BioShock creator Ken Levine has discussed some of the blowback to 2007's BioShock, and specifically around the game's Little Sisters and how there were calls to remove them from the game. He also discussed the current climate of online discourse in a wide-ranging interview.
Speaking to Reason, Levine said there was a "contingent" of people pushing him to "get rid of the Little Sisters" out of fear of public backlash. For anyone just catching up, Little Sisters are people in BioShock who carry a valuable resource in their stomach, and people can decide to kill them to harvest the resource, or not. "I wanted to give that economic question to the player," Levine said.
"People did talk to me about it and they were very concerned. And that element almost got pulled from the game because the publisher got nervous. But we had a great defender of ours at the publisher who said, 'No, without that there's no game.' And so they let us do it," he explained.
Asked if he thought BioShock could be made in 2026, Levine said, "I don't think BioShock per se," adding that BioShock Infinite, meanwhile, would "definitely" be a "very different conversation."
BioShock came out in 2007 just as the social media revolution was revving up. Today, things are different, with "politics" becoming a "big discussion in the games industry," Levine said. When the original BioShock came out, that wasn't necessarily the case. "We were one of the first to really bring any kind of real political notion into games. And people really just seemed to generally, universally like it," Levine said.
Levine observed that things have changed today, with the further politicization of many things. "I'm sure you can't really do anything now without somebody getting upset about something," Levine said.
Levine's current project is a game called Judas, and it's been in development at Ghost Story Games for years. It's in the works for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, with Levine as director. Judas has previously been described as a procedurally generated roguelite set in a dynamically shifting open world, but concrete details about the game remain scant, and there is no release date yet.
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Speaking to Reason, Levine said there was a "contingent" of people pushing him to "get rid of the Little Sisters" out of fear of public backlash. For anyone just catching up, Little Sisters are people in BioShock who carry a valuable resource in their stomach, and people can decide to kill them to harvest the resource, or not. "I wanted to give that economic question to the player," Levine said.
"People did talk to me about it and they were very concerned. And that element almost got pulled from the game because the publisher got nervous. But we had a great defender of ours at the publisher who said, 'No, without that there's no game.' And so they let us do it," he explained.
Asked if he thought BioShock could be made in 2026, Levine said, "I don't think BioShock per se," adding that BioShock Infinite, meanwhile, would "definitely" be a "very different conversation."
BioShock came out in 2007 just as the social media revolution was revving up. Today, things are different, with "politics" becoming a "big discussion in the games industry," Levine said. When the original BioShock came out, that wasn't necessarily the case. "We were one of the first to really bring any kind of real political notion into games. And people really just seemed to generally, universally like it," Levine said.
Levine observed that things have changed today, with the further politicization of many things. "I'm sure you can't really do anything now without somebody getting upset about something," Levine said.
Levine's current project is a game called Judas, and it's been in development at Ghost Story Games for years. It's in the works for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, with Levine as director. Judas has previously been described as a procedurally generated roguelite set in a dynamically shifting open world, but concrete details about the game remain scant, and there is no release date yet.
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