Irrational Games | Code Like It's 198x

Irrational Games began in 1997 in Ken Levine’s living room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with three former Looking Glass developers and no start-up money. Ten years later its underwater shooter BioShock went on to sell more than four million copies. In between, it was the kind of studio critics loved and players overlooked. “Everybody loved our games but nobody bought them,” its animation director Shawn Robertson told Edge in 2013. What it kept throughout was a habit of building games around a place and an idea, and of letting the player work out the story from the world rather than from cutscenes.

Fast facts

Founded: 1997, by Ken Levine, Jonathan Chey and Rob Fermier, all from Looking Glass Studios.
Based: Cambridge, then Boston, Massachusetts; later Quincy, just south of Boston. A second studio opened in Canberra, Australia, in 2000.
Owner: independent until January 2006, then Take-Two Interactive, under its 2K Games label.
Names: Irrational Games; 2K Boston and 2K Australia from 2007; Irrational Games again (Boston) from 2010; Ghost Story Games from 2017.
Games: System Shock 2 (1999, with Looking Glass), Freedom Force (2002), Tribes: Vengeance (2004), SWAT 4 (2005), Freedom Force vs the Third Reich (2005), BioShock (2007), BioShock Infinite (2013).
Wound down: February 2014, from about a hundred staff to about fifteen.

Three people and a borrowed engine

Levine, Chey and Fermier left Looking Glass on good terms. Their first job, the single-player part of a shooter called FireTeam, was cancelled after three weeks. “I’m living in my apartment in Cambridge without a dime to my name, we didn’t have any start-up money,” Levine told Edge in 2005. The next week Looking Glass’s Paul Neurath rang and offered them the engine his studio was building for Thief. With a contract artist, the three built a prototype of a science-fiction role-playing game called Shock in two months. Electronic Arts, which held the rights to the System Shock name, signed it, and the game became System Shock 2.

It came out in August 1999, made, in Levine’s words, “in about a year”, with “no time to polish and balance”. Critics gave it scores of 90 per cent and more; Edge gave it eight out of ten. It sold about 50,000 copies in its first six months. “I think we expected the critical reaction to be on par with the commercial reaction, which was tepid,” Levine told Edge in 2013. Its best-known character, the rogue computer SHODAN, was not Irrational’s creation: she came back from Looking Glass’s first System Shock of 1994. The System Shock 2 entry tells that story in full.

Boston and Canberra

After System Shock 2 the studio nearly ended. “When we finished Shock 2, both my business partners said: ‘This was great, we’re exhausted, see you later.’ And I was running the company by myself with no staff,” Levine told Edge. Chey went home to Australia, and when the superhero game Freedom Force found funding, he set up a second Irrational studio in Canberra in the spring of 2000 to share the work. “And less than two years later, from what started with a guy in his living room, we had the game shipped,” Levine said. The two studios worked across the time difference through a virtual private network, shared source control and weekly meetings run by Chey, whom Levine called “the best manager I’ve ever known”.

Canberra went on to lead Tribes: Vengeance (2004), a new game in the Tribes series of science-fiction shooters, because, Levine said, “the Looking Glass experience pool doesn’t help that much with the multiplayer-oriented games”. Its engine, custom-built on an Unreal base, also ran Boston’s police tactics game SWAT 4 (2005). “The engine is a shared codebase — Vengeance and SWAT just branch off at a certain point, which is the great thing about working on multiple titles,” Levine explained. A third game, the survival-horror The Lost for the PlayStation 2, was never released. By Edge’s 2013 count it was eight years after System Shock 2 before the studio had “a title that was truly commercially successful”.

BioShock and Take-Two

That title grew slowly. By 2002 the only thing Irrational had for its next Shock-like game was a system of “protectors, harvesters and drones carrying a valuable resource”. Pitches built on it were turned down by Codemasters, Atari and EA before 2K Games, part of Take-Two Interactive, signed the project in 2004. On 9 January 2006 Take-Two announced that it had bought Irrational, “the award-winning development studio behind such titles as System Shock 2 and Freedom Force”, with studios in Boston and Canberra, and said that BioShock would be the first game from the deal. Levine told Edge in 2012 that the money changed what the studio could make: a role-playing game for a team of 30 became a shooter for a core team of 90, with the resources “to really establish an aesthetic as carefully as we did in that game”.

In August 2007, days before BioShock came out, the two studios took the names 2K Boston and 2K Australia. BioShock sold more than four million copies. It also changed who wanted to work there. “It didn’t change the old timers so much,” Levine told Edge, “because we all have the ‘fat kid’ syndrome — like we’re the unpopular kid in school.” In January 2010 the Boston studio took back the Irrational Games name, and in 2013 Edge found about a hundred people there, in an open-plan office where artists, designers and programmers sat together so that an idea could be tried “in a day”. Canberra, still 2K Australia, worked on other 2K games, among them Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, until 2K closed it in April 2015.

BioShock Infinite, released in March 2013 after five years of work, moved the series from the undersea city of Rapture to Columbia, a city in the sky. Levine told Edge the team had turned down the idea of another BioShock until someone asked, “What if it wasn’t in Rapture?” The end of its development was not easy; Edge reported “a mini staff exodus” late in 2012, which Levine described as “a mix of people leaving and people being asked to leave”.

Winding down, and Ghost Story

On 18 February 2014, less than a year after Infinite, Levine announced that he was “winding down Irrational Games as you know it”. Most of the staff were laid off, with financial support, time in the studio to prepare portfolios and a recruiting day for other publishers. Levine kept “about fifteen members of the Irrational team” for “a smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavor at Take-Two”, to make “narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable”, sold only as downloads. He handed the BioShock series to 2K, noting that it had taken more than half a billion dollars at retail.

The small team kept the Irrational name for three more years. In February 2017 it became Ghost Story Games, with twelve founders from Irrational and Levine as president and creative director. Its first game, Judas, was announced in December 2022; the Ken Levine entry follows that story.

Sources

Edge issue 145, January 2005, pp. 58–62, “Irrational Discourse”: the founding, FireTeam, Neurath’s call, Shock and EA, the year’s development, the partners leaving, the Canberra studio, why it took Tribes, and how the two studios worked together, The Lost, the shared Tribes: Vengeance and SWAT 4 engine; the quotations.
Hyper issue 134, December 2004: news that Irrational had finished Tribes: Vengeance and that BioShock would use a modified Unreal engine.
Computer Gaming World issue 215, June 2002: Freedom Force review.
Maximum PC, July 2005, review of Freedom Force vs. the 3rd Reich; Maximum PC, August 2005, review of SWAT 4.
Edge issue 241, June 2012, pp. 142–145, “The Making of BioShock”: the early game system, the rejected pitches, 2K’s signing in 2004, the sale to Take-Two, 2K Boston and 2K Australia and Boston’s later return to the Irrational name, the team’s growth, the office in Quincy, sales of more than four million.
Edge issue 253, May 2013, pp. 122–125, Studio Profile: Irrational Games: founded 1997 by Levine, Chey and Fermier; about 100 staff; System Shock 2’s reviews and sales; eight years to a commercial success; Robertson’s and Levine’s quotations; the staff departures of 2012; five years on BioShock Infinite; the first day of work on Infinite.
Take-Two Interactive, “Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. Acquires Irrational Games”, press release, 9 January 2006 (web). https://ir.take2games.com/static-files/15eb630f-c0bd-438d-a577-b2349e895a0e
Game Developer, “2K Boston Reclaims Irrational Name”, 11 January 2010 (web, secondary): the return of the name; both studios renamed under 2K. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/2k-boston-reclaims-irrational-name
Henry Belot, “Game developer 2K Australia closes Canberra studio”, The Canberra Times, 16 April 2015 (web, secondary): the closure; founded in 2000 as Irrational Games Australia; its later games. https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6068998/game-developer-2k-australia-closes-canberra-studio/
Ken Levine, “A Message From Ken Levine”, Irrational Games, 18 February 2014 (web): the wind-down, the fifteen staff, support for those leaving, BioShock handed to 2K, half a billion dollars at retail. https://irrationalgames.ghoststorygames.com/new-featured/a-message-from-ken-levine-2/
Game Developer, “BioShock developer Irrational Games rebrands as Ghost Story”, 24 February 2017 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-i-bioshock-i-developer-irrational-games-rebrands-as-ghost-story
Wikipedia, “2K Australia” (web, secondary): the renaming of both studios on 10 August 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2K_Australia