By now, I imagine all Xbox 360 owners have downloaded and thoroughly enjoyed the BioShock demo that was released yesterday.
Despite early critical reviews and people crawling out of the woodwork for the demo, it looked like Irrational Games (now known as 2K Boston) hit loads of trouble early in the game’s development when pitching the game to publishers.
In an interview with CVG, Joe McDonagh, Senior Producer, admitted that many publishers turned Irrational away because they thought BioShock would, "just [be] another fu*king PC FPS…."
McDonagh said, "Ken (Levine) spent years pitching the game to publishers but no one was interested, incredible as that seems now. I joined Irrational in December 2004 and my first job was to get a publishing deal for the game (I worked as the Business Development Director for the first six months). I remember pitching the game to one publisher who later told a friend of mine that it was ‘just another fu*king PC FPS that’s going to sell 250,000 units.’"
McDonagh compared the situation to Irrational Games’ 1999 FPS System Shock 2. Despite being critical acclaimed for its atmosphere and gameplay (one of my favorite and early FPS loves), the game sold very poorly, "Something I realised very quickly was that as much as your boss won’t ever know that you turned down a future game of the year, he will know that you signed up a turkey. You don’t get fired for not taking risks. "
In the meantime, check out our hands-on preview of BioShock.
