Early E3 Announcement of BioShock Vita was Made to Help Sony Build Hype for the Platform

During Sony’s press conference at last year’s E3, Irrational Games’ Ken Levine took the stage and announced that a BioShock title would be coming to the PlayStation Vita even though the studio hadn’t even begun working on it. The beloved game designer recently shared why he made this announcement so early, attributing it mainly to wanting to help Sony build excitement for the Vita launch.

When questioned by Eurogamer about the early announcement, Levine explained that this wasn’t something he normally does, but because Sony has been so good to the studio, he made an exception.

Look, generally when I announce something… like with BioShock Infinite we had a whole video to show and it was all fully-formed.

[With the Vita announcement], it was part of something else obviously. Sony was launching this platform and it was important that they had a show of support from people no matter what stage of development they were at.

Sony has been such a good partner to us, and I’m not just blowing smoke.

Levine went on to praise Sony, saying:

Not just on a professional level, but on a personal level they’ve been really good to us. Every time we see them they take really good care of us. So they asked me to do that and I said okay, even though that’s not what I normally do.

And I tried not to oversell it when I went out there. I just said ‘we’re doing this’. I didn’t want to present something that I didn’t have a lot of clarity on at that point.

Hopefully Ken and his team will have more to show us on the game in the near future, as a top-notch, completely original BioShock title would undoubtedly do wonders for Sony’s handheld.

TRENDING