|
Ken Levine Interview
Quote:
Ken Levine Talks BioShock
We speak to the father of BioShock post-launch to get his thoughts on the game and the work that went into it.
by David McCutcheon
August 27, 2007 - We were fortunate enough to attend the BioShock launch event in Boston last week, and in doing so got a peek inside The Cult of Rapture. Click here for our full wrap-up including dozens of pics and details from the behind the closed doors of the event. Now that BioShock has shipped to rave reviews and plenty of fanfare we thought now would be the time for a retrospective interview with the game's head honcho, Mr. Ken Levine. We sat down with the mastermind behind what could very well be the year's best game to get his thoughts on the BioShock community, the effort to bring BioShock to life, and whether he's given any thought to the game's multiplayer possibilities.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IGN: All right, my girlfriend thinks I'm a monster for harvesting the Little Sisters. Give me an argument that I can use so I'm not sleeping on the couch.
Levine: Um, well, I think the game is about choice, and I think if that's your choice, you've got to live with it.
IGN: [laughs] Are you saying I'm doomed to the futon for the rest of my life?
Levine: [laughs] We give the choice to the player, and they have to live with the consequences of their actions. That's what the game's about, man!
IGN: C'mon, Ken, this is not what I expected, I expected to buy a game and play it, not attempt to sleep on my futon with no pillow.
Levine: Well, that's how the game plays. If you're gonna make that choice, you've gotta be prepared to roll with it, brother.
IGN: Beyond the Sea. Stylish touch. Last minute inclusion or something you wanted from the get-go?
Levine: There were two songs before I had initially started my work on the license thing. We had a song that we didn't end up getting. Then we had both the French version of "La Mer," which is the tune of "Beyond the Sea" that you hear in the lighthouse, and Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea." We had the variations of "Beyond the Sea" because we thought it was a great song, for the period, and what it's about, it's great. I mean, with BioShock, we're at the bottom of the ocean. [laughs] We tried to get the original French version of it, too, but we couldn't secure it.
IGN: How hard is it to portray the things that are unfolding in a game that's as story-driven as BioShock without using cut-scenes that take the gamer out of the first person perspective?
Levine: When you have a cut-scene that's out of engine and taking control away from the player, you're essentially telling the player "Hey man, don't worry, just watch this movie and you're going to be fine until the movie is over. Take a break, have a smoke, just chill, loosen the top button on your pants, whatever. And with BioShock, the goal was to never let the player out of the story. It makes me want to immerse people and make them feel engaged. We never want them to feel safe.
This might be a bit of a spoiler, but when you first find the Big Daddy in the demo, you know, you see the Little Sister… We think it's great when you see the Big Daddy slam him into the window. You know, if that was done as a cut-scene, we would've burst away from the window, and they wouldn't feel a sense of danger from the action, or a sense of emotion from that action. We wanted the player to constantly see the action, and that requires a lot of tricks to focus the player's attention on things, and secondly it requires a trust in the player that he may not see every pixel of your sequence, but it's better for him to see it as is. It's his, even if he misses some of it, than to sort of shove him in front of it and strap him in A Clockwork Orange-style, and make him watch the whole damn thing..
IGN: Fans are obviously very interested in this type of world. What would you recommend to fans of BioShock who are looking for more on the subject matter of destroyed Utopia, in terms of film, fiction, or gaming?
Levine: In terms of inspirations for us, Ayn Rand's books were obviously a huge part of our inspiration, especially The Fountainhead for some of the philosophy and some of the characters in the game. The Shining, I mean, you can't go wrong with The Shining if you're any bit interested at all in horror or fiction. It really doesn't get much better than The Shining. I remember when I read it as a kid, [Stephen King] wasn't particularly well known, and it absolutely blew me away. It's easy to forget what a talented, revolutionary novelist he was for the horror genre, he really just turned everything around. The Overlook Hotel… how he had such a feel for the place, which is what I wanted BioShock to have, I wanted Rapture to have, like a place lost in time. So yeah, I was really inspired by The Shining for that.
IGN: The Shining is a favorite around these parts, both the novel and the Stanley Kubrick film, two completely different takes on it.
Levine: They're essentially totally different things, they both have huge upsides to them, but that book, boy… it's really something else.
IGN: Who is your favorite character in all of BioShock, without giving too much away?
Levine: I'm pretty fond of Sander Cohen. He's pretty unique in video games, and he plays a pretty interesting role, a role I haven't seen in a video game character. I think Jordan Thomas did a great job with his level, and he was really fun to write, and the actor was great.
IGN: What's your favorite Plasmid hand animation?
Levine: I gotta say, well… Art-wise, I've gotta say Stephen Alexander's textures on the frozen hand is really something to be believed, to me. But the bees crawling out of the arm in Insect Swarm is really amazing to me, I was really inspired by the work put into the trailer we did with the hornets coming out of the arm. I've gotta say, just the simple snap of the fingers when you use the Incinerate! Plasmid, it's such of a "F*** you!" I mean, you snap your fingers and you light the guy on fire, I think that was Shawn Robertson's idea… I just think it's such a great "F*** you" to your victim, you know, it just plays pretty well.
IGN: To what extreme did you have to tone down the portrayal of the Little Sisters' demise?
Levine: We never toned it down, because it was never really, you know, past what it was… For me, the goal was always that we were dealing with some fairly resident moral issues here, and the idea that some of that may or may not be a child. And I felt, and the team felt like we had an obligation to handle that responsibly, and show the sequence to the player, to show him what's happening, but it isn't expected to do whatever is necessary to get beyond the certain barrier of events that's happening here.
I also thought it was very important, you know, we had some people that were more than upset that thought this limited their freedom, that the Little Sisters don't respond to attacks. In the story, it reads that they're not damaged by traditional weaponry, that you either have to harvest them or rescue them, those are your primary methods of dealing with them for the Adam they carry. But to me, having her in front of you, like we do in the game, and having you make that choice, it takes away the indemnity of the action and makes it very personal. I mean, you experienced that first hand with your girlfriend. [laughs] I think she saw that, it was very clear that you're making a choice there, and [laughs] she responded to your choice. And that's gratifying for me, because I think there should be a choice in games that bring about real life consequences. You may not be happy about it, but I'm happy about it.
IGN: [laughs] Now wait, Ken, I bought this game thinking I'd only be stuck with in-game decisions! It was my anniversary yesterday, and I didn't get so much as a peck on the cheek!
Levine: [laughs] This may be a first for video games. We take that seriously, we take what happens in the game… you know, we want players to make an actual choice here.
IGN: You've worked very hard on trying to keep most of the characters in the gray field, where no one person is purely good or purely evil. Why do you think our society in general is so determined to see things in black and white?
Levine: I think it's a very dangerous obsession. You can almost see a counter-movement where you hear people say, "no, there are moral absolutes, there are pretty morally irredeemable folks out there." But most people are pretty gray. I remember being disappointed when I got a little older to find that there really weren't white halves and black halves out there, and I think that's one of the appeals to video games: it sort of simplifies the nature of it a little bit. It's very simple, good or bad. In BioShock, I want you to have to make your choices without a clear black or white, you know? You have one character tell you something that sounded kinda right, while the other character also sounded kind of right, and you have to make that decision, because you know, in my personal experience in life, that's generally how it rolls.
IGN: Roger Ebert and Hideo Kojima say that video games are not art. How do you feel about that?
Levine: Honestly, I can't think of a more irrelevant topic to think about, you know? Is "frogurt" yogurt or fruit? Who cares? It tastes good. I think what you're seeing with Ebert is similar with what happened when movies came along, with the grave years of the book industry. Theater looked down on it, and theater in Shakespeare's time was looked down upon—and that's what serious artists do. You know, there's always a new form of media to look down on or make fun of, and that's their prerogative, and I understand. But yeah, I don't really care either way, that's my prerogative, that's his prerogative, I just want to make as many people dig it as possible.
IGN: Terrific, and speaking of terrific, BioShock's voice work. How did you determine the voice acting talent for BioShock?
Levine: We were more focused on getting talented actors rather than big celebrities; because I don't think it's that big of a draw in video games to get a huge celebrity. I don't think gamers really care that much. And there are side effects to getting a big celebrity in terms of their availability. One of the things about the actors I worked with is that I called them back into the studio over and over again, for whenever we'd do a rewrite or retakes, and they were very patient with me.
We had some great people, probably the only names we had in BioShock, and I say this because they're both extraordinary actors but not giant, huge stars, but who I was personally a fan of was Armin Shimerman as Andrew Ryan, he was in [Star Trek] Deep Space Nine and I really liked him in Buffy the Vampire Slayer because I'm aBuffy nerd, so I'll probably get beat up in some circles of the gaming world. I'm a huge Joss Whedon fan. And then Juliet Landau, who plays on Justice League, as well, and she plays the Little Sister. I was excited because they're very talented actors, and when I saw they were available. And the other actors, like the guy that plays Steinman or even the small characters, like the woman that plays Diane McClintock, it's such an extraordinary performance, you know? And the woman that plays the immigrant woman who, I don't want to spoil anything here, but she has a bit of trouble with her daughter… She just came in at nine o' clock in the morning and gave this incredible performance. The actors really were amazing, they gave me so much support, and they were very patient with my endless, on-the-spot rewriting.
IGN: It is very important to work with people like that, because honestly, we love you, Ken, but if you told most of our staff to wake up at nine AM and give a tremendous performance, we'd likely tell you to kiss off.
Levine: [laughs] It's hard to understand, these sessions, like Juliet's was six hours long, and I'm on a phone with her… she's in a studio in Los Angeles, and I'm in the studio in Boston, and we never met face to face. You need to build a relationship of trust with the director or an actor, and she's going "Ohhh, M-M-Mister B-B-Bubbles!" And she's got to prepare for that, and get ready for that, and that takes a lot of trust. I mean, she doesn't know a lot about video games, she had a lot of trust that we weren't just doing some crappy little thing, and she really brought something of her own to it.
IGN: Her performance may be the reason I'm sleeping on my futon.
Levine: [laughs] It had to work, because at the end of the day… video game characters are very much plastic toys, really. The voice is the only thing they have that is authentic, so that's why I have so much dialogue in this thing, how you can walk around the world and listen to the splicers having conversations with themselves in the distance, doing their own little monologue, because that makes them so much more believable when you actually engage with them.
IGN: I've noticed a few of the splicers actually interact with each other, a few seem to be married couples…
Levine: Charlie and Brenda, right? From the beginning of the game?
IGN: Yeah, that's two of them. It's kind of disheartening to kill these people. Obviously you have to, because they attack you, but you have this few seconds of regret for your future actions as you listen to these people interact. How important was that, to make the player feel bad for killing these human beings that just made a few mistakes in life?
Levine: It says something about the game. I draw a very thin line between what happens in real life and what happens in a movie or a video game, because they essentially have nothing to do with each other. I think if you can make people think about actual violence when you watch a movie or play a video game, or you read a news story about 50 people killed in Iraq or 100 people killed in Afghanistan, or whatever… These are people with personalities, and lives, and relationships. Maybe they're really bad people or very nasty people, but they all have lives and families. I want to bring some of that, because the people of Rapture are not a faceless army of goons, they're real people whose lives were destroyed, and they're in as much of a rut as anybody else. We spent a lot of time in the first level, whether it was the woman hanging from the ceiling or the woman with the baby carriage, or Charlie and Brenda… We wanted to really establish them as people. So when you actually fought them, it wasn't just mindless combat, it had a lot more resonance.
IGN: We know that BioShock will not have multiplayer, but do you care to spill your brain on how BioShock's multiplayer would play?
Levine: [laughs] Oh boy, I'm gonna dodge that one. I've sat around and I've spat spitballs with a bunch of guys, you know, but designing a game is a really long, complicated process. There's so much work to be done to see what… I sort of have a twinkle in the eye of what it would work like, but that's about it.
IGN: There's not a whole lot of emphasis on powerful single-player experiences these days with amazing multiplayer games like Gears of War out there. How important is it for the single-player fans out there for a game like BioShock to succeed?
Levine: That's really for other people to decide. Obviously it's important that there are great single-player games out there for great single-player games to survive, but I've always been a fan of single-player games. You've got to understand that, as a developer, BioShock is the first game we've made that doesn't have a multiplayer mode. We've always had a force to distract our resources, and focus our attention into putting together a multiplayer mode, and I know, I love multiplayer games, too, but at the end of the day and you get home, and you do the things we're trying to do with BioShock… some people call it innovative, others call the world "rich" or something, whatever it is, that requires a lot of work. A lot of attention, a lot of focus, and the multiplayer does distract them.
So when you play the single-player games and you see a multiplayer mode, and you think it's a bonus for free? Basically, that came out of your single-player experience, so only if you've got a potential amount of game and a potential amount of focus can you do both. It's very rare that you find that, and the testament to that is when you look at Xbox Live. There are really only two, three, four games that people play multiplayer at any certain time. That's because those games are extraordinary pieces of work. I'm looking at my game shelf right now in my home, and, you know… there's Joint Task Force, there's Prey, there's F.E.A.R. … And how many people are at home playing those in multiplayer right now? Most of them are online playing Stealth Wars 2 multiplayer, you know?
IGN: So true. We already know the answer, but we'll ask it anyway… Will there be a chance for Download Content?
Levine: No comentario, my friend.
IGN: Do you think of yourself as the next Cliffy B, as the next big gaming rock star that's going to come in and change the industry?
Levine: Actually, I'm Cliffy B's stunt double. [laughs] Cliff has been great, not only is he a really talented game designer, but he's sort of building up his personality and that's what he does. He's a smart guy. He's the real deal, too, ya know? He's not some guy that throws his name out there, he's a real game developer. I think I'm a little more like Todd [Howard, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Executive Producer], it really doesn't interest me. I'm a married guy, as well, so that doesn't do it for me.
All I care about is about making cool games, because that's where I spend all of my time, in the office with guys on my team that make games. I could be at the office making BioShock, or I could be at the office making Pet the Pony 3 on the Wii or something, and I'd rather be making BioShock. The success, beyond the monetary benefits—hey, everybody likes money—the success means that they'll keep throwing money at us to make cool games like BioShock, and the other aspects of it aren't really as interesting to me because they just don't hold a lot of value to me.
IGN: How important are the Cult of Rapture guys and gals? Isn't it a little crazy with how much the Cult of Rapture supports BioShock, a brand new IP from a company than has received tons of critical success but little to no success on the market?
Levine: Oh, absolutely, these guys are coming in from six, nine, twelve months to put faith in something that there's no reason they should put faith in. The guys, I met some of the moderators, and they're spending time moderating the boards and I don't think they're getting paid. Elizabeth Tobey, the community manager over there is employed by 2K Games, but all of the other guys… all for a game they've never seen until recently. I don't have that kind of commitment to a game I'm not a part of, and all I can be is grateful that people would believe in us enough to get behind us and the game that far in advance with as little information as they had. I'm only happy now that they've played the game and they think their contribution was worth it.
IGN: You're in Rapture, you're trying to survive. You can choose up to three plasmids and tonics overall to survive. Pick your poison.
Levine: For me, you know, you've gotta have Electrobolt. C'mon, you can take bots down, zap people in water, I mean, you've gotta have that. I'm a big fan of Telekinesis, and I'm a big fan of Enrage. Really big fan of Enrage, because I like setting people against each other, especially when I'm getting swarmed to break up the action, to break up the enemies' ranks.
|
Link To Article
Neato! 
__________________
|
Register
Home
Leaderboard
08-28-2007, 04:20 PM
Linear Mode
