Well, that’s good
The debut from Ghost Story Games, Ken Levine’s studio comprised of Irrational vets founded 8 years ago, is in development hell. Jason Schreier examines how Levine’s management style has led to scrapped work and burnout.
I had to enter in private mode to be able to read the article, otherwise it wanted me to subscribe.
Maybe one day Take-Two will realize that Bioshock was a great game in spite of Ken Levine, not because of him.
That’s frustrating. It worked fine for me, but I’ll add an Archive link just in case. archive.ph
Take-Two must truly believe in Levine’s process to support him for this long - the game was supposed to be out in 2017!
That seems like a strange conclusion to reach, even if he may be a poor communicator and manager. Do you think Bioshock would have been better without Ken Levine?
Good article. I was thinking while reading it that Schreier has found the ideal amount of oversight that lets him produce so much good journalism.
My question is–how far off might the game be from an announced release date? I couldn’t figure that part out.
I suspect that it’s more that he’s very valuable for a certain phase of the project, but needs to be told to sit down and let the big boys finish the game. Which is honestly a common trait amongst designers. Very, very few are actually a good influence for the entire duration of the project.
Better? No idea. Released anyway, probably a lot earlier, and still a great, influential game because of an amazing team? Yeah, most likely.
Every retrospective of Bioshock and Infinite (and now Ghost Story Games) makes him seem like an absolute nightmare to work with and hardly worth the praise lavished upon him by the media.
Loved this short thread:
Agreed. I think deadlines and funding pressure force these kinds of micro-managing executives into accepting what their teams have produced – without that release valve Levine is endlessly sabotaging himself.
This prompted me to re-read Eurogamer’s 2014 BioShock retrospective. It doesn’t sound like he’s evolved much from the guy that would haze new employees by “firing” them on their first day.
That article reads like an attempt to build the Legend of Ken Levine. If his game ships and it’s any good, he’s now the entire reason why.
Ken’s a former poster and member here. Pretty sure he was on the Blue Boards originally. I’d really like to see him release something. The people who made System Shock 2 made a masterpiece with not a lot of money but also a lot of smarts. Fingers crossed that Ken can find his way with whoever is there now.
This is exactly true.
A bad director is one who asks for many large shifts deep into a project. You need to be able to communicate your vision with your team much more clearly, and earlier on into the project, to avoid missing a show time/shooting window/release date. Now, that being said, it is definitely OK for directors to want to make huge shifts in gameplay or story or art after a gameplay session. It is important that the final product be good. But… there is a limit to how much you can do this, and how much a team can withstand.
Directing is a very difficult job and basically split into 2 roles, you are trying to make something in your brain manifest physically, and since you can’t do it all yourself (unless you are a single dev studio) you have to collaborate with other artists and designers and actors. One of the most important parts of a director is being a visionary, but an equally important part is being a master communicator and facilitator, so the team can succeed at achieving that vision.
I honestly don’t know what else to say about it. It seems like Ken is having trouble with that second part of directing.
The price of having a very specific vision is often hours upon hours of re-writes changes and scrapping tons of work. The important thing is that you have to have faith in the director that all of this is worth it. Getting to 5 years past an expected release date makes it pretty difficult to keep the faith. Some directors are notoriously strict with their vision, to a fault. Actors and designers go through hell working for them. In some cases people will look back and say, it was worth it, the finished product justifies the blood sweat and tears put in, I hope that is the case for Ken’s studio.
I still can’t get over the way he shut down Irrational and brought the cool kids with him to his new awesome company, free of all that dead weight.
Dead weight that he apparently needs as one of the key complaints is that they are trying to make a AAA level game with a studio of like 30 devs.
Good luck with that.
Just a general recommendation if you haven’t read it yet: Jason Schreier’s second book has a chapter on the making of BioShock, BioShock 2, and BioShock Infinite. If you’ve read that, then Schreier’s Bloomberg piece will ring familiar. It also goes a bit more into detail on the awkward handling of Irrational’s closure.
In fact, most of that book then goes on to follow ex-Irrational employees. For example, 2K Marin, then Hanger 13, then the team that went on to make The Flame and the Flood, and a couple of other teams that used to work at Irrational and went on to become small indies. Irrational was definitely the epicenter of that second Shreier book.
Thanks to all these Ken Levine/Irrational articles from the last couple of days, I belatedly learned that Card Hunter and Void Bastards, two games I quite enjoyed, were made by a studio created by Irrational co-founder Jonathan Chey.
Remember that Bioshock Infinite would have never shipped when it did in the first place if Irrational / 2K didn’t bring in Rod Fergusson during the last ~8 months of production to help get it out the door.
I’ve never worked with Ken, so this comment isn’t about him, but what Mysterial says is often very accurate. It’s hard to be really good in concept, rapid iteration, early production and be able to close out a game. They are all different skills and require different ways of thinking. It’s often good to pair your creative visionary with someone who knows how to get things done and make clear at which phases of development the accountability shifts from one to the other.