Veteran game developer Ken Levine stepped away from the BioShock series after 2013’s BioShock Infinite, and while the series is going ahead with BioShock 4, it’s doing so without him. Why did Levine step away to work on a different game, Judas, instead of sticking with the series he created?
Speaking to IGN, Levine said BioShock remains “very important” to him and that he feels “incredibly fortunate” to have worked on a franchise that means so much to so many people. However, he opted to step away in part because he “didn’t have a lot else to say in that world.” He also reflected on how working on established franchises can be something of a trap.
“A franchise is an interesting thing because it can come to own you if you’re not careful. It can define you. It was scary and risky and crazy to walk away from a very successful franchise. I didn’t [walk away] because I didn’t love the franchise,” he said. “I wanted to step away and challenge myself in a different way, and challenge a team in a different way. Things can own you if you hold them too tightly rather than the other way around. I will always love [BioShock] and I can’t wait to see what they do with it.”
Levine also talked about how, even when he was making BioShock Infinite, he was questioning what a BioShock game even is. He said the franchise has core tenets like being a first-person shooter that takes place in some kind of alternate history. He said the Call of Duty series may be able to jump to a new location with new enemies with each installment, but BioShock–at least as Levine envisioned it–didn’t want to go this route. Nor did Levine want to make a BioShock game set in the future, though he said maybe another team could come up with an idea for a future-set BioShock game.
What’s more, Levine touched on how the he felt “bound by the reasonable expectations fans would have in a BioShock game.” He cannot define what a BioShock game is.
“I did worry that [working on more BioShock] would be the rest of my life, and it felt like … I may look back on it and say, ‘That was the dumbest thing I ever did.’ But I am fortunate that I have had enough success that I don’t … money is not the most important thing,” he said. “Challenging myself and working with brilliant people on hard problems is really what gets me going in the morning. I wanted a new hard problem, and I got one.”
That hard problem is Levine’s new game Judas, which has been in development for a very long time at the 2K-owned Ghost Story Games. Levine said Judas contains “a lot” of BioShock’s DNA, and that’s immediately obvious when looking at videos and imagery for Judas.
The new BioShock game in the works at Cloud Chamber hasn’t been unveiled or detailed yet, and Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of 2K owner Take-Two, recently shed some light on why it’s taking so long. He said the developers lost “years” of time pursuing creative “dead ends.”
While the new BioShock game might not be coming soon, a BioShock movie for Netflix is reportedly due to begin production in 2027.