Shack: Really, it seems in part because of Ryan's changing attitude towards Rapture that allows Fontaine to take control in the end.

Ken Levine: They both let nothing get in their way. I think at the end of the day, Fontaine is truer to his philosophy than Ryan is to his, because when things start going bad for Ryan in the business world with Fontaine, he sacrifices his ideals when he takes over Fontaine's business using government power.

Ideals are great until they don't work for you anymore, then you work around it.

Shack: Ryan said outright how important it is to avoid big government and regulation--but then there ended up being exceptions

Ken Levine: Yeah, and I think the brutality of his end was his mea culpa, his penance for that sin. McDonough is sort of the Greek chorus character--don't do this, you're heading towards the abyss! But he goes over. Ryan's a true believer, and he comes back, but it's too late at that point. BioShock's a tragedy in that sense. Ryan could have beat Fontaine if he put his mind to it. I think he was stronger and better, but he got scared.

Shack: I ended up getting the "bad" ending. What's the implication for the future there?

Ken Levine: What did you see happening?

Shack: Well, maybe a Fontaine-like situation, where you return to the real world with this massive amount of power you can exert over others.

Ken Levine: Literally, the end is that you take control of this nuclear submarine, and for me it's less about war and more about having that power. Extending the power of Rapture to be a third superpower, potentially. Now, none of this is canon, it's just how I interpret it. He gets ahold of a nuclear weapon, and what would happen if that city became on par with other superpowers? That would be an interesting world. [laughs]

Shack: So Rapture isn't necessarily destroyed there?

Ken Levine: Maybe. I don't want to speculate too much. You embrace the power, and where the city was going. At the end, is it about power or people? You have to take a bet on what Tenenbaum says, and it's a leap of faith. To have the "good" ending, you have to make a leap of faith. The bad one is a bit more cynical, but not that uncommon.

I'm not sure how many people would get the good ending in real life. Ryan doesn't. When backed into a wall, he takes the easy path. Everything we tried to do was a reflection of something else. Do you become Ryan, or are you better than Ryan?

Shack: What went into toning down the Little Sister harvesting sequence and keeping you from killing them outright?

Ken Levine: I think a lot of people on the boards were upset when they heard you couldn't shoot the Little Sisters. I'm not sure why, but that's their prerogative. I thought it was much more powerful to have it right in front of you, with that choice. I still find that sequence almost unwatchable. If that's tame, I don't know... I mean, I guess people are accustomed to different things.

Shack: There's been a similar outcry among certain Fallout fans, with Bethesda undecided about killing children in Fallout 3.

Ken Levine: Sure, same thing. It's every developer's call. I personally believe that art is art and reality is reality, but it wasn't meaningful in our game and it didn't advance what we were trying to do. There were gameplay problems with it, and it was just the wrong thing for us. At the end of the day, it was a controversial decision internally, with people asking, "Well, are you limiting what people can do?" For me it was a no brainer--well, not a no brainer, but it was a clear path once I thought about it.

Shack: I could be reaching pretty far here, but was there any influence from Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate?

Ken Levine: Oh, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, that movie had a huge impact on me. I've always said I have different influences than a lot of game developers. There's a concept in movies--I don't know if I came up with the terminology for it or if someone else did--I call the unreliable narrator. It means you don't necessarily trust what you see on the screen. Boy, that scene in the original Manchurian Candidate, you know, with the garden party?

Shack: Yeah, amazing.

Ken Levine: Some movies just put you in a place. That movie was so ahead of its time. I was wondering, if you can play with narrative like that in a movie, can you play with it in a game? It took me a long time to figure out in BioShock. I kept talking about the unreliable narrator; I was driving the design team crazy. It took me a long time to figure out how to do it right. In a movie it's one thing where you have control of the camera and everything.

But yeah, that movie, I can't even tell you what an impact it had on me as a storyteller. It fucks with your very perception of the events. A movie like Fight Club is another one, when you go back and watch it a second time, it's a totally different movie, and I love that. Even something that did it fairly well, like A Beautiful Mind. They're not cheating, it's fair, but what you're seeing is not what you're seeing.

It was challenging to pull that off in a game, but we had done the displaced identity notion in System Shock 2 and we wanted to go the next step--not just somebody else's identity, but your own identity is what was in play. Not an amnesia story--you have a reasonable idea of who you are, but that whole life is a fiction. That became a central part of the story.

Shack: That's an interesting property of video games in general, the concept of telling a story that actually revolves around the player rather than having the player observes.

Ken Levine: And you have no choice. You have to do this stuff or the game doesn't go anywhere. Games are strangely about fate. You can argue about fate in real life, but there's fate in games. What if we took that notion and turned it on its head?

People who played the demo said, "Why did I stick that needle in my arm? Why did I go in that lighthouse?" I just said, "I don't know," but the answer is that you're born to go down in that fucking place and put that needle in your arm.

Shack: Presumably that's what the wrist tattoos are about?

Ken Levine: Yeah. You never want to completely pull the rug out from under people. You want to plant the seed, so they can say, "Okay, okay, I get it." I don't think it's completely unfair to just say, "That guy's not a human, he's a gopher." "What?" You have to put enough clues along that the way that the player could have figured it out, even if they didn't.

Continue to the last page to hear how BioShock drew from Fight Club and The Usual Suspects, as well as Valve's games and the world of theatre.