BioShock Interview

MTV.com has published a new game-related article that features a recent interview they conducted with Irrational Games’ Ken Levine about BioShock.

Levine describes himself as “half total freaking computer video game nerd and half pretentious, boring, Vassar-educated twit.” He’s read up on Ayn Rand and studied art history. Certainly that can fit into a video game. “You could take a bunch of liberal-arts courses and find ‘The Matrix’ all throughout it. What they did is they basically said, ‘Let’s take a tiny bit of this and sprinkle it on top of our action movie. Because it makes our action movie seem cooler.’ That’s what ‘BioShock’ is. The architecture … [and] the Ayn Rand philosophy and the economic theory sprinkled on top. My challenge as a writer is to make this a nice flavor, but never forget this is a first-person shooter. Never.”

From the sounds of it, they’ve really been focusing on the FPS portion of BioShock lately. Is it going to be an RPG hybrid at all anymore? What happened to it being the spiritual successor of System Shock 2?