Ken Levine, who is currently working on Judas, has admitted that 2K (Take-Two) almost canceled the project… but luckily for us that didn’t happen!

Edge magazine has an interview with Ken Levine, who is currently working on Judas at Ghost Story Games, but has also worked on BioShock, Thief: The Dark Project and System Shock 2. In the interview he talked about the development of BioShock and basically said that it was a surprise that it was even RELEASED in the fall of 2007. At the time, Irrational Games had the problem of being approached by developers who liked System Shock 2 and the immersive simulator style of Looking Glass behind it (which was the case with System Shock 2 and later BioShock).

He said they shouldn’t have made those games because they didn’t sell well, but allowed a “cheap prototype” for the developers because they convinced Levine. Irrational Games then started looking for publishers (at the time they didn’t have a relationship with 2K, who then bought them out). They got a negative response (“it doesn’t make money”) and then the strategy took a turn. They started hyping their then-unreleased game through the press.

They showed it to a journalist who loved it and wrote about the “next Shock game”. The next day, people saw his article, and then they suddenly started getting calls. Levine’s memory is a bit distorted because Irrational Games wanted to work on some form of this game back in the early 2000s. They had a modest budget at first, under 2K, and then in 2006, before the publisher bought the studio, they threw a bunch of money at it. Levine says they still had a pretty cheap development budget, but they went over budget and missed their deadlines…

2K almost canceled the whole project, but Levine later showed what the time and budget overruns really meant with BioShock Infinite…

Source: PCGamer