BioShock’s Ken Levine Gets Silenced

Evil Avatar has posted a forum reply that was supposedly made by BioShock lead designer Ken Levine before the 2K Games moderators pulled it. Honesty will not be tolerated!

Hey all-

I’m really trying to answer every PM I get, both here, on TTLG, on Live and a couple of other sites I post on. Since BioShock has made the splash it has, this takes up a bunch of my time. In the interest of saving everybody’s time, here’s a little FAQ about things I can and cannot answer for you.

Things I can answer:

-Story questions
-Voice acting questions (If you hate that damn circus of values clown, you got me to thank!)
-Interface question
-Gameplay questions
-Art direction questions
-Other aesthetic questions (you hate that Perry Como track, I’m your man!)
-Widescreen questions (i.e. WHY THE HELL DID YOU DO IT THAT WAY, DICKHEAD! etc.)

I take responsiblity for all decisions made by my team at IG/2K Boston/Australia. I won’t be able to answer the more technical questions (I love it when people write to me as if I’ve even heard of shader 2.0! I’m a technological moron.), but I can try to point you in the right direction (which is generally the tech support forums). I do have a huge amount of say as to what goes into patches, given budgetary limitations coming from 2K, however, so feel free to make your voices heard.

Things I can’t answer:

These are some of the aspects of the BioShock experience that aren’t under my control:

-Customer Service Policies and procedures- I don’t have any control over customer service budget or decision making. Like…Zero. You may think I’m some kind of important dude, but at the end of the day we make the games, 2K New York publishes them, does customer support, etc. I’ve been heavily involved all week trying to get things improved for people, but at the end of the day, I can’t take credit or blame for any changes to customer service.

-Copy Protection. Copy protection calls are all made in New York by Technical Director Tim Perry. Our job is to implement what he decides. If he’s not a member of these forums, I’ll suggest to Elizabeth that he gets active in them. The only thing I know about Securom is I’ve got about 1000 games with some version of it on my shelf. The tech that I know is limited to my experience many years ago as Macintosh computer consultant- in the days before the tubes of the interweb. All that stuff is entirely out of my hands and frankly a bit beyond my understanding.

My understanding is 2k has hired or is about to hire 24 hour a day support for the forums, amongst other things. I think we were all surprised by what a hit BioShock has been. I expect things to keep getting better. I’ll try to help where I can, but there’s a large organization above me that I have only marginal input into.

Thanks for listening. If we can direct PM-informed traffic to the most appropriate people everybody can get better and more timely answers to their questions.

Something tells me Tim wasn’t happy about being called out.