BioShock Interview

SPOnG has published a four-page interview with Irrational Games’ Ken Levine, quizzing the BioShock lead designer about their soon-to-be-released FPS/RPG hybrid.

Q: Another striking aspect is the Art Deco visual theme. Presumably you had that from the word go where did it come from?

A: Well, actually, it wasn’t from the word go it took a while for us to get there. A few months before E3 last year, we did a prototype, and I brought it to my new corporate masters at Take 2 and I showed it to them, and they asked me what did I think. I said: (I think it’s terrible actually, and we need to start over.) The great thing about having a company like Take 2 is that they said: (OK, go ahead and start over.)

I always loved New York, with the look of the buildings like the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, and we just started again on the visual side. A lot of things started to come together at that point. We built one room that we liked, and said: (Let’s focus on that one room.) It’s still in the game in fact, you come into a restaurant near the beginning; that room has been there since we focused on that Art Deco thing. It’s evolved a lot over time, and I think it makes a nice visual it’s very bold and polygonal, Art Deco, and it evolved very nicely.