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Comment by jay_kyburz | Hacker News Reader

ugg, how did this make it onto the front page of HN. It's been floating around the internet for a few days.

I worked at Irrational Games / 2K Australia from Freedom Force right up until shipping Bioshock 2. I was a team lead, producer, and even ran the Australian office for about year before I left to make Neptune's Pride.

To me there is nothing really controversial in this article. Running big studios full of people with big personalities is really hard. People didn't get along. Things fell apart.

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I just saw it tonight on Twitter and thought it was interesting. I know nothing in it is terribly unique compared to what other studios have gone through, but I still thought it painted an interesting picture of the inside of the industry and what happens to the individual parts that make up the mega-studios we're all used to.

This person is obviously unhappy, but I'm not suggesting there is a major scandal here.

haha, yeah, I guess in my mind there were major scandals, but none of them are in the article. ;)

oh you're just gonna put that line out there for us to bite are you? i bet we're getting nothing

of course we're getting nothing, would you risk your career for a few points on here?

I thought it was interesting, too, for the same reasons. I'm glad it made the front page.

It also sounds like it was written by someone who was not actually there. Most of the content in the article is old news and there are no real personal insights that ring true. E.g. the notion that the team was ok with changing the name from "irrational games" is totally inaccurate; it was a source of tremendous tension between the dev team (at least in Boston) and 2K.

Jay hasn't done sufficient self promotion here. Neptune's Pride 2 is one of my favourite multiplayer games ever. It's a turn based "board game", somewhat akin to Risk, that can take weeks to complete.

If you work in a team you must play it. It is guaranteed to end in tears (In a hopefully good way). https://np.ironhelmet.com/#landing

Thanks Toast! You rock!

Why had I not heard of this game before?

I used to love playing VGA Planets (and Stars!) is this in any way an evolution of that genre?

Wow, I hadn't thought of that game in a long time, and I used to love it. I'll have to check that game.

> Running big studios full of people with big personalities is really hard. People didn't get along. Things fell apart.

That statement is very generic. Could you please elaborate on this?

I can't speak for anybody else, but I was super passionate about my job and the team at 2K Australia, but I didn't enjoy working with my bosses. I found myself arguing with them all the time and felt that I wasn't able to do my job properly. I was burnt out. We argued about what should be in the games, and who should do what and when. There were tussles for creative control and lots and lots of political maneuvering. I wasn't making games anymore.

Rather than stay and do a bad job, I decided to leave and let others step up and have a go.

Glad I did becuase I rediscovered my passion for games and had some success in Neptune's Pride.

So basically the CEOs discovered there buried artistic dreams and took over? If you have to argue about who is on what place in the pipeline, that sounds like what the article is describing.

Yeah, something has been up with HN recently. I posted the original article 2 days ago [0]. It got many upvotes but it didn't show up on the front page and there were no comments.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12818109

The article seems to be more lamenting the decision to shut down 2K Australia, given that (from the author's perspective) it was still a productive studio. It's far from a finely-tuned, hard-hitting, ground-breaking treatise on the topic, but "how did this make it onto the front page of HN" seems extreme. If you know of a better essay on the topic of "What happened to 2K Australia?" or "What happened to Borderlands?" I'd love to see it.

I realize that things like:

> People didn't get along. Things fell apart.

and

> Ken Levine got tired of it.

might well tell the whole story...but I guess it leaves me wanting more (particularly since you imply that there was more).

I wondered what happened to 2K Australia - mainly the office in Canberra was right up the street from my office so it was often in my mind.

I'd love to buy you a beer and have a chat at some point. Do you go to the monthly Pizza and Pixels [1] events?

Looks like they've moved it to a location that's inaccessible for me, but I'll work something out.

1: http://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Canberra-Gamedevs/

I think it is closed now.

I worked at an isp which serviced their CBR office with a 128k isdn then upgraded to a "2 mbit" PAPL link (a niche product where you used 2 or 4 pairs of directly connected copper which bypassed the exchange).

It's definitely closed. That's the first time I've ever heard of "PAPL", though.

A quick search brings up a PDF of a contract with NSW RMS (formerly RTA). I wonder if that's supposed to be public.

Looks like it was a slow, dedicated link to the exchange, still in use right up to 2009. Ah, Australian Internet.

http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/1998-September/0352... has all the good sauce on papl

Yes, next month its out at the AIE. I should be there, I want to playtest my next game. Would love you to come and give it a try.

It's hard to notice or care about the fortunes of great, big, but faceless companies, and indeed I never paid attention to all these studios getting renamed and shut down. But it's eay to notice a single individual, and in this case Ken Levine has been on my radar since Bioshock as I recognized he was the one turning out video game story after video game story that could actually hold a candle to stories in other mediums.

Thus, I heard about the termination of his studio (or scaling his team back to ~15 people-- whatever) with dismay and utter confusion. As far as I knew, he made successful game after successful game, culminating in his whole team getting canned. So that's why I was interested in the story linked above, truthful that it is or not.

Thanks for making Bioshock 2, i actually enjoyed playing that game since it felt (to me at least) that it was more story-rich than the original game.

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