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'

The venerable Edge magazine, one of PC Gamer's sister brands, is currently celebrating the 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 working at 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.

The publishing rights for Bioshock were subsequently acquired by Rockstar Games and 2K, which Levine says came with a “modest budget”, before in 2006 2K acquired Irrational outright and immediately pumped “a bunch more money into BioShock.” Levine insists that next to the competition the game's development costs were still “extremely cheap”, but even so it was “going over budget and over time” and 2K “almost cancelled” the game. Whether the latter was ever a serious prospect or something 2K was saying to Levine to get the game over the line is unclear, though Levine would certainly go on to show 2K what going over budget and over time really means with Bioshock Infinite.

Bioshock, of course, turned out to be a commercial smash and arguably has done more than any other game to bring elements of the immersive sim into the mainstream. The first half of the game probably remains my single favourite FPS campaign ever, and it holds up beautifully even now. Bioshock Infinite was also a critical and commercial hit, and a success by any metric, even its reputation has subsequently declined among some. The series went on hiatus after the final Irrational entry and the closure of that studio, but now 2K is seemingly all-in again, with a live action film in the works and of course a long-rumoured fourth game. 

The rumour-mill is currently spinning up around that as-yet-unnamed entry in the series, which is under development by Cloud Chamber: last week the studio said it was “recruiting like mad”, and now a screenshot (albeit a 2021 screenshot) of the work-in-progress game has leaked. What can you say: it looks like Bioshock. Maybe after all this time that should be a pleasant surprise.