Of course, a key person in creating an idea BIOSHOCK The screenwriter is Ken Levin. When he was not a game developer yet, he tried to find a scriptwriter’s free place in Hollywood, but did not find a job. Despite this, Levin Soon I was able to find a vacancy in the game studio Looking Glass Studios As a game designer where he worked on a cult game Thief. But when developing a game with Looking Glass Studios The problems began financially, as a result, the studio branch had to be sold, and some of the developers went to Ion Storm, which later created a cult Deus Ex. Ken Levinn also left the studio with Jonathan Cheem And Robert Fermir, and founded his studio called Irrational Games. Subsequently Thief passed into the hands of other developers and was completed.
After leaving the studio, the team Irrational Games I wanted to start developing my new game- one user mode Fire Team, But its developers soon abandoned this idea, and Irrational Games I had a risk of closing myself without even developing one game. Ken Levin was afraid of this situation, the fact thatKen Only recently he entered the game industry and could already fail, scared him even more.
"My heart was broken, – tells Levin. – I left with a girl and friends in Maine for the weekend. They had fun, and I remember, I thought that my life was over. It was very scary. I just got into the industry, I left my dream work to do [Irrational and Fireteam], and everything went wrong at once. It seemed to me that I would return to graphic design and computer consultations … I thought I missed my chance"
But at that moment Ken Levin One of the founders called Looking Glass – Paul Newart. He offered the engine above the mentioned game Thief, To the team Irrational Games was able to develop her game. Ken And his team was incredibly happy, knowing that they were already familiar with this engine, they certainly agreed to develop the game. Team led by Levin was able to make a breakdown, but a working prototype. Due to the fact that they approached the presentation of their game with responsibility, where RPG genres and shooter are mixed,EA gave the go -ahead to develop a project.
Irrational saved, and despite the further problems, the team was able to find a game for development, and did not die so early. The team met with a limited budget and a short development period, which did not allow the young company to improve the game to its preferences. But Irrational though with difficulty, but was able to complete the development of the game.
And so, the game went into release, and did not become successful commercially, but received high marks that for Irrational It was much more important, because the next time when meeting with the publisher, they will be able to present favorable conditions. Levin still considers work on System Shock 2 The peak of your career.
Soon Looking Glass Studios Closed, and the team from Irrational was preparing to make its main hit Bioshock
Idea and game development Bioshok
Idea BIOSHOCKA Came Ken Levin, Oddly enough, after watching the program about animals, he saw as his mother – the predator brutally kills the animals who wanted to eat her cubs. At that moment Ken He began to think about the relationship between people (in fact, it was the concept of big daddy and little sisters). And, finding an idea, Irrational Games She began to work on the game in 2002, they wanted to create a large budget RPG game that would have a success of critics, and would succeed in a commercial plan, and the team with Ken Levin, consisting of 80 people, began to work on the concept.
Initially, the game narrated about the Nazi bunker at the time of the 2nd World War, where scientists put people under their experiments. The very action of the game would take place in the near future on a tropical island, where the main character, just the same, had to fight the victims, these very experiments. Enemies would combine human anatomy and animal behavior, and genetic implants would also be used as a currency, which could also add to the hero of the ability (this means that the concept of plasmids was invented in the early stage of development). It is interesting that the “little sisters” came from one of the types of characters in the game, or rather, “collectors” who processed corpses into genetic implants. The programmer of the game Chris Klein He stated that the type of “collectors” changed several times, and in the end they reached the “little sisters”, they should have caused pity to the player (it was not excluded that the ancestors of the “big daddy” were just the same “soldiers” who guarded the aforementioned “collectors”).
But the key here is a “would” particle, all scripts were not finalized to a normal state, and the team could not decide on the very concept of the game. Everything was aggravated thicker when McDonons(who performed in Irrational Games As a director of business development), he proposed a game to a certain publisher, but was refused. Soon, they told him that the publisher was thinking about their game:
"Another fucking shooter for a https://pirate-spins.co.uk/ PC, which will be sold in a circulation of 250 thousand copies"
And the reputation of Irrational remained the same, still remembered unsuccessful sales System Shock 2. And due to the lack of a publisher, Irrational There was no money for normal development.
But everything has changed when Ken He began to read books about anti -utopia Orwell and others, but noteworthy for him was creativity Ain Rend.
The most popular book Rend became "Atlant straightened his shoulders". This work became a bestseller, and it is also famous for the fact that, like its last book, "Source", brought the idea of objectivism to the world. In short, objectivism is the idea of reasonable egoism in which a person is obliged to live for himself, and the state must help a person to develop. Myself Ken I did not agree with my thoughts Rend, And by bringing her ideas to perfection, I wanted to show that any social system (including objectivism), when reaching its peak, can destroy itself. Despite the lack of consent with ideas Ain Rend, At the book itself Levin took many details that he subsequently added to the world BIOSHOCK. For example, the city "delight" is similar to the shelter of John Golt, where individualists also lived from the world. And the most important question of the book is “who is John Golt?", Also appears in BIOSHOCK, only in the form of a poster with the inscription – “who is the atlas?". Even Andrew Ryan himself, this is the same Andrew Golt, but only instead of asylum, he created a whole city.
"For me, Andrew Ryan is a combination of several historical personalities such as Howard Hughes and Ain Rand together. Unlike the character in the book Rand, he is a "real person". John Golt Superman, he is not a simple person. He does not accept the bathroom. The characters in the book "Source" are idealized superman. They have no doubt, they have no fears, they do not make mistakes. And this is very similar to the super heroes of the 40s. I think that people are much more like super heroes of the 60s, like the wall of Lee, who have real problems and they make mistakes. I think that delight is a place where real people bring to life a very powerful ideology. And when people fall into a mixture of events, everything is complicated. "
Ken Levin began to create a whole world, where criticism of objectivism and worship of the structure as a whole is a hidden meaning. Thanks to this, u Irrational Finally, a well-thought-out scenario appeared, around which it was already possible to create not just a typical shooter (of which enough in the second half of the 2000s), but something new.
But at Irrational There were still problems with the publisher, no one was ready to finance their game. Basically, games developers agree with the publisher, and then small information is published about their game on one of the magazines. Ken Levin the opposite decided to do it, he called one of the site employees Gamespot, Or rather Andrew Barku, And knowing that he was a fan System Shock 2. Despite the fact that the project shown only remotely resembled BIOSHOCK, Andrew Bark He praised the game, calling it the spiritual heir System Shock 2. And the plan worked, the company Take Two I called Irrational and agreed to finance the game.
Now Irrational turned into 2k Boston, And also the studio joined them 2K Australia. Ken Levin attracted many people from another studio in Australia to develop BIOSHOCK, due to an increase in the scale of development. They selected the people themselves very carefully, but slowly, and therefore there were not enough people in the team all the time.
"We hire quite slowly, so we did not have enough staff to make a game normally. We regularly attracted new employees from Australia, which meant that the product that they worked on stopped, … but we really wanted Bioshock to be magnificent. This developed over time. I would like to say that everything was planned perfectly at the beginning, but that would make me a smelly liar".
Yes Take Two gave, to put it mildly, not a pleasant condition for Irrational, The game was also supposed to be released on consoles. This properly puzzled the developers, because it was necessary to come up with a convenient interface for the consoles, taking into account all the features of the game as an RPG system, plasmids, several types of weapons, plus and different types of cartridges for these weapons, and there was no need to forget about the spoiling itself. Such a condition naturally spent strength and was reflected on finance.
In general, the most important problem was financing. Due to the limited budget, the team redid the game a significant way several times, but the basic foundations of the design remained not touched. But the story all the time remade on the go, to please the same design and gameplay. Even the “delight” was originally a large submarine, but soon it was replaced with an incredible city under water. In general, the place itself according to the idea Kena Levina should have been detached from the world so that the player did not feel that he could just get out of here on foot. And the atmosphere of detachment itself was added by charm.
“Players should not face that you are in New York, and you can go to Jersey, or there is a person walking along the street with whom you can interact in the way in real life. I wanted some place where the player could be cut off from the rest of the world, which we could incredibly deeply simulate. I had an idea of an underwater city. Based on this, I thought that if we want to make a game that would be terrible, then it should be believable. "
Despite the depth of study of the plot and narrative, Irrational I did not forget about gameplay, the team tried to take into account its past mistakes in System Shock 2 and fix them in BIOSHOCK. For example, one of the disadvantages of their past game was that the game gave the player everything at once, from which he simply got confused in the abilities of the main character, and he had to spend time assimilating these mechanic. IN BIOSHOCK This problem was corrected, and now all weapons, plasmids, abilities appear gradually and depending on the stage of passage. And the game itself was felt like System Shock 2(in a good way). Many tricks were taken, pumping the atmosphere and space distant from the world (in System Shock 2 This is literally) the gloomy style of the authors emphasized. No wonder Andrew Bark He called the creation of the team Irrational-"The spiritual heir to System Shock 2".
But it was necessary to progress in graphic terms. Irrational I bought the engine Unreal Engine 2.5, And on the basis of him she created her own – Vengeance Engine. He had a number of improvements compared to Unreal Engine, For example: adding physics HAVOK, Water behavior, improved Unrealed, which now allowed to shoot videos on the game engine. But soon, in 2005, a new generation of consoles came out, and the team decided to process the engine to the best version, with the improvement and updating of the components of the initially laid down.
All this, also complemented the atmosphere in which the picture turned out to be good not only in graphic, but also in artistic terms. The work of artists greatly influenced the atmosphere of the game. Dirty rooms, where there were a lot of trash and corpses, the places themselves were illuminated by a barely prominent beam of the sun through glass and water, and if there was no sun, then artificial lighting added even greater horror.
After the grueling work on the game, the developers decided to let the beta testers play it, but suddenly they received extremely negative reviews, they did not like the dullness of the characters and it was not the convenience of the mechanic. This naturally allowed the team to fall into depression, but Irrational Despite everything, she worked on her product, redoing it once at a time. This all confirms that the team gained experience all the time and progressed as a studio of developers who can make excellent games.
And so, on August 21, 2007 BIOSHOCK goes into release and receives incredibly high marks from players and critics. According to the site Gamerankings.Com The average rating set by more than 40 publications dedicated to games is 9.5 out of 10. 10 publications (1up, Game Industry News, Gameguru Mania, Game Chronicles, VideoGamer, G4-X-Play, Gamer 2.0, Gamespy, Gametap, Gamedaily, Jolt UK) put the game maximum assessment. 19 publications assessed from 95 to 99 %.
After the game was released for Xbox360 and PC,Spike TV Awards Name BIOSHOCK The best game of the year for Xbox 360, and nominated the game for 4 awards: the best shooter, the best graphics, the best game for PC, the best soundtrack. The game was also called the best game of the year British Academy BAFTA.
Magazine Gambling Put the game 9.5 out of 10, and called it the game of the year (2007).
Bottom line:
Not every studio manages to win the hearts of players and critics, but Irrational was able to do this thanks to her hard work, in the team Kena Levina there were many talented people because Ken I wanted to make a large -scale game that would become a masterpiece, and I think they did it.
"I take games as they are. I want to make great games. I have no second career I try to experience. I’m trying to create a video game that will allow me to focus on the telling ability of the video game, and not just invent another environment. While in the game, I give control to the player, because he deserves control, not me".