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BioShock and BioShock Infinite director Ken Levine has opened up about the initial challenges the series faced regarding budget, low sales expectations based on the genre, and imminent cancellation.
In an interview for Edge magazine issue 400, Levine recalled that many of the original developers came to Irrational Games “because they loved” the classic immersive simulation game System Shock 2 and wanted to create something similar to the shooter “where the AI gets bullied,” but Levine reportedly rejected the idea early on for financial reasons. “We can’t make these games because they don’t sell,” he reportedly told the new team members. “Eventually, they wore me out.”
Irrational Games then created a “cheap prototype” to present to publishers, who anticipated the reaction from players and rejected the game because games like System Shock “weren’t making money.” Eventually, the team came up with the idea of presenting BioShock to journalists, who covered the game as part of a System Shock 2 retrospective. “The next day, people saw the article and we started getting phone calls,” Levin says. “I think that created a sense of demand at the publisher.”
Rockstar Games and 2K’s parent company Take-Two secured the publishing rights to the future hit, giving it a “modest budget” before acquiring Irrational Games and investing “a lot more money into BioShock.” The 2007 shooter was still “extremely cheap” compared to today’s blockbusters, but that didn’t stop it from being “nearly canceled” due to “budget overruns and increased time,” according to Levine. The publisher also reportedly had concerns about the game’s infanticide—BioShock gave players the ability to kill and harvest “little sisters” for more resources—though anyone who’s played that game knows it was ultimately picked up.
Fortunately for Take-Two, the project wasn’t canceled. In fact, it became a smash hit, spawning two sequels and selling over 41 million copies. Netflix is also working on a live-action film adaptation that promises “new twists” on the series about utopias gone sour. A fourth game in the series is also “accelerating” development without Levine at the helm, since Irrational Games closed its doors about a decade ago and the director left to make another BioShock-like game called Judas.
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