A replica Big Daddy towers over Ken Levine’s living room – an artefact of the universe he walked away from. “I didn’t have a lot else to say in that world,” he tells IGN in a new interview. “A franchise is an interesting thing, because it can come to own you if you’re not careful. It can define you.” Perhaps the Big Daddy, sitting in pride of place as an ornament, is a useful reminder of who owns who.
And yet it’s impossible to look at Judas, the upcoming first-person shooter that Levine has been working on for the past 12 years, without seeing BioShock. Rapture’s Little Sisters are echoed in the doll-like guise of Hope, a lavishly animated character who mixes the childlike with the uncanny to disturbing effect. Plasmids are replaced by a conceptually similar suite of abilities that emerge, wincingly, from the player’s hand – leaving electrified pools of water in their wake. And the team at Ghost Story Games, rooted in the Irrational studio that was decimated by layoffs in the wake of BioShock Infinite, still delights in imagery of the early 20th century: faberge eggs and steam furnaces, this time displaced to a colony ship in outer space.
I’d be remiss not to point out the key features that distinguish Judas as well: a highly malleable narrative steered by the player, as opposed to a linear rollercoaster ride through Rapture or Columbia. And a vision of humanity’s future beyond our galaxy, rather than an alternate take on the past. “You couldn’t really do a BioShock game in the future, or at least I didn’t have a way to do it,” Levine says. “Certainly there’s a lot of DNA in Judas of our legacy, but people are also going to be surprised by how different it is.”
Nonetheless, there is definitely a particular set of fascinations that follow Levine from game to game – exemplified and forever associated with BioShock – which I doubt he’ll ever really leave behind.
Many of these run deeper than a fondness for certain aesthetics and time periods, and are thematic concerns: preoccupations first developed during Levine’s employment at Looking Glass Studios in the ‘90s. While working for the legendary immersive sim developer, Levine was instrumental in the early worldbuilding of Thief, the stealth series set in a semi-industrialised medieval city.
Within that framework, he pitted two factions against each other: the Pagans, who shunned technology and followed a Dionysian trickster god who would see the city plunged into darkness. And the Hammerites, a church which promoted order and industry with an unforgiving zeal. The only thing the two groups had in common was their fanaticism, and their capacity to tear the city apart with their uncompromising desire for change.
A similar dichotomy shaped System Shock 2: Irrational’s first game, and the one that laid out the model for the BioShock games that came after. There, you navigated a battle between SHODAN – a godlike AI who considered you lucky to be blessed by her attention – and a biological hivemind called The Many. The latter attempted to persuade you into its warm embrace, and took on Levine’s reservations about collectivism.
If you’re reading this, you likely know what came next: the free market deregulation of Andrew Ryan in BioShock. And then in the sequel, Father Comstock: the prophet who advocated living according to God’s Great Plan, so long as you were Caucasian. In each case, Levine charted the decline of a society rooted in extreme ideology.
Above anything else, the BioShock games are warnings. They reflect Levine’s wariness of rigid belief systems, and of getting swept up in groupthink. It’s that wariness that gives BioShock its unique voice, and which has also been responsible for its controversies. Some players reacted with dismay when, in BioShock Infinite, the Vox Populi revolution against a racist state ended in dehumanising violence. But whatever you think of the results, the approach has been consistent: to encourage you to think for yourself.
“I never set out to educate people, or tell them the truth,” Levine says. “The problem with trying to do that is it’s not interesting dramatically. Nobody wants to be lectured to. I’d much rather ask questions than answer them, because what the hell do I know, really? And I’ve been wrong in my life before. So I’m not comfortable telling people I have the answers. I like exploring the questions.”
That approach has shaped Judas, too. “The team and I create a really broad canvas to talk about things we’re interested in,” Levine says. “We spend half our time in the writer’s room just talking about this particular philosophy, or this particular moment in history: what’s interesting about that, and what are the interesting questions?” As a consequence I suspect that Judas, despite its unique qualities, is going to feel an awful lot like BioShock.
Meanwhile, a team at 2K has been trying to build a BioShock game without Levine’s involvement, and had a difficult time of it. A creative shake-up at developer Cloud Chamber last year saw Rod Fergusson installed as studio head – the same figure who, long ago, pushed BioShock Infinite over the finish line.
“I think finding the right creative purchase was hard,” said Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick in a conversation with Game File. “I think we, in retrospect, wasted a lot of time and money chasing down some creative alleys that turned out to be dead ends.” Some of that struggle, surely, must lie in synthesising the very particular voice that shaped BioShock in the first place.
During our interview, Levine says he could never quite nail down what a BioShock game is: “If you ask me to define it, I couldn’t really even tell you exactly.” Here’s one possible answer: a BioShock game is quite a lot like Judas. Levine might have left his most famous series behind, but evidently it has not left him.
Jeremy Peel is a freelance journalist and friend to anyone who will look at photos of his dogs.
