Sony brought out the big guns for its E3 2011 press conference last month, revealing just about everything there is to know about the upcoming PS Vita other than its official release date. The best reveal came, however, when Irrational Games’ Ken Levine took the stage and confirmed that a BioShock game would be coming to the handheld. That’s all the detail he shared, but it was enough for the time being. Now Levine has spoken a little bit more about his plans for the Vita game, in a new interview with IGN.
“That’s a new game. That is going to be strange and surprising to people,” he said. “I think when we launched Infinite, people said, ‘Wait, what, what are you doing?’ I think we always want to surprise people.”
“For us, it’s like, ‘Hey, here’s this weird experiment you want to do.’ Experiments always carry risks, though. That’s been the experience of working on BioShock Infinite. And working on BioShock. People saying, ‘This is weird, risky, I don’t understand.’ I’m fortunate that I get to do things that are risky, my team gets to do things that are risky.”
Damn right he’s fortunate. Then again, BioShock wasn’t Irrational’s first dazzling effort; System Shock 2 opened plenty of doors in the early days, no doubt.
Levine also confirmed that this is a game being built from the ground-up for Vita, though he wasn’t as clear in separating it from Infinite completely. He did say that the Vita game won’t be “mobile” in the sense that we think of the term nowadays; in other words, expect chunks of gameplay that last longer than five minutes. There’s more to the interview as well, three pages worth of talk about Irrational and BioShock. Go check it out.
