For almost a decade, one of the gaming's most well-known developers, Ken Levine, had basically vanished from the face of the industry. After BioShock Infinite's release in 2013, Levine kept his head down, taking a break from video game development for personal and health reasons. But thanks to a recent announcement, it seems as though Ken Levine is well and truly back, heading up a brand new narrative-focused FPS called Judas.
Announced at the Game Awards, Judas looks to take a great deal of inspiration from Levine's past work, in particular the BioShock franchise. There are creepy automatons, elemental hand powers, and plenty of spooky moments plastered throughout the reveal trailer, all of which are commonplace in Ken Levine's games. Though he's been out of the game for quite some time, Levine's wealth of experience in the industry should keep fans hopeful about this new Sci-Fi shooter.
Ken Levine's Long History In the Gaming Industry
After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Drama back in 1988, Ken Levine moved to LA to fulfill his dream of becoming a screenwriter. Seeing the games industry as a way to build up his writing credits, Levine ended up applying and getting a job at Looking Glass Studios. Here, Levine worked on his very first video game, that being Thief: The Dark Project. Officially given the role of designer, Levine helped to create the initial story and design concepts of the game, a large part of what made the original Thief game so iconic.
After Thief's release in 1998, Levine was hungry for bigger and better things and decided to leave Looking Glass Studios to found his own development company. Called Irrational Games, this brand new developer began immediate work on the sequel to a Looking Glass Sci-Fi RPG game. That game became System Shock 2. As the lead writer and designer, Ken Levine is directly responsible for a lot of System Shock 2's groundbreaking features, some of which would go on to inspire the BioShock series.
In the early 2000s, Levine, along with the rest of Irrational Games, produced a few pretty different titles. 2002 saw the release of Freedom Force, a tactical RPG heavily inspired by the Silver Age of comics. In 2004, Levine was a writer on Tribes: Vengeance, another Sci-Fi first-person shooter. Freedom Force would then get a sequel in 2005 titled Freedom Force Vs. The 3rd Reich, along with another release, SWAT 4, which took Irrational Games in a more serious, grounded direction than their previous titles.
While Irrational Games had begun to build a name for itself by the mid-2000s, it would take just a few more years before the developer and Ken Levine, would be famous names in the gaming industry. Acting as one of the game's creative directors and writers, Ken Levine played a huge role in the development of the original BioShock, a role which would only grow for the series' third entry. Though Levine passed on the opportunity to work on BioShock 2, stating that he'd already written everything he wanted to for Rapture, he came back in full force for BioShock Infinite.
Assuming the role of lead writer and creative director, BioShock Infinite was Levine's baby, and following an extremely stressful few years, BioShock Infinite released to critical and commercial success. The first and third BioShock games are actually some of the most critically acclaimed games in the industry, still. However, the stress Levine was put under during development had left him burned out, and in early 2014, Levine announced that Irrational Games would be shutting down.
In 2017, Levine, alongside 11 of his former Irrational Games colleagues, founded Ghost Story Games, where he planned on creating another story-focused single-player game. In development for at least four years, many people thought that Levine's game was a mere pipe dream, especially when reports earlier this year claimed that the title was stuck in development hell. While it's unclear whether those reports were true, that didn't stop Levine and Ghost Story Games from announcing its next title, Judas, at the Game Awards.
Judas is in development for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X.