A surprise open letter to the public from Ken Levine (creator of the Bioshock franchise) today has announced that Irrational Games will be “winding down” and will be forming a smaller entrepreneurial endeavor over at Take-Two. In the letter, Levine details his plan to take “all but around 15 members of the Irrational team” to his new, smaller creative group, along with his plan to create games for a “core gaming audience”.
Oddly enough, this announcement raises more questions than answers: what does Ken Levine mean by describing the “core gaming audience”? What is the purpose of this split, beyond creative flexibility? The biggest question of all is was this Ken Levine’s idea? Is it possible that he has had pressure put upon him from above in the company to move on in this way? The last game that he headed as Creative Designer, Bioshock Infinite, was both a critical and commercial success, so a ‘forced early retirement’ from the company seems incredibly unlikely. What is more likely would be something of a vanity project for Levine himself. With a smaller group of designers, he will have less of a workforce in order to create the spectacle-filled games we have previously seen from Irrational, but will also have far more creative control over the projects themselves.
In a silver lining to his letter, we are told that current Irrational Games employees that will not be making the transition will be helped along to their next vocation through Take two itself. They will be organizing meetings with other studios under Take Two’s label in order to add employees to their forces. They will even organize on-site interviews and a ‘recruiting day’ for third party studios to take a look at what the former Irrational Games studio has to offer for their projects.
This is certainly a sad day for many, as the company that brought us Bioshock will be shutting down. One can only hope that this “more entrepreneurial endeavor” will bring us, as Levine himself puts it, “something half as memorable as Bioshock”.
