"I wish them the best," Levine said. "I have a personal connection to System Shock, [System Shock 2] was the first game I ever shipped. We were completely stumbling around in the dark on that game... so the impact that it had was a complete surprise to us. Without that game, there's nothing else for us. Nothing would have happened. So I have a deep connection with it... I'm excited, I hope they can figure it out and make a cool game out of it."
We then asked Levine about leaving the next System Shock in somebody else's hands and whether he would have liked to work on it himself, but he responded by drawing comparisons to his mysterious next project that he says is a first-person sci-fi RPG.
"I'm so deeply involved in the themes of our new thing, our new game is a science-fiction game," Levine said. "It involves themes like artificial intelligence and what it means to be programmed, that you are a thing that was created by programming. That's a big theme in the new game. And how much agency you have outside of what you are as a piece of programming instructions. So I'm scratching a lot of those itches in the new game already. I don't really feel a need to go back to touch those characters again, in the same way that I didn't need to when I made BioShock. Say we would have gotten the rights to System Shock before we did BioShock, there wouldn't have been an Andrew Ryan, or Big Daddies, or Elizabeth... I do think it's important to move on and make different things in life."
