Ken Levine | Code Like It's 198x

Ken Levine came to games from the theatre and from Hollywood, and he has spent the thirty years since making games that carry an argument. His BioShock (2007) put a shooter in an underwater city built on Ayn Rand’s ideas and then turned its most ordinary instruction, “would you kindly”, against the player. Before that he had written the first designs for Thief and led System Shock 2 from a studio that began in his living room.

Fast facts

Born: 1966, in New York.
Before games: drama at Vassar College, then screenwriting in Los Angeles.
Looking Glass, 1995–1997: early story and designs for what became Thief: The Dark Project (1998).
Irrational Games, 1997–2014: co-founder with Jonathan Chey and Rob Fermier; lead designer of System Shock 2 (1999); creative director of BioShock (2007) and BioShock Infinite (2013).
Ghost Story Games, 2017–: president and creative director; Judas, announced December 2022.

From plays to Looking Glass

Levine studied drama at Vassar, where he wrote and staged plays, and then went to Los Angeles to write for films. He told his audience at the PAX games festival in 2008 that the high point was a commission for a romantic comedy, which did not turn out well. “I was a decent writer,” he told Boston Magazine in 2013. “But I knew nothing about storytelling.” In 1995, aged 29, he answered a job advert in a games magazine and became a designer at Looking Glass Studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He spent two years there, in Edge’s words “developing the story concepts and game designs that would eventually become Thief”. Retro Gamer’s history of Thief calls him the project’s starter: before it became Dark Camelot in the spring of 1996, he had written design documents for games called School of Wizards, Dark Elves Must Die and a “communist zombie game”, Better Red Than Undead. The designer Randy Smith said that Levine “established some of the earliest thematic elements, factions and highest-level plot trajectory”. Levine left before Thief was finished, but Edge was still calling him “the writer of Thief” in 2006. Of working with Doug Church at Looking Glass, he said it “was like going to college and studying with Einstein”.

Irrational Games and System Shock 2

In 1997 Levine, Jonathan Chey and Rob Fermier left Looking Glass and started Irrational Games in Levine’s living room. Their first contract, the single-player part of Multitude’s shooter 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, and the three thought the company was finished. The next week Looking Glass’s Paul Neurath rang to offer them its Thief engine. The three of them and a contract artist built a prototype of a science-fiction role-playing game called Shock in two months; Electronic Arts, which part-owned the System Shock name, signed it, and it became System Shock 2.

Levine was its lead designer and writer. Talking to PC Zone before release, he named an unexpected source: “We were very influenced by an old paper game called Traveller. It was serious sci-fi - not fantasy sci-fi”. He wanted “suspense and terror” rather than “gross-out gore horror”. The rogue computer SHODAN, who returns in it, came from Looking Glass’s System Shock of 1994. System Shock 2 came out in August 1999, made “in about a year”, as he put it, with “no time to polish and balance”. Critics loved it and sales were modest; the System Shock 2 entry tells that story.

The studio nearly ended there. “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 in 2005. He kept it going with the superhero game he had “always wanted to do”, Freedom Force (2002), built in Boston and at a new studio in Canberra that Chey set up in 2000 after going home to Australia. A survival-horror retelling of Dante’s Inferno for the PlayStation 2, The Lost, was never released. By 2005 Irrational had made Tribes: Vengeance and was finishing SWAT 4.

BioShock

Irrational kept coming back to the idea of another Shock game. Edge’s history of BioShock describes a long start: by 2002 the team had only a basic system of three groups, “protectors, harvesters and drones carrying a valuable resource”, which grew into the game’s Big Daddies, Little Sisters and splicers. Pitches set in an abandoned Nazi genetics laboratory or a science-fiction setting were turned down by Codemasters, Atari and EA before 2K Games, part of Take-Two, signed the project in 2004. Take-Two then bought Irrational, whose studios became 2K Boston and 2K Australia, and the money turned a small role-playing game made by a team of 30 into a shooter made by a core team of 90.

The setting came from New York. Walking around the Rockefeller Center, with its art deco towers and statue of Atlas, Levine began to imagine a city in that style, and the story of Rockefeller finishing the project alone after the Depression fed into BioShock’s Andrew Ryan. Levine was not sure it would work. In February 2007 he watched a focus group mock the game from behind a one-way mirror: “It was pretty depressing.” It came out that August. Edge’s review found in Ryan influences “from Orwell to Ayn Rand (note the initials)”, and the game’s late revelation turns on the phrase “would you kindly”, with which another character had been steering the player all along. Levine was frank about his taste in stories: “I’m a pretentious jerk, so I write things that pretentious jerks like myself would come up with. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

BioShock Infinite (2013) moved the series from Rapture to Columbia, a city floating in the sky, and gave the player a companion, Elizabeth. Levine told Edge that the team had begun with a prototype it was unhappy with, and had ruled out another BioShock until someone asked, “What if it wasn’t in Rapture?”

Ghost Story Games and Judas

On 18 February 2014, less than a year after Infinite’s release, Levine announced that he was “winding down Irrational Games as you know it”, keeping “about fifteen members of the Irrational team” for “a smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavor at Take-Two” that would “make narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable”, sold only as downloads. He handed the BioShock series to 2K. In February 2017 the small studio took a new name, Ghost Story Games, with twelve founding staff and Levine as president and creative director.

Its first game, Judas, was announced at The Game Awards on 8 December 2022 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC: a first-person game set on “a disintegrating starship”, in which the player has “to make or break alliances with your worst enemies”. Development had been long. In January 2022 Wireframe, following a Bloomberg report, noted that nothing of the game had been shown since the team formed in 2014. Previewing it in January 2026, Game Informer found the release date still to be announced, and Levine described it as “our first game where you truly inhabit a character in a way you didn’t in … say BioShock”, with characters built to respond to “the smallest details” of what the player does.

Sources

Boston Magazine, Josh Allen, profile of Ken Levine, 26 November 2013 (web, secondary): Vassar and plays, Los Angeles, the job advert and Looking Glass in 1995, his quotation on writing. https://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2013/11/26/ken-levine-profile-video-games-bioshock-infinite/
Shacknews, “PAX 08 Keynote: Ken Levine and His Nerd Tribes”, 29 August 2008 (web, secondary): the screenwriting years and the romantic comedy. https://www.shacknews.com/article/54499/pax-08-keynote-ken-levine
Edge issue 145, January 2005, “Irrational Discourse”: his two years on Thief; Doug Church; the founding in 1997, FireTeam and Neurath’s call; Shock, EA and the name; the prototype and the year’s development; the partners leaving; Chey’s Canberra studio; Freedom Force, The Lost, Tribes: Vengeance and SWAT 4.
Retro Gamer issue 117, August 2013, “The Making of: Thief: The Dark Project”: Levine’s early design documents; Randy Smith’s quotation.
PC Zone issue 78, July 1999: System Shock 2 preview and interview (lead designer; Traveller; suspense and terror).
Computer Gaming World issue 184, November 1999: the System Shock 2 team “led by Ken Levine”.
Computer Gaming World issue 215, June 2002: Freedom Force review.
Edge issue 167, October 2006: BioShock feature (“the writer of Thief”; his “pretentious jerk” quotation).
Edge issue 180, October 2007: BioShock review (Andrew Ryan, Orwell and Ayn Rand).
BioShock (2K Games, 2007): the “would you kindly” revelation.
Wikipedia, “BioShock” and “BioShock Infinite” (web, secondary): release months, August 2007 and March 2013.
Edge issue 241, June 2012, “The Making of BioShock”: the early concept, the rejected pitches, 2K’s signing in 2004, the sale to Take-Two, 2K Boston and 2K Australia, the team’s growth, the Rockefeller Center, the focus group.
Edge issue 253, May 2013: Irrational Games feature and BioShock Infinite interview (the first day of work on Infinite; Levine as creative director and co-founder).
Ken Levine, “A Message From Ken Levine”, Irrational Games, 18 February 2014 (web). 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): the name, twelve founders, Levine’s title. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-i-bioshock-i-developer-irrational-games-rebrands-as-ghost-story
Ghost Story Games, “Press Release: Announcing Judas”, 8 December 2022 (web). https://www.ghoststorygames.com/blog/2022/12/08/press-release-announcing-judas/
Wireframe issue 59, January 2022: news item on the Bloomberg report about Ghost Story Games.
Game Informer, Wesley LeBlanc, “Judas Preview: Just A Holy Fool”, 27 January 2026 (web, secondary): development status and Levine’s quotations. https://gameinformer.com/preview/2026/01/27/just-a-holy-fool