Ken Levine made a rather bold statement to EDGE magazine, looking back on his considerable body of work.

He has gone from Looking Glass Studios to Irrational Games to Ghost Story Games, which is about to release Judas. It will be Levine’s first game since BioShock Infinite. That was released in March 2013, so it’s been almost a dozen years… but Irrational didn’t last that long, because, on February 8, 2014, Levine announced that the studio would be shutting down and almost the entire staff would be laid off. Levine expressed that even he was surprised: “Closing Irrational was complicated. I felt out of my depth in the role. You’re this creative person, and all of a sudden, as your vision of what you want to do grows, you have to become a manager in a way that you don’t necessarily have the training or the skills to do. My mental health was a mess during Infinite. I was stressed out, I had a lot of personal things going on in my life at the time, and then my parents both died. I just couldn’t do it anymore, and I didn’t think I had the trust of the team.

So 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 keep the name Irrational. I thought they would continue. But it wasn’t my company, I sold the company, so I was working for Take-Two and the studio was theirs. The decision was made at the corporate level that they didn’t think they should continue with the studio as a going concern. My feeling was that probably would have made sense. Take-Two was doing a BioShock remaster: That would have been a good title for Irrational to get their head around, set up a new creative director structure, and then build on that once they had the confidence to do the next BioShock game. I don’t think I was in a position to be a good leader for the team,” Levine said.

He then went on to talk about how devastated he was by the studio’s closure: “I had a lot of respect for the people on the team. When we found out that the company wasn’t going to continue, we tried to make the transition as painless as possible. We had multiple job fairs for the team, we allowed them to stay in the studio, we gave them generous transition packages, and we fed them. That’s not to say it didn’t suck. But I don’t think I could have been their leader anymore, and I knew the next thing I was going to do was a very long period of R&D. The problem is, and you see this problem with big studios, what do you do with 300 people when you’re going to have a multi-year R&D project?

Interestingly enough, a good portion of those guys ended up coming back and working on the new BioShock game. Then a bunch of them went off and started their own companies. On Ghost Story, we work with a whole bunch of companies that started up after Irrational closed. I’m proud to say that despite the negativity of that situation, there were a lot of young entrepreneurs who were just ready to do their thing. I think it worked out for the best in the long run, but it was painful in the short run,” Levine added.

So it’s management that ruined everything…

Source: PCGamer