A man chooses, begins one of Bioshock’s most famous lines, a slave obeys. Perhaps this sentence crossed the mind of Ken Levine when he posted his announcement on Monday declaring the end of Irrational Games, the studio he co-founded in 1997.

“While I’m deeply proud of what we’ve accomplished together, my passion has turned to making a different kind of game than we’ve done before,” he wrote. “To meet the challenge ahead, I need to refocus my energy on a smaller team with a flatter structure and a more direct relationship with gamers. In many ways, it will be a return to how we started: a small team making games for the core gaming audience.” Following the completion of the final piece of downloadable content for Bioshock Infinite, almost all of the studio’s staff will be out of a job, while Levine and around 15 others are set to move forwards as a distinct outfit.

Over the course of Irrational’s lifespan the studio developed six games, including the exceptional System Shock 2 and the underrated Freedom Force series, and cancelled at least five others. But it came to global prominence with 2007’s Bioshock, one of the last hardware generation’s most defining experiences. Set in a doomed undersea city, Bioshock is about a world where extreme capitalism rules, where the struggles of powerful men enslave those who thought they were signing up to utopia, and things do not turn out well.

As Levine pointed out in his closing statement, the Bioshock series (which includes 2K Marin’s Bioshock 2) has made over half a billion dollars in revenue. A year before its release, the original title looked so good, publisher 2K bought the company, and sure enough Bioshock was a commercial and critical hit. Irrational set to work on Bioshock Infinite, finally releasing the game in March 2013 to similarly glowing reviews and – as of July 2013 – 4m sales and counting. That sounds like a lot, and of course it is, but the reality of AAA development at the highest end means that even this wasn’t enough to help 2K make a net profit in the last financial year.

Cash cows and money pits

The problem with Bioshock is, it isn’t a standard game franchise, easily updated on an annual basis. “Bioshock Infinite was released at the same time as Tomb Raider,” says Chris Dring, editor of industry-watchers MCV. “And Tomb Raider is a franchise that they can easily build a sequel on. They have the engine built now, they can add some new features, a new adventure – it’s a lot more straightforward than Irrational and Bioshock. Ken Levine, obviously a genius in many ways, isn’t particularly good at churning out AAA games – he takes ages, it costs a fortune… I mean, 2K Marin, love them or hate them, turned out Bioshock 2 in 18 months. It didn’t hit the sales target but I suspect it made more money than Infinite.”

Nevertheless, it’s surprising that Irrational wasn’t kept alive in some form. It’s how this usually works. The creative head of a respected developer gets itchy feet and leaves, so the publisher moves someone else in as studio head and things go on. It’s how EA dealt with Peter Molyneux’s departure from Bullfrog in 1997. Id Software has survived the departure of all four of its founders. “If you look at [Call of Duty developer] Infinity Ward for example, half that studio left but it was rebuilt by the publisher and still exists,” Dring says. “Take Two hasn’t done that. Perhaps they just don’t need as many big studios. From what I understand, Bioshock was a profitable project because Take Two are very good at managing their budgets – although it was a lot longer in development than planned so I don’t imagine it made a lot of money.”

Money, money, money.

Irrational Games was working on Bioshock Infinite for over five years – 2K’s next financial results will doubtless provide more context to the closure. Originally slated for release in autumn 2012, the title was delayed at least twice as the ambition of the project pushed the team to its limits. In august 2012, two key members of the development team left the studio amid rumours of widely felt disquiet and unhappiness, rumours that Leigh Alexander has referred to in her thoughtful article on the studio closure. Near the end of development 2K hired industry veteran Rod Fergusson as a producer. A tough type who specialises in getting product out on time, it was clear what his role on Infinite would be. Get the thing out.

Levine on the line
As it is, Ken Levine has come forward to take the slings and arrows of outraged gamers. But his statement acts as something of a distraction from the fact that 2K is firing up to 200 people (based on figures from 2012) who made one of last year’s most successful games. No matter how you cut it, it is a damning indictment of a blockbuster culture where budgets are spiralling into the hundreds of millions. The games industry has already gathered round to try and help those affected find new jobs, and Levine stressed that staff would be assisted in the process of relocation, but it’s impossible to miss the connection between the studio’s increasing scale and this unexpected end.

The statement has made Levine, somewhat unjustly, a focal point for the anger many in the industry feel about such an outwardly-successful studio being closed. It has also led to the offensive suggestion (in the absence of evidence) that the studio was closed to satisfy the man’s ego and keep him at 2K. This perhaps comes from the fact that Levine is one of the industry’s few exponents of the auteur theory, in perception at least. He’s not only one of the three co-founders of Irrational, but also the studio head and creator/director behind the Bioshock games. He is the face of Irrational, the face of Bioshock.

He won’t be making any more of them. His statement says he’s moving to “a new endeavour with a new goal: to make narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable.” He is down to deliver a talk at the Game Developer’s Conference in March entitled ‘Narrative Legos’ and, though specifics are thin on the ground, it is clear he’s moving on to concentrate on procedural or reactive narrative experiences – games in which the story emerges organically as the player takes part. He is also penning the script for the upcoming remake of Logan’s Run, retracing his time in LA as a wannabe screenwriter.

The emerging story
Last March I went to Boston to visit Irrational Games and, among other things, got talking to Levine about the tensions inherent in games with a linear narrative like Bioshock Infinite. Through dumb luck I ended up suggesting that the future ‘solution’ to these issues may lie in procedural narrative and stories that are systems rather than scripts – something no designer has successfully cracked.

“Yeah you know it’s weird,” Levine said, “Because actually I wrote the first draft of the design document for System Shock 2 and I haven’t done that since – I’ve been more focused on the writing and business side. But I like systems, that was a very systemic game, and quite often I’m heavily involved with a lot of the more systemic stuff in Bioshock like Elizabeth’s behaviour in combat and that came out of a desire to... it’s a systemic expression of a narrative concept.

“I love systems, I love board games and that’s all they are is systems. I think the challenge is that I probably have something more to say in the narrative space than I do in the system space, but who knows how that could combine? I mean maybe, we did this game called Freedom Force about superheroes, and one thing that I thought we did better than other superhero games was the narrative component. Superhero stories are soap operas, right? They take the characters and emotions and amplify them through the fantastical stuff, and without that character stuff – like without Uncle Ben dying in Amazing Fantasy #15 – Spider-Man isn’t interesting! Videogames often leave that on the table and make their games way more goofy than comic books actually are.”

And from here, very possibly, a hint of what is to come. “So maybe there’s a systemic superhero game with a narrative that is systemically, somehow procedurally generated – I mean, that would be cool right? Something that involves relationships and drama in some systemic way that can click together. It’s harder to do in a first-person shooter, though there’s a lot of systems in Elizabeth. I like the merge of systems and narrative a lot – and there’s nowhere to go but up, you know? That’s a space that has been barely touched.”

If Levine is sticking with a small team, and if he wants to keep making narrative-focused games, then procedurally generated stories and environments make sense. He won’t need a large team to generate masses of art assets and scripted sequences – he just needs very smart coders and designers who can generate systems. Look at Hello Games in Guildford – a tiny studio that’s creating a whole systemic universe in its forthcoming title No Man’s Sky. Perhaps Levine saw in that game’s triumphant VGX Awards trailer, a hint at where his style of game was heading.

Last exit from Boston

Back in the business world, elements of the industry see Levine being used as a smokescreen to hide the human tragedy of 2K’s decision, and perhaps there is some truth to that. But the man himself, when asked about this perception of his being an auteur, had no hesitation in putting credit where it was due. “I have the easy job. There are ideas I come up with, but I say this is what I want now go make it happen – how do you draw a close relationship, like the Big Daddy and Little Sisters, or something like the skylines from that? I have the easy job.”

You can’t hold it against Levine that he still has one. But the fate of Irrational is a cautionary tale and, subsequent to the news of closure, the studio has been locked down tight, with employees left under no illusions about the consequences of speaking to press.

At the moment this is too raw, but in the future perhaps Irrational’s former employees will look back with pride on the magnificent games they made together, and particularly the worlds of the Bioshock games. One aspect of these fantasies is how they skewer the idea of collectivism, presenting rank-and-file workers as little more than indentured slaves kept in line through the propaganda of tyrannical overlords. Not now, but maybe in a few years that will be worth an ironic laugh.

Whatever angles of this story remain uncovered, Irrational Games was one of the great developers. It is a studio that has left a permanent mark and, as 2K may find out to its cost, the quality of their games was never down to one man’s choices. The original Bioshock has three endings. “They offered you everything,” says the game’s brilliant geneticist, Brigid Tenenbaum. “Yes? And in return you gave them what I have come to expect from you: Brutality.”