Bioshock - Rationalising Rapture @ GameSpy

The fancy title Rationalising Rapture is really just a Bioshock interview with Ken Levine, but it covers some interesting territory:

Patrick: In the old System Shock games, we saw a really early version of this idea of story that doesn't take away from the shooting. We heard this from the team working on Blacksite: Area 51, and we're hearing it from other games in which the story aspects flow into the shooting aspects. Do you think that's pulling from System Shock 2, or do you think that's just a progression of next-gen game development?

Ken Levine: We were fortunate in that we used the message system in System Shock, like e-mails, in order to frame the story. Because of our budget, we had a certain idea of mise en scene, in which you can look around the world and visually tell the story. We spent a great deal of time on BioShock working on those details and telling the story, because look, while I'm not against it, people are going to get ten percent of the story because they're skipping the in-game messages. I want them to understand what's happened here. I want them to at least be able to piece together the basic story of what happened in Rapture. Granted, if they listen to the audio diaries, they'll really get a better idea of what happened, but it has to work on multiple levels.