Binge Gamer Dot Net

Not everybody at BioShock thought that their Game of the Year, BioShock, was going to be a success. In fact, according to 2K lead programmer Chris Kline, BioShock should have failed. Kline says that the game did fail quite a bit, and that BioShock’s previous failures are what led to the title’s ultimate success.

It did fail a lot, over the course of time. A series of big mistakes and corrections and slipped ship dates, but all of these helped make it a good game.

So what were some of BioShock’s failures? According to Kline, the game’s first failing was that it was based on System Shock 2:

Here was our idea: Let’s just make System Shock 2. This was easy because we’d already made System Shock 2. We knew it was a critical success, and we thought we knew all the things that kept it from being financially successful.

I said this was going to be about failure, and the very first failure was that we wanted to base this whole thing on System Shock 2.

Other failings that Kline touched on included the team getting so excited at the big picture that they forgot to focus on the little details, and the development team going in a million different directions, coming up with a million different ideas that just didn’t fit into the game’s universe.

But overall, there is a lesson to be learned, says Kline. That lesson?

Some people think that constantly messing up, and pushing dates isn’t a good way to make a game, but as far as I’m concerned it’s the only way to make a good game.

If this process could turn out games as good as BioShock, I’d have to agree.