The Rise and Fall and Rise of Irrational Games

Remember Irrational Games? You should do, really. For the uninitiated it’ll be a bit more recognisable under the 2K Boston and 2K Australia monikers, the studio names it was branded with when taken under the publishing arm of Take-Two Interactive back in 2006. You’ll know it as the team that developed BioShock three years ago to immense critical and commercial success.

But its story goes beyond the Big Daddies and Ayn Rand philoso-gaming. The studio had been born in ’97, giving it ten years of history before its biggest mainstream title. Irrational Games had come from the same stock as the brilliant but doomed Looking Glass Studios: similar development team, similar development style. Together they formed the yin and yang of innovative and well written games development as two companies that, at their best, offered games for the thinking man.

They also had a hell of a lot of bad luck between them. Irrational Games is about as well known for the games it made as they are for the ridiculous vertical climb it faced when trying to get games out of the studio and into stores.

It had begun as an industry underdog, a company that had branched off of Looking Glass to develop its own titles. Back in the mid-nineties the studio had released the critically adored System Shock, a cyberpunk action-RPG and spiritual predecessor to BioShock that followed the story of a hacker. Unfortunately Looking Glass’ success/failure rate had an incredible bipolar streak. In the middle of the decade it had developed another fantastically successful and very dark first-person stealth series, Thief, but not before making a commercial disaster or two.

The disasters might as well come in laundry-list format. In ’96 it had released Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri, a tactical FPS that was an immense commercial flop. Terra Nova had been one of Looking Glass’ attempts to publish a game on its own, leaving the company with the publishing debt when the game ultimately failed. That was the first road-sign on its journey toward a total studio collapse.

In between the deadlines and the finance problems, most development companies have a bloody hard time. A developer will enter a contract with a publisher to make a game; the publisher will cough up the money when the team meets particular targets for the game. But if the money dries up before then, the developer is forced to either scout around for more or go out of business. Finding money to feed development costs will often mean the developer begs, borrows, and is left with a debt to pay off in the future. The issue you’re left with is how to churn out a complex game in a short period of time.

By the time Looking Glass had come out with the forgettable Flight Unlimited III it had already eaten away at any financial gain originally made off the back of System Shock. It tried its hand at making a game based on Star Trek: Voyager which would soon be cancelled, but by that point Irrational Games had already budded off of the company to develop its own titles.

Irrational Games had been built by a few ex-Looking Glass employees who’d jumped ship: Ken Levine, Jonathan Chey and Robert Fermier, taking on lead designer, project manager and lead programmer roles, respectively. It came about around the time that Star Trek died on the table, acting as a response to the successive failures their old studio had been repeatedly producing. And the new studio was built around a series of principles.

The first and most important was essentially to work smarter. As a team, Irrational was very green. Out of the three main players it was only Fermier who had previous experience in his job as a lead programmer, and they were working with a team of artists and level designers who had little to no actual experience in the industry. Yet here was Irrational being handed the sequel to one of the most critically lauded games of the decade.

The game was being developed around the same time that companies like id and Valve were churning out technologically advanced first-person shooters. In fact Half-Life had been released right while System Shock 2 was still in the middle of development, and featured the kind of highly scripted cinematic sequences that Irrational had never had the time or resources to implement into its own game.

System Shock 2 was being made on a tight budget and design timeline, and using a talented but inexperienced team so any chance to carefully script complicated gameplay sequences or create high-poly environments had gone out the window. Instead Irrational went down the simple road, creating reusable gameplay elements. It started by building a game around the tech it already had, recycling an old engine from Looking Glass’ Thief.

System Shock 2 innovated with limited resources and the result was Irrational taking very simple gameplay and squeezing every drop they could out of it. Take a basic in-game security camera. SS2 would use a security cam as the focus for stealth missions that had the player avoid detection. It would be used in timing missions where the player had to memorise the movements of the camera sweeping left and right. It would be used in hacking missions where the user would finish a puzzle mini-game to de-activate the cam.

The other main principle was to actually hit deadlines. Looking Glass had shown what could happen to even the best of studios when a deadline gets missed. By ’99 System Shock 2 was enormously successful. Looking Glass closed down a year later. So keep it simple, and don’t let development drag on.

But Irrational was hit by a similar wave of bad luck to what Looking Glass had experienced.

Remember The Lost or Deep Cover? No? Well, you’re not the only one. Neither game was ever released. Deep Cover in particular had been the nail in the coffin for Irrational’s professional relationship with Looking Glass. Before System Shock 2 had been released, Looking Glass had already asked the studio to work on another title, a modern stealth game by the name of Deep Cover. Unfortunately by this point Looking Glass was doggy paddling its way through debt and couldn’t pay the team for their work. There went one title, however, Irrational had been successful enough with SS2 to start up a second studio over in Australia. One studio, the Yanks, were developing The Lost and the Aussies were set to work on Freedom Force.

The Lost had been the dev team’s first entry into console games. It was a survival horror based on Dante’s Inferno. You’re Amanda, a waitress travelling through the circles of Hell to find your daughter. Irrational’s American half was facing a slew of issues that had ranged from technical problems with the game’s engine to too small a development team to handle the game. By 2003 the game was a fraction of what the studio had imagined it would be and it was canned.

The only game left kicking about was Freedom Force, a kind of comedy real-time tactics game based around super heroes that was successful enough to pull them out of financial hell. Fast forward a few years and they were handed SWAT 4, essentially a cop game that became another success for them. SWAT 4 was another thinking man’s shooter. Where similar games would encourage you to go on shooting sprees, this one encouraged you to restrain yourself. More points would be rewarded based on the fewer shots fired and the fewer enemies killed. The game would ask you to subdue enemies rather than go for in for a headshot.

By the middle of the Noughties the studio had been picked up by Take-Two who had been impressed with its output since SS2, and the little independent studio saw its first legitimate opportunity to remain competitive in a ludicrously high-risk industry. The publisher offered a massive raise in resources for the company and Irrational gave up its name to associate itself with the new owners.

That was four years ago, when Ken Levine’s idea to make a game about a government de-programmer who sets out to infiltrate a religious cult had transformed into the story of BioShock. The studio had leveraged itself up from a young, unlucky independent bunch to the makers of some of the most critically successful games ever made. Between BioShock and System Shock 2 it had carved out its name in the industry and become the go-to developer for innovative games with a brain, and last January it reverted back to its original name. After half a decade of being referred to as “2K Boston, those Irrational guys” the team had gone back to its roots and left the 2K moniker behind.

Irrational is currently developing a new IP, due to be revealed today. It’s the studio’s first legitimate game since working on BioShock, and rounds out a full decade in the industry.