A replica Big Daddy towers over Ken Levine’s living room – an artefact of the universe he walked away from. “I didn’t have a lot else to say in that world,” he tells IGN in a new interview. “A franchise is an interesting thing, because it can come to own you if you’re not careful. It can define you.” Perhaps the Big Daddy, sitting in pride of place as an ornament, is a useful reminder of who owns who.
And yet it’s impossible to look at Judas, the upcoming first-person shooter that Levine has been working on for the past 12 years, without seeing BioShock. Rapture’s Little Sisters are echoed in the doll-like guise of Hope, a lavishly animated character who mixes the childlike with the uncanny to disturbing effect. Plasmids are replaced by a conceptually similar suite of abilities that emerge, wincingly, from the player’s hand – leaving electrified pools of water in their wake. And the team at Ghost Story Games, rooted in the Irrational studio that was decimated by layoffs in the wake of BioShock Infinite, still delights in imagery of the early 20th century: faberge eggs and steam furnaces, this time displaced to a colony ship in outer space.
I’d be remiss not to point out the key features that distinguish Judas as well: a highly malleable narrative steered by the player, as opposed to a linear rollercoaster ride through Rapture or Columbia. And a vision of humanity’s future beyond our galaxy, rather than an alternate take on the past. “You couldn’t really do a BioShock game in the future, or at least I didn’t have a way to do it,” Levine says. “Certainly there’s a lot of DNA in Judas of our legacy, but people are also going to be surprised by how different it is.”
Nonetheless, there is definitely a particular set of fascinations that follow Levine from game to game – exemplified and forever associated with BioShock – which I doubt he’ll ever really leave behind.
Many of these run deeper than a fondness for certain aesthetics and time periods, and are thematic concerns: preoccupations first developed during Levine’s employment at Looking Glass Studios in the ‘90s. While working for the legendary immersive sim developer, Levine was instrumental in the early worldbuilding of Thief, the stealth series set in a semi-industrialised medieval city.
