"You have a bunch of great ideas, and then you toss them overboard" Ken Levine about gamedesign, System Shock and the errors of Looking GlassGameStar: Ken, which was your first computer gameKen Levine: An ancient Star Trek game on the mainframe at my sisters college. There was no screen, only a printer. I printed out the whole game history, took it with me and read it again and again for years.GameStar: How did you get into the gaming industry?Ken Levine: Being 30 years old and still hanging around lazy, I had to do something with my life. So I applied to Looking Glass- and was hired as a designer. After a few years, me and two other persons went on to found Irrational Games. We wanted to have more freedom and a bigger challenge.GameStar: Looking Glass was shut down in 2000. What went wrong?Ken Levine: My former company was very ambitious, and normaly that kind is either rich or almost broke. The guys wanted to do their thing - that made them awesome and their business so troublesome. At the end there were massive finanial problems, especially after Terra Nova flopped; the company never recovered from this.GameStar: Did you gain knowledge for your own company Irrational Games from this?Ken Levine: Sure, Irrational Games is only half as big as Looking Glass and we don't intend to grow much further. We are very cautious in negotiation with business partners and don't go into technological risks.GameStar: Despite lavishly reviews System Shock 2 only sold moderately. How come?Ken Levine: Who knows? Maybe it was to complicated. Maybe one of System Shock 2 problems was, that the player is served the game depth right at the beginning. Even in complex games like Civilisation you start with one or two units. The more difficult elements are introduced step by step, in order not to confuse or to overtax. We didn't get that quite right in System Shock 2.GameStar: Why did you includ ethis stupid organic levels?Ken Levine: That's right. They are stupid. But I can't take all the resposibility for System Shock 2 on myself. Originally this mission was supposed to take place on the outer hull of the ship. But then there were intensive discussions with our main programmer, who considered to have this better idea. His version made it into the final game. But alright, I'm to blame partially.GameStar: Which phase of design did you like best?Ken Levine: The beginning- less mistakes were made. It is guaranteed that huge problems result from your design ideas, that you never even considered. We wanted to include much more commands into Freedom Force, but we quickly noticed that this would overtax the players. In the beginning, you have a great bunch of great ideas, which you will throw overboard on after the other.GameStar: Is there anything in the game industry that you would like to change?Ken Levine: I wished that more titles get a chance. For original ideas, it is often hard to make a breakthrough on the market. A lot of designers get their only orientation from popular programms that are in at the time.GameStar: Will Shodan be back?Ken Levine: What's System Shock without Shodan? That would be like Star Wars without Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker.Shock reduced:First think up, then slim down: Ken's painful Design experience can be demonstrated with System Shock in a dazzling manner. The successor to the cult classic was called just Shock for several months, because Irrational Games had started to work without the official license. later on, Electronic arts got in as a publisher and contributed the name rights. That's why the vicious supercomputer Shodan is missing in the first design draft, instead the hero (later anonymous) had the friendly name Esper. According to Alpha-Plan the cruiser "von Braun" was supposed to have lush 16 decks - only half of these made it into the final game. Also, exciting Psi abilities, like seeing into the future and forcing will ointo the enemys, were dropped by the team. Ken took this cutbacks to his ideas with ease: "We realized the project with so little time and money that I'm surprised that anything made it into the game!" The chunky spacesuit, one of the first concept drawings, isn't one of them.
i was on the team during the last nine months of the development cycle, working primarily on the 'hydroponics' and 'shodan' levels. i also had a hand in the development of the earth and station levels seen during character generation. i constructed most of the architecture, textured and lit them. nate wells and dorian hart later picked them up and polished them before ship, adding the virtual training areas that teach the player how to interact with game objects. i thought the earth areas looked pretty cool and would liked to have seen more of them in the game.
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