The venerable Edge magazine, one of PC Gamer's sister brands, is currently celebrating the landmark of 400 issues, and such anniversaries are always a good excuse to look back on some of the great moments in gaming history. Edge's new issue features an interview with Ken Levine, now working at Ghost Story Games on Judas, about his time leading Irrational Games and, in particular, the development of Bioshock. To hear Levine tell it, the fact we got the game at all is surprising.
Levine remembers that one of the factors in Irrational's makeup was that the developers it was hiring tended to have sought the studio out "because they liked" System Shock 2, and that lineage of Looking Glass immersive sims generally. The director had been a key figure in many of those games but was also now in the position of holding the purse strings and having to play spoiler: "'We can't make those games because they don't sell,'" Levine recalls telling the team, before "finally, they wore me down."
