You all remember Ken Levine, right? He was a crucial cog in the development machines responsible for crafting the likes of SWAT 4, System Shock 2, two Thief games, both Freedom Force games and a barely-known project called BioShock. Since BioShock actually qualifies as a 2008 release, Levine's name should still be rattling around in the collective Gaming Hivemind.
Well Forbes has a great interview up with Levine, who now serves as creative director in Take-Two Interactive's 2K Boston office. There are plenty of highlights - you should follow the source link and read the whole darn thing - but I want to focus specifically on Levine's idea of "what the industry's biggest mistake" has been:
"I'm a real believer in industrial Darwinism. It's hard for an industry to make a mistake because the market tends to be self-correcting...but I wish the industry could find a way to make PC gaming more broadly successful. There are so many challenges for PC gaming--the complications from systems specifications to the drivers--most people look at PC games and say, "What are you talking about?" It's a shame because as a gamer, I am never more comfortable than I am sitting with a mouse and keyboard two inches away from my monitor."
Ken Levine, PC gamer. No big surprise there. System Shock 2 contained the blueprints for what eventually became the multi-award winning BioShock. Thief was one of the first titles to factor multiple sensory elements into its stealth-based gameplay. And SWAT 4, that too-often-forgotten gem, did things with squad-based first-person shooters that still have yet to be replicated properly; the team management features in that game are flat-out superb, and remain unrivaled even now by the tightest of the Clancy shooters.
As much as I loved BioShock on my Xbox 360 and look forward to the prospect of many more great console offerings to come from Levine and 2K Boston, seeing a comment like this from him kinda makes me wish that he'd stuck with the PC platform. Especially given what he and his people gave the world before BioShock became a sensation. Then again, many argue that this business of games needs more high-profile figures: Captains of Industry, auteurs, art-house indie sensations... Public Faces.
What do you all think? Is Levine serving his community best by raising his public profile at the cost of having to focus on more technologically limiting console platforms? Or do you think we'd all be better off now if Irrational Games were still quietly pumping out forward-thinking, primarily PC-only masterpieces?
Source: Forbes.com - 'Games Are The Convergence Of Everything'
