Ken Levine, the creator of BioShock, hasn’t released a video game in almost eight years due to ongoing internal struggles at Ghost Story Games, Bloomberg reported Monday.
In 2014, Levine shut down Irrational Games only a year after releasing its immensely successful BioShock Infinte to form Ghost Story Games, a much smaller studio that Levine believed would give him more creative freedom. However, not a single video game has yet to come out of the developer. Several current and former Ghost Story Games employees, including Mike Snight, claim that Levine’s auteur-like style made development an arduous task.
“Ken is a very hard person to work for,” Snight said via Bloomberg. “I think he tried a lot to change, and he really excels better at this company than Irrational because it is a smaller group of people.”
The struggles of Ghost Story Games raise questions about auteurism in the video game industry and the mistreatment it can sometimes mask. pic.twitter.com/6CxolbsAVZ
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) January 3, 2022
According to the report, Levine will allegedly throw out months of work in the blink of an eye if it’s not aligning with his creative vision.
“When it continuously goes in cycles and you don’t align anymore, you kind of get tired of being part of that,” Snight says via Bloomberg. “I wasn’t really happy anymore.”
Since the formation of Ghost Story Games, more than half of its founders and many other employees have quit. The studio is on track to finally release something, but it’s apparently still two years away.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.
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