The Bioshock series has some of gaming’s best intros because lead dev Ken Levine knows ‘if you have a mediocre beginning, you’re done’

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the Bioshock games have some of the best openers in the business—descending down into Rapture for the first time while Andrew Ryan’s hypercapitalist croon asks you if a man is not entitled to the sweat of his brow? Chef’s kiss. Molto bello.

Even Infinite, which I have a less glowing impression of, still basically knocks it out of the park in its opening act. Veteran dev and visionary behind the Bioshock games Ken Levine, speaking with IGN, says that’s very much all on purpose: “I knew it was important to capture the gamer right away—and to really immerse them in that mystery and the WTF of it.

“I know this from being a scriptwriter; if you don’t capture the person reading the script in the first five pages you’re screwed.” That’s not even because of short attention spans, mind—it’s writing advice that I’ve heard for basically my entire life. “You can have a mediocre middle part, or mediocre ending—if you have a mediocre beginning, you’re done.”

Ideally, Levine adds, you shouldn’t have those things, but game development is an act of resource allocation first and foremost: “Sometimes you screw up. Like System Shock 2 had a pretty bad ending, but we had a very strong beginning.”

When it comes to Bioshock, Levine explains that he “knew we had to capture people right away, and we spent a lot of time in the opening sequences of our games because everybody will see it.

“You want to get people so excited up front that they’re gonna trust you and stick with you … We wanna make sure that—those first few minutes with them? They feel like they’re getting way more back than they put in.”

That’s a requirement that’s only increased as time goes on—as Levine and interviewer Brian Altano note, there’s what Levine calls “an embarrassment of riches” in gaming today. If you don’t like a videogame on Steam within the first hour or so, you can just refund it—or just download something else on game pass.

“Your friend got a new Atari game, and everybody knew about it, and you went to their house and that was such a huge deal—and whether it was good or not, that was what you had. And there were no demos or any of that stuff. It’s a much more competitive environment [now], and you have to really respect the player’s time. You need them more than they need you.”

About