The latest issue of Edge magazine includes a retrospective interview with Ken Levine, going over his career from Looking Glass Studios to Ghost Story Games and the upcoming Judas. When it gets to the latter, Levine's first game since the release of Bioshock Infinite, the director opens up about the subsequent closure of Irrational Games, which it's fair to say came as something of a shock: Both to the studio's staff, and the wider industry.
Bioshock Infinite was released in March 2013 and, while its reputation is now decidedly mixed, it was greeted with almost uniform critical praise and high sales. Less than a year later, on February 8 2014, Levine announced that Irrational Games would close and almost all staff would be made redundant. The way Levine tells it now, it seems it was almost as much of a surprise to him.
"The closure of Irrational was complicated," says Levine. "I felt out of my depth in the role. You're this creative person and, all of a sudden, as your vision increases of what you want to do, you have to become a manager, in a way that you don't necessarily have any training or skill in. My mental health was a mess during Infinite. I was stressed out, a lot of personal things were going on in my life at the time, and then my parents both died. I just couldn't do it any more, and I didn't think I had the team's confidence."
The closing stages of Infinite's development are infamous within the industry, with Rod Fergusson brought in from Epic Games in order to take a hacksaw to the studio's ambitious plans and get the game shipped. The development of Infinite seems to have taken a lot out of Levine, and made him want to get away from projects on that scale.
"So my intention was to go [to Take-Two] and say, 'Look, I just need to go start a new thing, and Irrational should continue,'" says Levine. "That's why I didn't maintain the name Irrational. I thought they were going to continue. But it wasn't my company–I sold the company, so I worked for Take-Two, and the studio was theirs.
"The decision was made at a corporate level that they didn't think they should continue with the studio as a going concern. My feeling was that it probably would have made sense. Take-Two did a BioShock remaster: That would have been a good title for Irrational to get their head around, build a new creative director structure, and then build off of that once they had the confidence to do the next BioShock game. I don't think I was in any state to be a good leader for the team."
Looking back on it now, Levine feels that, once this decision had been made, they'd at least done the right thing by Irrational's staff. "I had a lot of respect for the people on the team," says Levine. "Once we found out that the company didn't want to keep going, we tried to make that transition the least painful layoff we could possibly do. We had multiple job fairs for the team, we allowed them to stay in the studio, we gave them generous transition packages, we fed them. That's not to say that didn't suck. But I don't think I could have been their leader any more, and I knew the next thing I was going to do was going to have a very long period of R&D. The problem is, and you see this problem with big studios, what do you do with 300 people when you're going to have a multiple-year R&D project?"
Bioshock was at the heart of Irrational and, while the studio made many other great games, it's the series it will always be remembered for. If you were ever lucky enough to visit the studio, the first thing you'd see upon exiting the elevator was a reception desk flanked by an enormous statue of a Big Daddy. It's perhaps unsurprising then that, even if Take-Two didn't want to keep the studio going, many ended up circling back to the series, one way or another.
"Interestingly, a good chunk of those guys ended up coming back and working on the new BioShock game," says Levine, referring to the as-yet-untitled Bioshock 4 currently in production. "Then a bunch of them went and started their own companies. At Ghost Story we work with a whole bunch of companies that were founded after the closure of Irrational. I'm proud to say that, despite the negativity of that situation, there were a lot of young entrepreneurs that were just ready to go do their thing. I think it worked out for the best in the long run, but it was painful in the short term."
I visited Irrational not long before Bioshock Infinite shipped and, while Levine cut a somewhat harried figure, and everyone had their heads down working, that felt normal for a studio in the final stretch of a AAA blockbuster: There was little sign of what was to come. "Games are hard to make" is an industry truism and, as they get even bigger and more ambitious, some become Sisyphean tasks. Looking back on Infinite with over a decade gone, I no longer think about the parts that fall flat, or the ambitions unrealised, but am just glad that somehow, the team at Irrational got it out of the door. And it's probably unsurprising that, after such an experience, no-one from Levine to Take-Two seemed to have the appetite to go again.
