understand objectivism or all that stuff, but they’re not slack-jawed idiots. I think the audience is ready to evolve a bit beyond copies of Aliens and Lord of the Rings.

It still means you have to deliver. Look at the success of The Matrix. With the first one, it had this great action, but also a great philosophical underpinning. You can have your cake and eat it too, and that’s what BioShock is. Look at Lord of the Rings, what separates it from every other orc and hobbit story is that it’s about power. I think people who like our stuff can take more than: “There’s the evil overlord, and you have to kill him.” And on the gameplay side, more than just: “There’s a Nazi; I’m going to shoot him.”