If you have played or seen an Irrational Game, you have viewed the work of Robb Waters.

Irrational was once a tiny team that made games on miniscule budgets. Today we’re much, much bigger and the budget’s grown along with the ambition of the group’s games. This month’s episode of Irrational Behavior explores what these changes have meant for the studio’s culture and the individuals who’ve been on board as the industry itself has had to adopt the professional practices of big business. Episode highlights include an insider take on the making of Thief, designers Dorian Hart and Alexx Kay waxing nostalgic on the days when they were allowed to do voice over work for Freedom Force, as well as the story of a mysterious onanist who secretly used artist Shawn Robertson’s office for forbidden self-pleasures.

Stay tuned to IrrationalGames.com for more content related to this months podcast.

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Podcast music provided by:

• Josh Rathbun
• Matt Grimm
• Geoff Graves
• Rich Vreeland/DisasterPeace
• Signal Hill

All games have secrets that stay locked away for years on end.  Creative Director Ken Levine sits down and reveals some of these secrets from 1999’s classic shooter System Shock 2.

Apocalypse Shock?

“The original story had the player going to a spaceship to assassinate a character similar to Colonel Walter Kurtz from Apocalypse Now,” says Creative Director Ken Levine. “We pitched the game to Paul Neurath at Looking Glass Studios based on a story outline I wrote and they gave us access to the Dark Engine which was used to make Thief.”

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Freedom Force Pack is Steam’s Weekend Deal now on sale for $2.  The Freedom Force Pack includes Freedom Force and Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich.  You should ditch the latte today and buy the Freedom Force Pack for yourself or as a gift for a friend.

For every feature that ends up in a game, 10 more are proposed and dumped during the pre-production phase, and another five on the road to final release*. The handful of examples that follow offer a window into the different ways that BioShock and System Shock 2 might have turned out.

*These aren’t hard figures. Include them in your school papers at your own peril.
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Before the studio began work on BioShock, and as it wrapped production on its PC shooter, SWAT 4, Irrational wondered, “What next?” Publisher Vivendi proposed another SWAT sequel. Creative Director Ken Levine “wanted the money really badly.”

But while the serial killer’s unsettling hideaway in SWAT 4 suggested what Irrational hoped to one day accomplish with mis-en-scene techniques, another straightforward cop sim wouldn’t provide the canvas that Ken and co. wanted to paint on. Instead, the studio would attempt to wed SWAT with parts of a pre-existing pitch for a shooter set in a zombie apocalypse. While it won’t hurt to have a SWAT team’s skills when the dead walk, the SWAT series’ signature features aren’t necessarily suited to the task. Reading the original pitch posted below, I’m reminded of a guy in grad school who tried to use literary language to get course credit for the fantasy tales he’d write about a barbarian who punched holes through the heads of his foes. My classmate wanted to make up names with apostrophes and assorted consonants; he liked the time that Th’thoth – or whatever idiotic thing the character was called — cut off a lot of ork limbs. He had less use for metaphor then a monster-hunting po-po has for pepper spray. The fact that Vivendi found the idea just as silly allows to me to say as much and not fear for my job.

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Check out this time lapse sketch by Concept Artist Robb Waters of Man-Bot from Freedom Force filmed by the Game Informer crew when they were here a couple months ago.