Ken Levine's work is defined by a wariness of the human animal and its capacity for cruelty. Yet he sees himself as "deep down, a real optimist". Were it not for a stubborn, self-deceptive streak of hope, he would have given up on Irrational Games a decade before making BioShock. "Maybe Irrational and Ghost Story are the one world where it worked," he says of the studios he's co-founded. "But I always had my eye on that world. And to some degree, you have to lie to yourself and kid yourself."
By the time Levine joined the videogame industry, he had already lived the highs and lows of a career screenwriter. "I was getting flown out to Hollywood when I was 19 years old from college, and I was like, 'OK, I've nailed it, I've made it'," he says. "And then it didn't work. I had to go through a period of my 20s where I was recovering from failure and picking myself back up again. But the fact that I had been through that prepared me for the games industry, in that I expected to fail a lot, and maybe fail completely."
