Chris Kline

Keep Calm and Carry On: The History of BioShock

This is already part of the legend: the making of Bioshock was difficult to say the least. Let’s begin with a bit of history.

Once upon a time there was a game called System Shock 2. This game was known to be incredibly good, but goodness doesn’t always means success – and the game sales were very low. In other words, SS2 was a failure – but a good one. But ultimately a failure is a failure, so when 2K Games decided to make a successor to SS2, they meet a bit of resistance – or, as Chris put it, “how do you sell a successor to a commercial failure?” To overcome this situation, the team decided to play a strange game: they created a buzz around a successor of SS2 within the gamer community in order to show to the producers around the world that such a successor would be successful.

They succeeded.

In 2005, they signed.

And they had to build a game within 14 months – but they had no idea about what the game should be.

Figure 6: yep. You'd better keep calm.

The first three months were dedicated to building up the schedule and developing the initial concept of the game. The next four months were used to build a game demo. 2K Australia worked on the technology to build a world-class console engine while 2K Boston worked on the game itself.

The initial concepts were quite fuzzy: the game would feature evolved creatures that would live in their own ecology. Unfortunately, two problems arose. First, a non-player centric ecology limits the player involvement in the game. Sure, it’s cool to see creatures fighting other creatures, but since most players buys games to play, it’s a bit frustrating in the end. The other problem was related to the art design: some creatures were supposed to create emotion, but how can some kind of insect do that? The first play tests showed that players would simply destroy them instead of trying to understand them.

At this point, the team decided to stop everything and make one single room that would feel right. Ideally, the room should tell what the game really is. Creatures were worked out too so that they would fit the mood – instead of evolved creatures, they should insist on the notion of lost humanity in order to enable the creation of an emotional connection with the player.

Once this was done, the real game production could start again. By E3 2006, the team had a working prototype that was critically acclaimed. But there was still a big issue: while game sites were quite enthusiastic, the gamers seemed to dismiss the game. The reason was the game complexity: is Biochock a RPG? A FPS? Something else?

“Complex games needs clear marketing”, said Chris. At the Microsoft X06 event, they decided to emphasize on the FPS part of the game, explaining that the other part of the gameplay were there to support the FPS part. Again, the event was a big success – players were now eagerly waiting for the game. More important, it showed to the developers what the game should be.

Finalization of the game proved to be yet another big task. The gameplay was reoriented to focus more on the FPS experience, and the team realized soon that they forgot to take some “details” into account. Nothing really important: do the players understand the game? What was the game script? And other “minor” things like that.

From this adventure, Chris drew an important conclusion: “always remember that you can screw up everything”. To avoid that, you need to listen to everyone, to doubt everything and most importantly, be honest with yourself and your team.