Ken Levine says Bioshock was 'almost cancelled' after going over time and over budget, while all publishers cared about was that these games 'don't make any money'

GamesFPSBioshockKen Levine says Bioshock was ‘almost cancelled’ after going over time and over budget, while all publishers cared about was that these games ‘don’t make any money’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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The venerable Edge magazine, one of PC Gamer’s sister brands, is currently celebratingthe landmark of 400 issues, and such anniversaries are always a good excuse to look back on some of the great moments in gaming history. Edge’s new issue features an interview with Ken Levine, now workingat Ghost Story Games on Judas, about his time leading Irrational Games and, in particular,the development of Bioshock. To hear Levine tell it, the fact we got the game at all is surprising.

Levine remembers that one of the factors in Irrational’s makeup was that the developers it was hiring tended to have sought the studio out “because they liked” System Shock 2, and that lineage of Looking Glass immersive sims generally. The director had been a key figure in many of those games but was also now in the position of holding the purse strings and having to play spoiler: “‘We can’t make those games because they don’t sell,'” Levine recalls telling the team, before “finally, they wore me down.”

Sounds a little like Levine was willing to be worn down, but he authorised a “cheap prototype” that Irrational began shopping around publishers (the studio didn’t yet have the relationship with 2K that would lead to it being acquired). The predictable response was thanks but no thanks, because these games don’t “make any money”, at which point Irrational decided on a new tack: getting the media hyped about the unsigned game.

Using the vector of a System Shock 2 retrospective, Irrational showed the game to a journalist Levine doesn’t name in the interview (if memory serves, I believe it was Kieron Gillen) who loved it, and wrote enthusiastically about the ‘next’ Shock game while praising the series to high heaven. “The next day, people saw the article, and we started getting phone calls,” says Levine. “I think it created a sense of demand in the publisher.”

It should be said that there’s some slight massaging of history going on here, inasmuch as Levine definitely wanted to make Bioshock, the idea had been floating around in various forms at Irrational since the early 2000s, and when he’s talking about people joining who wanted to make the next System Shock: well, Irrational was advertising roles based on the project in the early 2000s. I have no doubt that what Levine is saying about publisher disinterest is true, but at the same time this was a project that Irrational pushed for a long time.

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