ALPHA| NEWS
Ken Levine says work on Bioshock Infinite has taken a long time to build because the studio always looks to add quality staff, not just hire in bulk
prove yourself every time. I look at everything I write and everything the team does with the eyes of someone who has their hand on their wallet and going ‘Hmm, sixty bucks, huh?’ That’s a tough audience. A bunch of journalists at E3, that’s a tough
audience. They’re not my parents; they’ve no reason to be rooting for us. So you can’t let the fame go to your head because that’s how you become irrelevant. You start believing you can do no wrong.
What would you say to a young game developer looking to carve out a niche? The best advice I can give is be willing to do anything. Come in and say ‘What can I do?’ That’s how I started when I got to Looking Glass. I’d be there and hang out all the time until one in the morning. Just asking ‘is anyone doing something cool, can I get involved in it somehow?’ You have to be incredibly hungry if you’re
going to be successful in this industry. Making any game, the odds are stacked against you. It has to be great, it has to sell really well, it has to make big profit and it has to affect people’s lives. The odds of that happening are always remote.
Are the pressures of commercial success ones you’ve put on yourself, or is it the tension of knowing there is a publisher waiting for your work to pay off? The way I deal with that is that I don’t really think of the specifics. I just try to be the audience all the time. I’ll watch a level, like
the E3 demo for example, and I will sit there as the audience and even when it’s in very rough shape very early on, I have to envision, as the creative director, I have to see things and where they are going and consider, as an audience member, am I going to like that? I have to pretend I have no reason to like it. I really just position myself as a gamer playing the thing, thinking ‘is this going to be good? Do I have any reason why I want to go around the next corner?’ And that’s what I do and really how I deal with it.
You have to be incredibly hungry if
you’re going to be successful. Making any game, the odds are stacked against you.
Ken Levine, Irrational
Tablet devices and smartphones are now prevalent everywhere. What’s your take on making smaller games for these devices? Well, the industry changes. Almost all the successful console developers started off developing small PC games, whether it’s Valve, Bioware or Bethesda. We took over that space, and I think we’ve come to own it. The kind of games that I was making when I started, the mid-range budget PC games,
don’t really exist anymore. Low budget games do along with iPhone and super high end games, so you have to be mindful of that. But on the other hand, some ideas express themselves as big sixty dollar console games and some ideas express themselves as flipping some birds. There may be ideas that we have which express themselves that way, but at the end of the day it’s always about what’s the idea and what’s the best expression of that. The third question you have to ask yourself
is, if I’m taking someone’s money to make this, can I look them in the eye and say I think you’re going make your money back on this because I take that very seriously?
Would you ever make a mobile game? Do you have the time? Not right now –I don’t really have the time to. We’re working on a Vita game and fortunately we don’t have a ‘this has to come out tomorrow’ pressure on that. We’re very open ended on that; it’ll be out when it’s ready to be released. We’ve been kicking that idea around for a long time so it’s had some time in the cooker. That was an idea that expressed itself really well on a mobile platform where I don’t think BioShock Infinite necessarily is that game. But look, you have to be mindful of these things because maybe in a few years there won’t be this kind of platform. Then you’ll find a new way to express yourself just like we did before with going from mid-range PC titles to what we’re doing now.
08 | NOVEMBER 2011
THIS MONTH: A glance inside the Rayman Origins studio NaturalMotion Games’ free-to-play future A look at Hansoft 6.7
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