One of the best-written games ever made, BioShock Infinite was infamously a nightmare to work on. It required a herculean effort to complete "Project Icarus" from everyone at Irrational Games, including creative director and lead writer Ken Levine. A critical and commercial success by every metric, within a year of launch, Irrational Games was gone. 2K Games' decision to shutter the studio shocked the entire industry, including Levine.
In the latest issue of Edge magazine (thanks, PC Gamer), Levine reflected on the difficult period, part of which stemmed from the drastically increased headcount required, going from BioShock to Infinite (BioShock 2 was developed by 2K Marin, the series' Dark Souls 2 if you will). Despite it all, Infinite received nearly universal acclaim from critics and fans when it was released in 2013 and has sold over 11 million copies since. Levine explains where things went awry:
"You're this creative person and, all of a sudden, as your vision increases of what you want to do, you have to become a manager in a way that you don't necessarily have any training or skill in. My mental health was a mess during Infinite. I was stressed out; a lot of personal things were going on in my life at the time, and then my parents both died. I couldn't do it any more, and I didn't think I had the team's confidence."
Needing to get back to something small scale, Levine took a core group of developers to begin the long work on what would ultimately become Judas and Ghost Story Games. Levine explains that he hoped that parent company Take-Two would keep Irrational together, which would make sense, as the first two games would later be remastered for BioShock: The Collection (from Blind Squirrel Games):
"My intention was to go [to Take-Two] and say, 'Look, I just need to start a new thing, and Irrational should continue. That's why I didn't maintain the name Irrational. I thought they were going to continue. But it wasn't my company–I sold it, so I worked for Take-Two, and the studio was theirs.The decision was made at a corporate level that they didn't think they should continue with the studio as a going concern. My feeling was that it probably would have made sense. Take-Two did a BioShock remaster: That would have been a good title for Irrational to get their head around, build a new creative director structure, and then build off that once they had the confidence to do the next BioShock game. I don't think I was in any state to be a good leader for the team."
We still don't have a release date after over a decade of development, but it could simply drop out of the sky. Lest we forget, according to its 2023 financial filings, Take-Two, at least, expects Judas out by March 2025, which is coming up pretty quickly. No pressure, Ken!