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Now that BioShock: The Collection is here, we thought it might be interesting to revisit the original game's troubled development. Enjoy!25th January 2007 was a cold day, even by the harsh standards of a Boston winter. That morning, a dozen senior members of BioShock's beleaguered development team shuffled into a hidden room in the centre of the city, and stood to face a pane of one-way glass. As a huddle of strangers entered the adjacent room, unaware that they were being watched, the team from Irrational Games fell silent. After five years of arduous development, during which time the game's setting had shifted from an abandoned space station overrun with alien eels to a deep sea utopia project gone wrong, the team was about to see whether all of the toil, all of the late nights and all of the seven-day weeks had been worth the effort.
Ken Levine, the game's creative director, held a clipboard that listed the strangers' names and their vocations (all of whom were in their twenties). Security guard, construction contractor: these were blue-collar video game players. Through the glass, Levine and his team watched as each person sat down at one of the various television sets arranged around the room and played the game. They began at the very start: a plane crash over the ocean. The character, a lone survivor, swam to a nearby lighthouse where he discovered an elevator that dropped him into the oppressive splendour of the ruined city of Rapture.
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