Not Ken Levine too...

 You either die the hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain

Oh what a lovely year 2022 is turning out to be already. Hardly a week in and one of the artists who've I've respected for most of my life has suffered an expose to reveal him to be a much more flawed beast then any could have imagined; and I didn't even know he was still making games! Yes, we're talking Ken Levine, the head behind Irrational Games and thus the name most commonly thought of when considering the development of famed objectivist fever dream 'Bioshock'. His is a pedigree that always seemed to demand respect for it's vision, and the strength of the games his studio made are undeniable, but you know what they say about the creative ones, dontcha? They're always the ones who go crazy the fastest. It's just something in their brain chemistry that makes them super volatile, one messy day and they're all cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs. Maybe it's for the better that I heard the apparently false rumour that Ken had given up game development entirely to go and become a TV writer. (If he had it would have saved us all this embarrassing parade, now wouldn't it?)

Yes, as it turns out Ken was with us all along and actively still working in this industry with a brand new smaller studio from the one he shut down. This team, Ghost Story Studio, have apparently been active roughly since Irrational Games was disbanded, which one would think wouldn't be such of a shock given how that happened back in 2014. You'd have thought we'd have heard of something from a studio that's been kicking around for that long, no? Else the studio is actually just a front for an elaborate money laundering scheme like I starting to think The 'Initiative' is. (I'm still honing in on the finer plotpoints of that theory, catch up with me later.) No, we should have seen a teaser trailer, a studio announcement- heck, maybe even gotten a small title out of them by now! I know the studio in question had only about a bakers dozen worth of employees in the beginning but... seven years! Not even I can procrastinate that long. (And trust me, I've been practicing.)

I remember hearing of a game that Irrational were working on before the end that was something relating to these artists who's minds you would explore in a very physical sense in order to unravel their darkest secrets, certainly a premise that would allow for a whole lot of creative world design and perhaps interweave visual design and narrative in some clever meta-ways. But whether that game was real or just imagined, it would seem that, according to recent exposés, it was Ken Levine himself who chose to pack the whole thing in. (At least that's the way that people are framing it, maybe there were behind the scenes actual financial concerns that spurred his decisioning.) According to what we're hearing now, Levine seemed to have that artistic break from the immediate reality of his situation and turned sour on the idea of working within a company with other people. Not just for the interference of a publisher being closely tied to you, although from what we've heard on the man now I'm sure he complained about that a fair few times. No, apparently Ken just really wanted to downscale his team into a small group where he would have creative control.

Now question that if you will, also question the decision to section off 11 employees as the 'designated survivors' who had to keep that secret for weeks in the knowledge that all their friends are about to be jobless. (Ah, another step on the road of the 'artist'- losing track of basic empathy!) The draw of the new studio would be simply- the stability of a major studio and the freedom of an indie, the only drawback being that you had to work in close proximity to him all day. A proposition I'm starting to understand as being nowhere near as dreamlike as it initially sounds. (Why do all of the clever and ambitious ones have to be dicks?) Some of these survivors have come out to tell their experience to the one man who'll make sure it's posted on every site, Jason Schreier, and in a mood typical of these grand pieces he likes to put out- the reality of life for the developers sounds like a spiral of chaos and bad management that only offers a frail, vain, hope for future reconciliation. Schreier really is duty-drawn to the most doomed parts of our little industry here, isn't he? (Well I suppose that's where the stories are.)

Funnily enough, despite having been granted all the adoration and celebration as an 'auteur', and a one-of-a-kind mind, the problems with Ken's new kingdom under Ghost Story Studio (aside from his development studio seemingly being named after one of the worst/best anime dubs of all time) is envy. His envy. Envy of himself, envy of others- Ken is a perfectionist, as one in such a position has to be, but without supervision he seems to have blossomed into the worst type of perfectionist, the narcissistic destructive kind. Ken is the type of boss who utterly chucks out work he doesn't consider to be totally perfect, who galls at the presence of ideas that the staff haven't already cunningly masked to sound like his own ideas, (the term 'Kenception' sounds like a suitably belittling foil the team thought-up for this process) and just like freakin' Chris Roberts, Ken spends his every summer playing new games and suddenly deciding this thing he just saw needs to be transplanted into his game, thus rebooting development again.

From the sound of everything, it seems like Ken is a beast being pulled by two competing demons. One which is utterly intimidated by his own past work and so shudders to consider delivering anything lacking the social and commercial impact of System Shock, Bioshock or Infinite; whilst the other demon is cock-sure and doom-driven, convinced that he alone carries the secret formula to success and the goings on in his precious little mind are too grand to be put into pathetic words. There's nothing inherently wrong about having a game director take total control of a project, like Kojima would, but it comes with a heavy responsibility on the brain in charge as well as those operating under it. Kojima needs to ensure that every single department head working under him knows exactly what his vision is, and so that when they go to sleep they are dreaming of the same finished product. It's a relationship that requires clear communication above all else, as well as trust given that these employees know what they're doing. Ken seems to have struggled with that and given the development hell this game of theirs has been in since 2014, his prospective new magnum opus has suffered.

And then there's the problem which ties so closely to Cloud Imperium Games that it hurts; Ken is losing his grip on the cutting edge. Drawn to wanting to be the first always, Ken is always changing his mind and plans to ride the trend that the industry hasn't jumped on yet, but his own managerial shortcomings delay the process so much to the point his ideas stop being the new hotness. Just like Roberts dreams of a whole universe being rendered, nicked by No Man's Sky; people have pointed out how Ken's proposition, narrative legos which click together to generate a unique core narrative each time you play, was the key concept behind the recent critical darling from indie studio Worldwalker games- Wildermyth. His perfectionism has crippled the studio and now he's not going to get to do the interview circuit, boasting about his new 'Strand like game' which is going to be unlike anything you've ever played before.

Reports end on that 'faux happy note with the past problems very much still looming over everyone' finale that Schreier specialises in. Some people say that Levine is trying to be better, and others seem to think their long-struggling concept is finally entering a sensible development cycle, (as in, a 2024 release is a hopeful guess) but with Levine's cycle all it will take is a single relapse to throw away months worth of work and pretty much reboot everything from scratch again. We can all hold our hands in bunches and hope that we get to see another Levine game in our short lifetimes, but perhaps he just made the wrong career move and no longer has the resources (or guiding whip) to bring things together like he once did. This guy was one of my chief inspirations back in the day, and it sucks to hear this is the self destructive cycle he's wrapped up in now. (especially since I'd thought he rode off into the sunset to work on other mediums entirely.) Here's waiting for the, now-inevitable, exposé when it's eventually revealed that Kojima eats babies in order to power the creative juices that forms his ideas. (Actually... after playing Death Stranding I think that's a very real possibility.)