BioShock 2 Interview

Another “how difficult is it to follow up on such a great game” interview for BioShock 2 is available. An odd tenor to pick, if you ask me.

VB: Were some of these decisions in response to what the fans wanted? I supposed they wanted multiplayer?
VT: The fans wanted lots of things. You couldn’t find a more diverse bunch than BioShock enthusiasts. The game is intensely subjective. Everyone takes a different idea about what its strengths are. We had a lot of warring fans. We tried to compile the biggest trends and at some point we had to depart and pick a few creative vectors that we were interested in. We hoped we would build support for those vectors along the way.
(…)
VB: BioShock was made by 2K Boston (Irrational Games) and 2K Australia. They are now making something else. They passed the BioShock sequel to you. How did you handle that hand-off?
VT: It was a challenge. 2K Marin had to build a studio from scratch in tandem with the development of this game. The 2K label wanted to create their own development house in the Bay Area. They seeded us with several people who became project leads. Alissa Finley from the original BioShock team joined us as project manager and provided what we desperately needed. The rest of us were artists and designers who worked on the original game. There were only eight of us at the time. Our job was to make sure that the city of Rapture was treated properly and that BioShock 2 is worthy of the name. We couldn’t lean to heavily on Irrational, which was working on its own new thing. Instead of pestering them, our job was to pore over the first game and learn everything there was to know about it. We had to be careful about respecting the canon of the first game and its back story. We tried to stay true to that legacy and offer some new surprises without trying to pretend the first game doesn’t exist.