Irrational Games' future has remained uncertain since its recent layoffs, and now former employees have spoken up, anonymously, to discuss what happened during the final days of the BioShock Infinite developer's life.
"Some people did seem worried about layoffs, but it seemed to me that most expected that we were going to have some downtime while the studio leadership figured out the next thing to start working on," an anonymous Irrational employee told Polygon.
Following the completion of BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea, Irrational employees didn't hear about an upcoming project. They were essentially told to "recuperate from finishing three DLCs in a row right after shipping Infinite, and to spend some time thinking about improvements to skills and processes."
Some submitted to the idea that the company would live forever because they had shipped BioShock.
Employees paint company leader Ken Levine in a conflicted light, as a man who both demanded and often earned the respect of his employees. "He has incredibly high standards — standards that seemed at times to be outrageously tough when I first started," said a Polygon source. "Once I learned better how to work with him, it became clear that his expectations were really no higher or more unreasonable than those of our audience. It did take me a while to understand what a good working relationship with him entailed."
The developers also detailed what might have been if Irrationals multiplayer effort made it into the final version of BioShock Infinite.
Border Control, as Polygon explains it, was "a tower-defense game with an old-fashioned political cartoon art style, replete with racist stereotypes. The mode was itself a game set in the world of BioShock Infinite, meant to indoctrinate the fictional children of its bigoted universe." Another mode, which used the placeholder title Spec-Ops, featured four-player co-op, loot-gathering, waves of enemies, and character progression, all set in arenas with "randomized content."
"Some submitted to the idea that the company would live forever because they had shipped BioShock," a source said.
For more on the BioShock developer, check out IGN's editorial A Closer Look at Irrational Games' Change of Focus, and Ken Levine's last interview as Irrational Games' leader.
Mitch Dyer is an associate editor at IGN. He's trying to read 50 books in 2014. These are the 50. Talk to Mitch about books and other stuff on Twitter at @MitchyD.
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