Ken Levine Interview
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You talked about being influenced by a lot of old games, like Ultima Underworld, that were immersive, and obviously you have your own background. At this point you've been working on games in that vein, and you what I'd consider a traditional PC background, in a certain sense. Is there a culture there that you think is relevant on any level? Well, that's a bitbroad. Can you talk about the culture of people who come from that background, who embrace those kinds of games...
KL: I think there's a great creative tension. We have a lot of guys here -- a lot of oldschool Looking Glass guys here. And when I came to Looking Glass, there was definitely a tension, even a transition, going on. I remember the arguments we had on Thief. When I was working on Thief, it was, "Well, should we have mouselook in the game?"
Because there was a lot of people that thought, "No, you don't have mouselook, and there should be inventory screens..." and Thief almost didn't have weapons equippable by the number keys, and almost didn't have mouselook, because there was certainly an oldschool/newschool thing going on.
And I was certainly involved in that creative tension there, of figuring that out. How do you keep that -- for all the things that made those games great? While making it something that an audience that's used to the standards of modern games is going to enjoy?
But I think if you don't read the classics, it's hard to write new classics. And, so, we read the classics here. There's no doubt that we read the classics. And I think, sometimes, the challenge, more, with some of the oldschool guys, is, "Hey, look at the new stuff as well!" But I think it's good, though, because we have a mix.
And we have a lot of younger guys comingin, newer guys coming in, who don't know the classics -- and the challenge for them is saying, "Go read the classics! Go play System Shock 1 or 2, or go play Deus Ex. Go play these classics." But then let's take the lessons we learn from those things, and bring them into the modern day.
And I think it's not an accident. You look at the great developers now? Of console games? Bungie, and Lionhead. You look at BioWare; you look at Bethesda; and where do they all come from? They come from the PC side. Valve? They come from the PC side.
Because, I think the PC developers, working in the space they worked in, they were probably in a lot of ways -- not all ofthem, I mean, Shigeru Miyamoto, clearly, I think, is probably the most innovative person who ever lived, in the gaming space -- but, more innovative, pound for pound, than their console counterparts.
And then when they came over to the console side, they brought a lot of, I think, what made PC games great, in terms of, "Hey! This is your game, not our game! This is the user's game! This is the game for you! You want music on or off? You want to skip cutscenes? You want to play different difficulty levels? You want to have different modes that let you replay the game differently?" All of those things that came fromthe PC side are very much in the DIY part of playing a PC game, we brought over to the console side.
Also, I think, the maturity of some of the experiences. You know, you had things like Thief; you had things like Planescape: Torment; you had things like Half-Life on the PC side, which I think were more sophisticated narrative scene-wise, than on console counterparts at the time. All of that maturity came over, was brought over from the PC side. Now it's the console side, and most of my favorite console developers came from the PC world.
