Before BioShock visionary Ken Levine could guide his new studio Ghost Story Games toward releasing the narrative FPS Judas, Levine's first new release in about a decade, he had to go to war with himself.
Levine remembers struggling with heavy self-doubt while developing BioShock Infinite around 2010, describing the battle in a new interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays and calling that period of his life his "hardest time" with high expectations for himself.
"BioShock was our first success," Levine says. "And sometimes you're like, 'OK, is that the only thing I know how to do successfully?'" He lists 1999's System Shock 2 (on which he was a lead designer), 2005's SWAT 4 (which he produced), and the Freedom Force games he contributed to as some of his critical successes, though "they just didn't sell any units."
BioShock's wild success in 2007 made for a very different story, but Levine says "it didn't really feel radically different making it" from any of those other great games. "So you're like, 'Well, what was the difference? I don't know.'"
"Originally, the company wanted us to do another game set in [underwater city] Rapture, and they wanted us to do it pretty quickly," Levine says about BioShock Infinite, "and I didn't want to do that because I didn't really have another idea for Rapture." He abandoned the setting, but a question remained: "What exactly is a Bioshock game?"
"It was really depressing," Levine says about feeling like he was trying to outdo his own work, "because you start wondering, like, should I just do things the way I did it before?
"And you always do some of that because, like, it's very hard to throw away. You know, you look at a filmmaker like Martin Scorsese or Wes Anderson – you can tell it's a Martin Scorsese film or Wes Anderson film, generally, right? And, you know, with a Kojima game, probably similar. And then there are creators who are totally different every time."
"I think that the tricky part is, games are so hard to make," Levine concludes. "There are parts of Judas that are more similar to Bioshock. And there are parts of Judas that are really, really radically different."
