<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"On Friday (October 25), BioShock creator Ken Levine was presented with the &amp;#039;Lifetime Achievement Award&amp;#039; at the Golden Joysticks. Digital Spy caught up with the man recently to find out how the industry has changed since he started, his thoughts on System Shock 2, and information on BioShock Infinite&amp;#039;s upcoming story-driven DLC.  Congratulations on winning the &amp;#039;Lifetime Achievement Award&amp;#039; at the Golden Joysticks. What does it mean to collect this? &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s interesting because it&amp;#039;s an industry which didn&amp;#039;t exist when I was born, so to give a &amp;#039;Lifetime Achievement Award&amp;#039; is different than in the movies space where it&amp;#039;s so established. &amp;quot;I think if you get a &amp;#039;Lifetime Achievement Award&amp;#039; in movies, you&amp;#039;re sitting on this mountain top, looking around at this body of work. But with games, it&amp;#039;s more like a marker on the mountain. I still don&amp;#039;t know what the future is. I still don&amp;#039;t know what&amp;#039;s going to happen. I don&amp;#039;t really know what a game is, exactly. We&amp;#039;re still figuring that out. And I love that. &amp;quot;I love the fact that it&amp;#039;s not like we&amp;#039;re casting ourselves in bronze and saying, &amp;#039;Okay, we&amp;#039;ve accomplished all this&amp;#039;. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re still every day figuring out what a video game is. I view it as a nice resting spot for a moment, but it&amp;#039;s really about what&amp;#039;s next - not just for me, for everybody. It&amp;#039;s changing so fast, and to me, that&amp;#039;s a plus.  &amp;quot;The barrier of entry is so much lower now than it was when I started. You don&amp;#039;t need to have somebody who can put stuff in a truck and put it in a box and put it in a store. You don&amp;#039;t need to make a game that&amp;#039;s 20 hours long. &amp;quot;People are making five-minute experiences that are completely valid that people can buy. The price point range is hugely different. I love the evolution of where the industry is going. Right now, where it&amp;#039;s going is a big question mark, but to me that&amp;#039;s a plus not a minus.&amp;quot; The industry has changed a lot since you started. &amp;quot;We used to exclusively be a PC game developer. We were making like, four-million-dollar PC titles, mid-range like SWAT 4 and stuff like that. &amp;quot;That market, because the economics of it disappeared - the cost of getting a product on the shelf, the cost of marketing a product, the cost of making a game that&amp;#039;s only going to sell [so many] hundred thousand units - didn&amp;#039;t make sense anymore. &amp;quot;So we decided we need to go and make something bigger, which is BioShock and BioShock Infinite.  &amp;quot;But now it&amp;#039;s come around again where you could go and make something very, very small, and sell it for 10 dollars, 20 dollars, 50 cents, whatever you want to sell it for. &amp;quot;A game like System Shock 2 now could have been very successful because you only need to sell a few hundred thousand units to reach an audience, because you&amp;#039;re selling it over the internet and you don&amp;#039;t have to get it in a box. &amp;quot;Walmart is never going to take a game that&amp;#039;s only going to sell 200,000 or 300,000 units, but GOG will and Steam will, because they don&amp;#039;t have to deal with the same inventory problems.&amp;quot; You see successful games being developed by people in their bedrooms nowadays. &amp;quot;That was possible at the very beginning of the industry, but on a very, very small scale. I started playing games in the late-&amp;#039;70s, &amp;#039;80s. Once it became big business, it became impossible. But I love the fact that it&amp;#039;s possible now.&amp;quot;  What&amp;#039;s the thing you&amp;#039;re most proud of in your career? &amp;quot;It probably changes depending on how I feel, but I think being a part of popularising narrative/immersive sim games. &amp;quot;System Shock 1 is probably the game that was most influential on me, and Ultima Underworld as well. We made that type of game with System Shock 2. It wasn&amp;#039;t financially successful, but we were able to figure out how to make it work in a way that it would sell enough units that it could self-perpetuate with BioShock. &amp;quot;Now you can probably go and build something that&amp;#039;s like System Shock 2 and be successful, because you can go direct to the audience. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re popularising a type of game that I love personally, and I then get the benefit of playing Dishonored and the new Deus Ex which I thought were both great games. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not sure if the publisher would have made that bet before BioShock because of the financial side. A guy like [Arkane Studios game designer] Harvey Smith is incredibly talented, but it&amp;#039;s the spending the money, and hopefully that will have had some part in perpetuating those games.&amp;quot;  Is there a game you&amp;#039;ve worked on that you could say is your favourite, whether because of the development process or the way it turned out? &amp;quot;System Shock 2 is always very important to me, because it was the first one I worked on and I had no idea what I was doing. I had never shipped a game before. &amp;quot;Shipping out was really amazing, but also depressing because when you ship a game back then, it was like you&amp;#039;re releasing crickets. You get a few reviews, but there was no internet, no Twitter. You didn&amp;#039;t have that kind of contact with the audience. &amp;quot;People are now making videos of themselves playing games, and watching people play the end of BioShock Infinite and going through that mental process of trying to understand the ending is great. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s something we didn&amp;#039;t have a few years ago, so I find that very exciting because you get a connection to the audience that you just didn&amp;#039;t have before.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;The Infinite DLC has been really enjoyable as well for me, because we&amp;#039;re not creating everything from scratch any more. So, we can really work as craftsmen with the engine. &amp;quot;We have Elizabeth and I know the character. I know Booker. I know these worlds, and it&amp;#039;s about craftsmanship rather than about, &amp;#039;Oh my god, how the hell are skylines going to work?&amp;#039;. With the &amp;#039;Buried at Sea&amp;#039; DLC, why was it important to return to Rapture at this point? &amp;quot;It wasn&amp;#039;t important. Simply, there&amp;#039;s a story we wanted to tell with Booker and Elizabeth. If you got to the end of Infinite, you saw the connective tissue in the universe. &amp;quot;I really had no inclination when we started Infinite to tell another story in Rapture. &amp;quot;It was only when I got to where Booker and Elizabeth got to where I realised if I was to continue their story, that world was the place to do it. That was the place that would make sense - but only because of the events of Infinite.  &amp;quot;The DLC is for Infinite, not BioShock 1. BioShock 1 is really about a story of the city. And this DLC is a story about Booker and Elizabeth set in Rapture. It&amp;#039;s very different in a lot of ways. &amp;quot;We tried to bring the systems back much closer to the feeling of BioShock 1, because that&amp;#039;s that world. That world wouldn&amp;#039;t make sense with giant outdoor battles or airships coming in - that&amp;#039;s not what it&amp;#039;s about. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s this weird hybrid of what you experienced in BioShock 1, alone in this dead city and by yourself and people talking in the radio to you. &amp;quot;But you start off in this pristine version of Rapture in a city with life and people. There&amp;#039;s debate going on, there&amp;#039;s art being made, and there are people living and you see what it felt like right before it fell. &amp;quot;But at the day, it&amp;#039;s in the service of the story of Booker and Elizabeth.&amp;quot;  There are new consoles releasing very soon. How are you and Irrational Games preparing for these systems? &amp;quot;Poorly, in the sense that we&amp;#039;re really focusing our energy on finishing the DLC. I have in the back of my head - I&amp;#039;ve been talking about some stuff, I&amp;#039;ve been thinking about some stuff - about what narrative is and where it can go, because one thing narrative doesn&amp;#039;t do right now is be replayable. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s sort of, you play it and have that experience, and I&amp;#039;ve been thinking about how you make narrative replayable. And that&amp;#039;s not a simple problem. It&amp;#039;s fairly complex. The combination of content and technology - I&amp;#039;ve been thinking about that. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been working on a GDC talk for it, but I am really in the early, early, super-early of thinking about what&amp;#039;s next. &amp;quot;Right now, my almost entire main work is finishing the second &amp;#039;Burial at Sea&amp;#039; DLC and really tying up that BioShock Infinite the way we want to.&amp;quot; BioShock Infinite&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;Burial at Sea&amp;#039; DLC will debut on November 12. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/interviews/a526600/ken-levine-on-his-career-were-still-figuring-out-what-games-are/>