Ken Levine IN MY BASEMENT!

It probably smells like a community-based news site does, when it loses the closest thing it had to a legitimate journalist and begins to regress rapidly, fueled only by the support of intellectual 13-year-olds and long-time community suck-ups. Or maybe it smells like cheese. It's hard to say, really.

Smells like when you leave an opened jar of Ragu tomato sauce out on the kitchen counter for five days :(

Day 11: victory
Day 26: teen spirit

Day 11: Donuts

Day 26: God I'm hungry for donuts

Day 11: Piss, shit, blood, and caramel.

Day 26: New Jersey

this site has gone downhill.

Day 11: The heat is sweltering, thick and humid with the kind of stickiness to be expected from corn syrup and red dye on a Los Angeles studio lot. There's a pungent smell, it is a cacophony of funk that assails the nostrils with a 1-2 punch, game-breaker power up knockout. Strangely it reminds me of erotic memories, etched into my neurons one star-stricken afternoon as an orderly at a rehab facility where Lindsay Lohan was attending. It is like cream cheese and lox, put behind a radiator in a fridgid house, applied as a lubricant mouths later and left to fester in the nethers of another broken dream and poor execution.

It is almost impossible to remove the bubblegum tissue from the carpeting, but the neighbor's dog seems adamant at doing the job god designed him for. There is lime, but no coconuts. All I can do is muse quietly on quantum theory. We can break and egg to make the omelet, but we can not as of yet regenerate the flesh to the bone. Levine's mastermind will live on forever, seething in a clockwork colony of fire ants who carry his face-brain gloop-stuff to the hive in a mechanical orchestra of decomposition.

Day 11: smells like the buttcrack glazed sidewalk of Santa Monica BLVD after a can throwing bum who chases teenagers with sharp sticks and only eats cracker jacks slept on it for 3 weeks.

Day 26: The smell can only be described as the chode smeared thong the big daddies have been required to wear since they orginally put on the diving suit. The thong while not only elegant and perhaps even comfortable, had the added benefits of providing added flexibility and support.

is this some kind of desperate attempt to get a ken levine interview?

Day 11: Genjuro

Day 26: Genjuro eating Degenerate

I'm just going to guess salty garbage.

Incidentally, this is the most gross and disturbing official contest I've seen on this website, ever. I congratulate you, sir!

Day 26

His flesh smells like a cross of musty old cat shit and 1949 Chateau Petrus Pomerol

His corpse smells like a saucy little strumpet, exuding a certain sweet innocence.

Day 11: Like someone shit a Christmas tree on the Jersey Turnpike.

Day 26: The tree now resides in the corner of a French sweatshop atop a cheese factory.

Day 11:
An almost piquant concoction, the sour stench of sugar-coated bile mingles with the honeyed rank aroma of errant feces urgently thrown into his "Big Daddy" underoos. A salty-sweet whiff of a half-eaten box of Cracker Jacks almost lost among the crowd, but hangs in the air like hidden punctuation.

Day 26:
Now lost to the echoes of decay, the smell of old candy has lost any fragrance, and where once a deeply bitter aura loomed there is a track of mold to come. While the edges of sensation have dulled in the last two weeks, the core stands as a rotten testament to death itself, putrid and moist and ever festering. The tang is cloying, like air you can chew. And humid and suffocating as the gases and liquids stand exposed for the world to endure.

One thinks that in a few years life may grow here.

Day 11: Smells like a video game journalist after 3 straight days of GDC meetings, parties, and all-night writing sessions.

Day 26: Smells like a video game journalist after 3 straight days of E3 meetings, parties, and all-night writing sessions.

(disclaimer: not for the gentle people - this post would make children hurl) In all honesty... and this may gross some people out... but I used to live in an apartment building where an old guy passed away two floors below me and nobody knew it. He was literally in there for months. We hardly saw him before so we didn't really know he was missing. We didn't have an elevator so I walked by the apartment every day up and down the stairs. You know when you have a pet gerbil (well I didn't but SOME people do) and you put that sawdust stuff in there for them to pee, poo and live in? Well fill a trash can up with that stuff and let it sit for few weeks. That's EXACTLY what it smelt like (especially when the weather got warm).

After 11 days, he will stink like a ripe, week-old roadkilled possum. The sickly sweet-sour smell of rotting meat. Underlaying that, though, is the sour-bitter smell of rancid sweat and fermenting and decaying apple juice from the abnormal reaction his body had to the Crackerjacks before his untimely death. Fortunately, the flies, maggots, insects, and other scavengers (if they can get at it) assaulting the body means the stench won't persist too much longer, though larger scavengers may lend their own dusty and occasionally wet-dog-like smell.

After 26 days, if the body is not retrieved and embalmed, the bulk of the scavenging will be done, leaving mostly the remains of clothing, picked and cracked bones, teeth, and hair. The smell has receded to a moldy mustiness, with a hint of decayed meat. To a human, it still smells wrong, causing most to distastefully grimace, wrinkle their nose, and turn away.

Day 11 - salty beard crumbs and athletes foot musk

Day 26 - salvation

Day 11: smells like a Big Daddy

Day 26: two Big Daddies.

11 days from now: Like caramel, a fine French cheese, and Maarten's bong water thrown into a blender and then passed around between two Asian women in the new internet sensation: 2girls1corpse
26 days from now: Corn chips drenched in ranch dressing and Bourbon Street gutter 5 minutes after Mardi Gras is finished. The nice part though, is by now the prize from the Cracker Jacks should be visible in the musty remain's burst belly.

The important thing to remember here, is that like a Catholic saint, Ken Levine would not decompose, he is an Incorruptable. He is a man above mere mortals, a man who brought the world greatness in it's highest form; Thief, System Shock 2, Bioshock, and Freedom Force.
Apparently the awesomeness that was to be Bioshock 2 was too much for the world, if Saint Levine had a part in it until completion. A work so perfect would not be allowed to grace the imperfect Earth.
Saint Levine will be missed, but his memory will live on, giving all other developers a shining light for which to strive.

11 days: As Ken's body decomposes, a torrid, effervescent odour reminiscent of concentrated tiger diarrhea rolls out in waves of inimitable putrescence. Hints of dulcet sweetness and brackish tang linger in-between the roiling emanation of pungent misery, a product of Ken's last supper of stale Cracker Jack.

26 days: By now, the pungent aroma of feline rectal discharge has mingled with the decomposition of Ken's fatty tissues. The air is thick with an infusion of greasy corruption as it seeps into every pore of your skin. The saccharine yet briny hints of Ken's final meal has now been replaced by the heavy aroma of Ken's digestive juices eating through ripe meat like sticky maggots on a hot summer's day.

Day 11 : I push open the heavy basement door, forcing it to open completely despite the stack of warped 1980's National Geographics behind it in crumbling cardboard boxes. Beyond the faint odor of methamphetamine production there is a thick, wafting sweat smell with caramel highlights. there was another smell...something familiar. Wait...I remember once I went camping in the summer and left some uneaten hamburger patties in an open styrofoam cooler in the back of my 91 Honda Accord for two weeks...yes...yes that's it. If I remember correctly Dan had also spilled his Coke with Captain Morgans Rum and extra Buttershots Schnapps into the cooler the night before we left...just before vomiting into it. Perfect. Having diagnosed the smell with the expertise of a wine Enophile, I turned on my heel and left.

Day 26 : Hmm, the smell of methamphetamines has become stronger, but somewhat subjugated by the thick odor of sex: like Oprah running ten miles in the Alabama heat and long jumping spread-eagle onto a pile of Tony Romo's unwashed jockstraps. After the initial shock of that particular waft subsided, I could pick out notes of old carcass slow marinated in a sugary-sweetness like when my great-grandmother would tell me how much she loved her cotton candy within spittle distance of my young face. I leave having just received a text from Al Gore. Something about "Manbeaverpig"...

After 11 days, it smells like your normal corpse, except the Cracker Jack adds a little fancy touch of sweet melted caramel.
After 26 days, it smells like a rotten corpse but don't get fouled: It tastes like veal.

Steve may or may not care about this detail, but many of you are guessing about day #26. Steve is not asking for a guess about day #26. It has already been 11 days. 26 days from now would be day #37, not day #26. Please number the days appropriately so that you do not get disqualified due to a technicality! Also, thinking about the longer time-span between the two dates may produce even more putrid answers...

Personally, I think that Ken currently smells like a Cracker Jack OD'd Ken Levine after 11 days. 26 days from now, Ken will smell like a Cracker Jack OD'd Ken Levine after 37 days.

Good ol' "X = X" approach!

Day 11: Smells pretty much like it usually does, although the flies seem happier.

Day 11 : The smell of half fulfilled/half spent coitus between two bitter liquorice based weasel candy treats who by the smell of things finished their ordeal by self cannibalism, only managing to half digest themselves.

Day 26: The scent reaches tipping point and can no longer be 'smelled' in the conventional sense. Its arguable the scent has now become conscience in some form, but what we can tell it has developed its on foul distortion force field. The results being anything within a 24 foot begins to drip with brown meaty sweaty substance. Other symptoms include spontaneous tandem spew shitting and inflamed nostrils.

Ken Levine smells like a rotten brown egg that was buried in a shoe underneath a medical dumping ground.

Day 11: There is a sickening sweet smell of an unrefrigerated Taco Bell during a summer heat wave at the height of the diarrhea season.

Day 26, there is no smell because on Day 19 Ken Levine rose from the dead and ate Steve's brains. EA seeing an opportunity quickly offers Zombie Ken Levine a contract and he quietly works for all eternity on the System Shock series.

11 Days : The fragance of shavings from an uncoiled used diaper.
26 Days : The only description would be 'Flawless Victory'

Day 11 smell:
Like a diving suit washed up on shore, left to bake in the hot sun. The smell is sickly sweet, like meat too many days removed from a freezer, but marinated in caramel, with a hint of peanuts. The sea salt stings my nostrils, but the peanuts smell delicious. They were always my favorite part of Cracker Jack.

Day 26 smell:
The tide has come back in many times since day 11, but the diving suit is too heavy to be pulled back out to sea. The rotten meat smell has almost faded, and the tide has brought with it many peanut loving creatures of the deep. Tiny crab, shrimp and fish nibble at the caramelly deliciousness, and add their own seafood scents to the heady mix swirling about my head. This is too much, I can resist no longer! I must dine on delicious shrimp in a Levine caramel peanut glaze immediately!

I think this was Max Payne themed at first, I don't really know what happened by the end.

It smelt as if a half-dead skunk, that had a curious lump on it's back which had periodically popped in a puddle of puss, crawled into the basement, lived for a short while, then after a prolonged puking, vomiting, and all around orifice evacuation session died of dehydration, and an uncanny lust for cracker jacks that it acquired after eating a piece it found in the trash. Which it was reluctantly able quench right after it puked.

Day 11: Cracker Jacks.
Day 26: Nothing. That's why you got married, so the woman can clean up!

Day 11: Smells like dognose would after camping outside GeorgeB's office waiting for DNF to be released.

Day 26: Smells like dognose would after not showering in protest of DNF not being released.

11 Days: Limburger.
26 Days: Moldy Limburger.

this whole article smells like something sexninja!!!! would post.

He smells like fellow corpses George Brussard, John Carmack, Gabe Newall and Peter Molyneux, who also litter Steve's cellar, having also failed the cracker jack test.

Sometimes Steve wears their clothes whilst playing their own games, doing bad impersonations of each in a whiny voice saying 'Ain't I fuckin clever! I'm fucking Peter Molyneux and I invented this whole game!!!!'