Feature: Interview: Ken Levine (Pg. 2/3)
What's your favorite secret or scripted event is in the entire game?
Ken Levine: Creative Director of BioShock
*Spoiler Alert*
KL: I think the part where you first encounter Tennanbaum and Atlas together and you learn what is going on with the Little Sisters. I think that was a very hard sequence to do because there was so much exhibition we had to do. You have been seeing these Big Daddies and Little Sisters, but you don't fully understand their role and how you interact with them, and then at the end of the sequence the player has to make a huge choice. I really liked the dynamic of that and it was so much work to get it right, but I think we got that sequence to where I wanted it to be.
And you are referring to where Atlas is kind of urging you to take one action and Tennanbaum is kind of urging you to take another?
KL: Yeah.
We've noticed some sort of funny little parallels between certain elements of BioShock and System Shock 2. It is just little things like the guys running around and throwing grenades, potato chips, vending machines, etc., and it was these funny little nods and I was just curious, were these intended to be inside jokes to players of System Shock 2?
KL: Well, yeah, clearly... System Shock 2 is now and always will be in our DNA, you know, our first game as a company. Yeah, it was the first game I ever shipped. I did it as the lead designer and the head of the company; it was kind of a strange place to be. It is just in our blood. Yes, there are little nods to it. At the end of the day BioShock really takes the genre and moves it down the field substantially from what we could do with System Shock 2 considering the time, resources and the experience at that time. This was my first game and we're always going to have an incredible affection for it.
You already made a few references to these earlier versions of BioShock and I find it really interesting just because - and I think a lot of people do to - the game as it is, is so polished. The word I have heard, and it is used a lot, is BioShock has fine craftsmanship- and that is not something you hear very often about video games. This begs this sort of intrigue about the development process of the game. I have read a few other interviews where you spoke on the earlier versions of the game. I have heard at one point, and I don't know if this came up in an interview with you or if you had said this specifically, but there was one story that it was originally involving Nazis and they there was this other one that you were this D-programmer; so what is the real story there, are all they true? And how did the game end up evolving into its current state?
KL: They are all true. We went through a lot of different stages on the story. Much to the chagrin of everyone around me they happened fairly late in development process, but I think that was because I was waiting for the game to tell me what the story was. I didn't go in there with a story axe to grind; like I needed to tell a story and didn't care what the game was. The game comes first for me, and it wasn't really until mid 2005 when the World of Rapture started to speak to me and I started to understand what it was... and then I had to convince everybody else.
I don't blame anybody for having doubts because it is not something that tricks off the tongue in terms of a place for a video game to take place. I Sort of had to sell it to myself first, then sell it internally, then to 2K and then sell it to the public. Each step of the way got a little easier because I had support of the people. Once I sold it to the team and they bought into it, my life got a lot easier. Amazing artists, animators, and designers built out this world. The vision I had in my head just got taken over by amazing games that these guys are creating everyday.
You talk about how the story came together a little later in the process. I would never guess that from playing BioShock, at least from me with an outsider's perspective. I had no idea.
KL: What you can do like the details and the words - we had worked on a mission outline and the basics and sort of the three axe structure of the story and then it took me a lot longer to sit down and write all the words. You know, really get all the details down, so it is sort of a mix. It felt like we had nothing, but the vast majority of the actual verbiage didn't come until very late.
Do you think you kind of hit upon a secret sauce and would you be interested in maybe documenting that somehow... I mean coming up with some kind of primer for other game designers or does that intrigue you at all?
KL: That is funny. One man's secret sauce is another's hair-pulling formula. I wish I knew a "how to" with a different way because to me there is an adopting in the game and the story-writing. I think one of the reasons why BioShock's story works well is because I was able to integrate it so tightly with everything I saw coming. I would see something and ideas developed in this is sort of collaborative process; like an artist came up with something in the game and that gives me an idea, like with the Gathers Garden Machine. When I saw that I said, oh, yeah. I had this idea in my mind and when I had this actress come in I wrote a song right there and I sang it for her. Then she sang it back and then we had the machine. But if I had never seen that machine, I never would have written that song.
Is that, "My Daddy's Stronger than Hercules," that thing?
KL: Well, we had that and then there is something like: "In the garden we are growing..." [Laughter] Both of those things are the same actress and I wrote them both on the fly in that recording session because I had seen that machine a couple of days before and inspired me, and there is a lot of that back and forth.
I don't work off a blank slate. I get inspired by what I see around me and then I would write something. Another example was there is a poem that Sandra Cohen has - "The Wild Bunny" - and that is because Jordan Thomas, Stephen Alexander, and Nate Wells - and those guys were the artists on that level, and they did all these plaster figures in that level with bunny masks and stuff. And for some reason Sandra Cohen has this bunny mask on. I wrote that poem for it and had the actor do it. There is a lot of back and forth you get. You can sort of write the story but to get that kind of detail that we have in BioShock, it really helps to have that dialogue going on between the game and the writer.
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