Pre-E3 2006: BioShock
Creative Director Ken Levine takes us deep into the heart of Irrational's BioShock.
May 5, 2006 - Irrational Games is heading into the past to bring you the future. With BioShock, a game slated for release on Xbox 360 and PC in 2007, the Boston, MA-based development team known for Freedom Force, SWAT 4, and Tribes: Vengeance, is paying homage to System Shock 2, often referred to as one of the best games of its kind. Irrational's BioShock is about a fantasy underwater city struggling with a strict utopian philosophy that comes crashing into the inevitability of nature. It's about difficult ethical issues that tear the society apart. It's about putting you in terrifying situations and giving you horrific decisions to make and then having to live with them. And in the ways that System Shock was frightening, disturbing and troublesome, BioShock will assuredly thrill you. That's our guess, of course, but we're big fans of Irrational, which rightly deserves great fans.
In BioShock, you take on the role of an average guy who's constantly finding himself put in weirder and more troublesome situations. Your plane has crashed over the ocean, you survive, and in your panic and bewilderment, you see a strange buoy. You swim over to it, and it leads you down to a brilliant underwater city that's suffered a colossal war, and it's on the brink of collapse. What helped cause the war was a genetic chemical that scientists discovered could enhance people to do extraordinary things -- far beyond normal capacity. But along with the great physical enhancements come horrific psychological ones….
We spoke with Ken Levine, general manager and creative director of Irrational Games, about his team's spiritual successor to System Shock 2. What is next-generation about it? What is the story like? How will it disturb and frighten you? Will it be anything like System Shock 2? Will SHODAN make a cameo appearance? All good questions…mostly. He spoke about them all with clarity and a sense of humor, and then spoke some more, and some more after that. In fact, between the two of us, we used 5,668 words. Guess you'll never be able to say we weren't thorough.
05-07-2006, 06:36 PM
Pre-E3 2006, BioShock 
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