When a recruiter from Irrational reached out to Dowling and asked if he might be interested in helping make a new BioShock, he didn’t have to give it much thought. economic recession had hit the publisher hard, and it was cutting costs across all of its studios, including Kaos. First he worked on a shooter called Frontlines: Fuel of War, which came out in 2008, and then he went on to Homefront, a game set in a near-future dystopian universe in which North Korea invades the United States.īy 2010, THQ was in trouble. “So they were very open to hiring an idiot like myself.” Dowling couldn’t afford a New York City apartment, so he spent a few months living with his in-laws in central New Jersey and making the brutal two-hour commute into Manhattan every day. “It was a young studio that was made up of former mod-makers who found themselves suddenly having an AAA budget to build a game,” Dowling said.
Bioshock number of levels mods#
Kaos seemed like a good fit for Dowling, who had been making his own mods for games like Half-Life while working at an Apple Store and trying to crack into the video game industry. Executives at competing publisher THQ saw an opportunity, hiring members of the Trauma team to form a new game development company, which they called Kaos Studios. The actual developers of Battlefield, at a company called DICE, took notice, and the following year they purchased Trauma, although they went on to shut it down less than a year later.
Bioshock number of levels series#
In 2003, a group of modders for Battlefield, a popular series of first-person shooter games, banded together to start their own company in New York City, Trauma Studios. Some of these modders did it for fun, but others saw it as a potential career path.
Bioshock number of levels how to#
In the 1990s and early 2000s, one of the best ways to learn how to develop video games was to make mods - fan-made alterations that changed the way a game looked or felt to play.
Press Reset book cover Grand Central Publishing By his senior year of college, Dowling had switched course, falling in love with video games like Deus Ex and wondering what it might look like if he made them for a living.
After high school he went to a fine arts college - the type of place where “they’re not going to even talk about the fact that maybe you want to make money and eat food some day” - and experimented with crafts like iron-casting and sculpting before growing disillusioned with the art world. He’d grown up in western New York, knowing he wanted to be an artist but not sure where to start. “There was no chance at that point that the entire time, setting, place, conflict would change.”ĭowling was big and bearded, with a muppety voice and a pragmatic attitude. “I’d joined at a time when suddenly the team was inoculated against complete swings,” Dowling said. And as a new Irrational employee, he was happy to see that they’d actually committed to the game’s core ideas. As a BioShock fan, Dowling was stoked to see what they were doing - it had been three years of silence since the first game came out. Dowling had just started at Irrational, signing up as a level designer a month before BioShock Infinite’s big reveal. None of the major details could be overturned anymore.įor Forrest Dowling, the timing couldn’t have been better. It was that they now had to stick with the details they’d announced. What was nice about this announcement wasn’t just that the developers could finally be open about what they were doing. Guarding her tower prison was a flying robotic hulk called the Songbird, who would make for a good mascot (and merchandising opportunity) in lieu of those Big Daddies. It would star the former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt, sent to rescue a raven-haired girl named Elizabeth. BioShock Infinite was set in Columbia, a city in the sky devoted to the celebration of American exceptionalism, during July 1912.
After the trailer, director Ken Levine gave the press a basic outline of the game. The video opened with a delightful fakeout, zooming in on the silhouette of a familiar-looking underwater city before pulling back to reveal that the camera was actually inside of a fish tank. On August 12, 2010, at a press event in the swanky Plaza Hotel near Central Park in New York City, journalists gathered to watch the trailer for the next BioShock game. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing.
In the book, he dives into how a number of high profile game studios fell apart - and below, we have an excerpt covering some of the challenges BioShock Infinite studio Irrational Games went through when making the game. note: Out May 11, Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry is author Jason Schreier’s second book investigating the inner workings of the video game industry.