December 1st, 2007

2K Games scraps new team for Bioshock 2

Surfer Girl is known to pick up accurate gossips that soon enough turn into news and todays treat picks up the lead of a Gamasutra job’s listing. Part of the team that developed Bioshock for 2k Games is setting up a new studio in the San Francisco bay area. The listing profiled the search for a lead animator with and since has been removed, but 1UP was fast to catch a cached version of the posting which can be found. That’s what I mean by Surfer Girl sending ripples through the online gaming press. Everyone seems to pitch in on the subject. The page reveals the name of the new studio: 2K Marin.

Some of the people who created the award-winning “Bioshock” are starting up a new studio in the Bay Area called 2K Marin. We are looking for a character concept artist who can name all of the “Masters of the Universe” characters who had mustaches. That qualification, however, is less important than your DaVinci-like knowledge of anatomy coupled with drawing skills that easily put the entire Hanna-Barbara pantheon into question” in Surfer Girl’s own words.

In a rather ironic twist of events, the good people at 2K Boston don’t look forward to working with Ken Levine. Considering the game’s back story, the father of all things Bioshock seems to follow up on the evil odyssey of Andrew Ryan, his game’s arch villain. Levine used to be the head Irrational Games, the studio which originally developed the title. When faced with financial difficulties which threatened to impair the game’s smooth release, he was forced to make a so called pact with the devil and sell his company to 2K Games. It was so that the co-founder was faced with a choice, either releasing an incomplete Bioshock or losing his first brainchild. Levine played the PR machine aware of the implications of failure and maybe sometime along the way he started to ask too much of his development team.

Ken stated on several occasions that he isn't interested in doing BioShock 2 due to the ending of the story arc in Rapture, but the decision is not his alone. 2K Games feels like running the Bioshock franchise even further and will most likely get the new 2K Marin built up specifically for the job of developing a prequel of a sequel. As far as Ken Levine is concerned, he’s going to move on and develop a new X-Com game.