Way back in late October 2019, we reported on Ken Levine working on a new “ambitious immersive sim.” However, we now know that this new sim has no relations to the BioShock series of games and will feature “some weird shit.”
It has been over six years since BioShock creator Levine and his team released a video game. However, after the rebranding from Irrational Games to Ghost Story Games (while downsizing to work on more narrative-focused titles), Levine is still the company’s president and has been working on a new game for some time now.
In addition to the above, the new game by Levine and crew has a “Cinematic Narrative Scripter” working on this “ambitious immersive sim.” As of today, website videogameschronicle.com sees Levine saying that this new game is different from Cloud Chamber’s BioShock title while he was at Gamelab Live:
“I think that they’ve announced that there’s going to be [a new BioShock game], but I’m working on my own thing. I think I sort of said what I wanted to say about it, so I wanted to do something a little different.”
Whatever the story is for this new sim brace yourself for something outrageous and crazy if the next line by Levine holds any indication:
“I can’t really talk about the new game but there’s some weird shit in it. I think if you don’t have people saying, ‘that sounds a little insane,’ you haven’t gone close enough to the edge.
Because the great stuff exists on the edge of ‘over the top’ and ‘just OK’ [and] sometimes you’ve got to push past the point and make something outrageous and ridiculous, then pull it back.
But if you don’t go to the outrageous and ridiculous, you never know where that boundary is… that means you’ve got to go into the office sometimes, tell people things, and they’re going to look at you like you’re insane, and then you sort of bring it back to something that you can actually accomplish.”
Sadly, nothing else has surfaced on this “new game.” However, it will take a long while before we hear anything substantial on the forthcoming project since we are many years out from it taking shape for public viewing.
Lastly, Levine has worked on games like Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock 2, BioShock, and SWAT 4. Right now, the only thing known about Levine’s next project is that it’s an “ambitious immersive sim” containing “some weird shit.”
