Featured Employee: Ken Strickland

Here’s why we think Ken is swell.

Clint Bundrick, Principal Designer: Ken loves language and is quick to display that in everything he generates. Whether he’s putting lines like “the Handyman’s grabby, porcelain ape-hands can pound the player into meaty bits” into design documents, describing a weapon as “the bastard child of a hospital lab and the slaughterhouse” or creating temp Nostrum names like “filth gorger” he’s always good for a laugh and a clever name. He happens to be a great systems designer as well and can intelligently discuss everything from the Skinnerian reward structure to how we’re seriously lacking a dude-bro moment in one of our beats.

Your title is Principal Systems Designer. What does that mean?

Ken Strickland: It’s my job to bring the core gameplay of Bioshock Infinite to life, which is kind of like being a surgeon in the school of Victor Frankenstein. I raid the graveyard of terrible ideas for new parts, grab some of the good stuff from the big brain trust we have going on here, and hack away until only the useful bits remain. Stuff like our weapon set, Vigors, or our AIs.

That’s the easy part; almost anything sounds good in isolation. Once I sew all these component pieces together I see whether our core combat experience has become more than the sum of its parts. When my creation inevitably fails me, I take it apart, preserve the parts that work, and tinker with the rest. I’ll do that about a thousand times before we ship.

Luckily, I’ve got a great team of systems designers that I can point at all the really hard problems. And I have not once called any of them “Igor.”

What games have you worked on?

KS: I worked on a bunch of the PS2 and PSP Ratchet and Clank games, some prototypes that never saw the light of day, and the original Resistance: Fall of Man. Lots of playing with fun, absurd weaponry.

Describe Life at Irrational in three words or less.

KS: Fantastic creative maelstrom.

What is your favorite game of all time?

KS: Silent Hill 2. This is how you do horror, not with monster closets but by investing a character with stakes and slowly peeling them away. Incredible monster design, too.

Name a game everyone should play once in their life.

KS: Mass Effect 2. Halo’s core combat is still uncontested champ, but Mass Effect 2 brought together RPG, FPS, and Hollywood movie DNA in a way I find really compelling. Definitely a case of the sum being greater than its parts.

What is your favorite movie?

KS: “The Big Sleep” beats out “The Usual Suspects” by a nose. I’m a huge mystery buff, mostly in the style of Chandler and Ross Macdonald, and Bogart captures Marlowe’s weird combination of compassion and being a super-judgmental asshole. I also think it’s hilarious that they slid a movie about gambling, sex scandals, and the corruption of wealth past the Hayes Code; maybe having William Faulkner on the screenwriting credits bamboozled the censors.

What are your hobbies outside of work?

KS: I do a bunch of writing and toying around with indie game dev engines, but of course that waxes and wanes depending how engaging my current work project is. Needless to say, that home edition of Visual Studio isn’t seeing a whole lot of use right now.

I also enable my terrible baked-goods binges by going to a small Kenpo school a few blocks down from work.

Kenpo? That sounds fun! How’d you get involved with that?

KS: I’ve been doing some form of martial arts since the Resistance days, when a bunch of us designers decided we needed a little less “crunch gut” and a little more “flying kicks delivered at midnight from head-height cubicle walls”. We enlisted en masse at a local Kung Fu school, and it ended up becoming this crazy, pivotal experience for a lot of us. I got my black belt with those same friends years after we had moved on to different projects and roles within the industry.

Of course, when I moved to Boston, I spent way too long forgoing exercise in favor of exploring the city (by way of its restaurants), so I’m trying to plug holes in my Kung Fu training while starting afresh in this new style.

Tell me your favorite story about life at Irrational.

KS: There are a ton of great stories, but I think my favorite is still my first day in town! I had just moved into some temporary housing at the edge of Quincy, and after an hour I was convinced the complex was deserted except for phantom sounds and ghosts from “The Shining”. I had to get out. I called Bill Gardner to arrange lunch later in the week, and after thirty seconds on the phone he stops and says “Wait, you’re here, in town, now? Don’t move WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU.” Ten minutes later, no joke, this Black SUV pulls up and some game designer I’ve never seen before jumps out and tells me to hop into the back, and that it’s almost “too late”. No one can explain exactly what we’re going to, except that “It’ll be fun” and “Oh, it’s in the abandoned schoolhouse on the hill.” At this point I’ve texted my girlfriend to arrange ransom money.

We arrive at the school in the dead of night, and we enter one at a time into a pitch black hallway. I feel my way forward through some twists and turns, and eventually a series of tiny tea lights in the floor lead me into a room which my tired brain first identified as the dream sequence from “Twin Peaks”. Red draped walls, small stage with a jazz crooner, and a bunch of confused people all holding playing cards. A man in a white mask, the bird equivalent of Sander Cohen’s rabbit fetish, hands me a card and tells me to wait my turn. Then and only then am I told that I’m actually seeing some experimental take on MacBeth called “Sleep No More”, and not say, attending some sort of cult sacrifice already in progress. The show itself was incredible, but the experience of hurtling towards some deserted stretch of night with one’s soon-to-be coworkers, wondering if you trust them with your life, well, it’s the sort of thing that sticks with you.