Ken Levine (game developer)
Ken Levine ( born September 1, 1966 in Flushing, New York) is an American computer game developer. He is creative director and co-founder of development studio Irrational Games. Among his best known works include the award-winning game Schleich: The Dark Project Thief, and also the award-winning action title System Shock 2 and BioShock.
Career
Levine studied drama at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. He then moved to Los Angeles to pursue a film career, where he wrote two screenplays. In 1995 he was hired by the Cambridge, Massachusetts -based development studio Looking Glass Studios as a game designer. At Looking Glass, Levine has worked with designer Doug Church to the background scenario and design of Dark Project (Original Title: Thief ).
1997, following his work on Dark Project, Levine left with his two colleagues, Jonathan Chey and Robert Fermier Looking Glass to jointly establish the development studio Irrational Games. The first release of the studio in 1999 was the role playing shooter genre mix System Shock 2, a direct sequel to Looking Glass ' science fiction title System Shock from 1993. Levine worked as a lead writer and designer on the title, the high critical acclaim obtained. Irrationals next project was Freedom Force, a tactical real-time role-playing game, which was created from Ken Levine and Robb Waters preference for the so-called Silver Age Comics ( 1956-1970 ). After the first Freedom Force developed Irrational Tribes: Vengeance and SWAT 4, where Levine was involved as a writer or executive producer.
Although Tribes: Vengeance, Freedom Force and SWAT 4 vs. The 3rd Reich published between 2004 and 2005 at intervals of one year, Irrational worked in addition to the pre-production of the first-person shooter BioShock. The game is a dystopian underwater world was conceived as a spiritual successor to System Shock 2, for its scenario, Levine was strongly influenced by the objectivism theory of Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand. The game went through several revisions and Irrational was taken 2 Interactive during the development of its publisher Take. When the game was released August 2007, it received high critical acclaim and also became a major commercial success. BioShock and BioShock 2 his successor sold together over eight million copies. After the release of BioShock, Levine has worked as a creative director at BioShock Infinite, a continuation of the BioShock series, which deals with the theme of American Exceptionalism and is located in 1912 in the fictional flying city of Columbia. The title was released in March 2013 and was awarded as the first Series title great critical acclaim.
In February 2014 Levine announced surprisingly the dismissal of almost all Irrational staff up to 15 people known. Levine justified this in the future to want to preferably work in a small team of action-oriented titles that should be distributed digitally. In the wake of former co-workers reported the difficult collaboration with Levine. He was described as extremely perfectionist and detail oriented, which lead his employees through the granting of great creative freedom and strong leadership to best performance, but also could hurt by harsh criticism. Levine's project management of BioShock Infinite was also been insufficient, the development was due to numerous rounds of corrections for a long time slowly. Only with the change of Jordan Thomas of 2K Marin to Irrational and the entry of Rod Fergusson as Vice President of Development, supported Levine in 2012 in the project organization, managed to steer the work in regulated channels.
Ludography
- Dark Project Thief: The (1998)
- Wall Street Tycoon ( 1999)
- System Shock 2 (1999)
- Dark Vengeance (1999)
- Freedom Force (2002)
- Tribes: Vengeance (2004)
- SWAT 4 (2005)
- Freedom Force vs. The 3rd Reich ( 2005)
- SWAT 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate (2006)
- BioShock (2007)
- BioShock Infinite (2013 )
Awards
The editorial team of 1UP Games network chose Levine for Man of the Year in 2007, due to his contributions to the field of narrative in gaming. In 2009 he was counted from the Games IGN 's best 100 game developers of all time. That same year, the industry magazine Gamasutra him was one of the top 20 computer game authors. 2010 Levine was the game magazine Game Informer listed as one of the " Best Storyteller of the decade ".