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.

Irrational has built a system of intelligent AI with complex relationships with other AI in the game. This Aggressor scours the city for its next meal.

IGN: I wanted to start off by asking some general questions. Will you tell me how you came up with the story? It takes place underwater in a city where you've got art deco design, a utopian set-up, and yet the world in which the lead character discovers finds it crumbling and in disarray.

Ken Levine: Well, I wish I can say I had some kind of genius master plan to come up with this stuff. I never really do. I just sort of sit down and it kind of accretes over time; the same with Thief, Freedom Force, and System Shock 2. I get some themes going in my head and then start building around it. For us, we wanted to have…we knew we had this theme of biological experimentation. That was at the heart of where all the players' powers and all of the creatures from the game came from. From this biological intentional mutation I wanted to build a world where that would happen and be believable and not in the far future, but something that we could speak to, like something we're dealing with now -- with stem cell research and the moral issues that go around. And I have my useless liberal arts degree, so I've read stuff from Ayn Rand and George Orwell, and all the sort of utopian and dystopian writings of the 20th century, which I've found really fascinating.

IGN: Really? I took a utopian fiction course at U.C. Berkeley and it was one of the most interesting courses I've ever taken.

Ken Levine: Yeah. There was a great period in the middle of the last century where there was a lot of people, Aldous Huxley, Orwell, Rand -- and Rand, she sort of obliquely wrote about utopia. There was a notion about utopia where, I don't think people buy utopia anymore, which is kind of a shame. Utopian almost invariably leads to distopia, and when I was a kid I was obsessed with Logan's Run.

IGN: Yes, I saw that and loved it when I was a kid, too. I look back on the movie now and think that movie must be so horrible now. (Laughter.)

Ken Levine: Yes, it's horrible, horrible. (Laughter.)

IGN: But the ideas were good.

Ken Levine: The ideas were good. Did you ever read the book?

IGN: No.

Ken Levine: I was so obsessed with the book and the movie that, just a few years ago, I re-wrote -- just for fun -- a screenplay of the book the way I thought it should have been done. I knew it wasn't going to get made. I'm not in the film industry. I just did it because I wanted to because I was obsessed with it. Just the utopian notions were fascinating. What happens when you take any idea to the extreme, and that's what I think BioShock is about. It's about an ideology, an ultra-capitalist vision. And listen, I'm a capitalist. I run a videogame company. I'm not exactly running a commune over here, but whenever you take any notion to an extreme, what can happen? And what are the dangers of that. And all these themes tied together. Anything that can be good and you push it too far, what happens when you push it too far? But in order for it to work, there had to be a kind of sadness to it, that this place could have been amazing.

IGN: It sounds like your game is taking Greek ideals and putting them underwater. For instance, how did you come up with an underwater city?

Ken Levine: One thing I wanted to do was create a game that was separate from the real world for several reasons. One is that I think when you make a place that takes place in the real world, like when you take a game like Deus Ex 2, for instance, it had some great stuff, and it had some problems. One of the problems I've always had with it is, and it's not their fault, but, you know, you're supposed to be in Seattle. And you're so obviously not in Seattle. There is a hallway with a barricade. When you get too ambitious and try to re-create a real space, either you have to really go all out and make a game like Oblivion…but even that has real limitations, even World of Warcraft -- where do people live in World of Warcraft? They don't. It's not really a world. But it's very fantastical, and so you buy it. But with a game that supposed to feel realistic, those rough edges really show.