Beyond the Sea: Inside 2K Marin

2K Marin is like a burrito.

When asked to sum up their freshly minted creative studio in one word, the team tossed around a few typical terms — “creative,” “excited,” “collaboration,” “glee.” But nobody expected Mexican food to be on the menu. ¿Qué?

“Because,” explains senior character designer Colin Fix, “it’s the tastiest thing ever — it’s a bunch of neat little ingredients wrapped up in one tortilla of love.”

“I was going to say ‘love,’” says executive producer Alyssa Finley.

“And it’s a balanced diet!” chimes in JP LeBreton, lead level designer.

“It’s cheap, though,” warns lead artist Hogarth de la Plante. “I don’t know.”

“And it’s giving me indigestion!” cries creative director Jordan Thomas. “Bail out now!”

It’s a funnier and friendlier introduction to the 2K Marin team than the internet offered. A terse press release announcing the formation of the studio went out in December with few details — no names, no games. A job posting for a lead animator noted the studio members’ BioShock lineage, which added more intrigue than fact. Rumors flew: It’s a bunch of angry developers who stormed out of the Boston studio and struck out on their own! Ken Levine’s not going with them; he’s impossible to work with! They’re going to do BioShock 2 without him! The online grapevine decided it knew everything it needed to know about 2K Marin — accuracy be damned.

The truth is less sensational and, for anyone who loved Rapture’s rich world, a lot more hopeful. Yes, the studio was founded by former 2K Boston and 2K Australia employees; no, they didn’t storm out in a huff. Yes, Ken Levine stayed on the East Coast to continue leading 2K Boston; and no, there are no hard feelings. And yes, the 2K Marin team is going to do BioShock 2 without his direct involvement. And that’s going to be okay. “It all started with a phone call from Greg Gobbi, VP of product development,” explains Finley, a game-development veteran with over 15 years of experience, from programming to project management. “‘Hey, we’re in this situation where we’re trying to do all these projects at once, all of which are awesome, and one of them is BioShock 2. Wanna go there?’” A Bay Area native, Finley had relocated to Boston after swearing she’d never go to the East Coast for a job. Heading back to the left coast meant uprooting her family, but to have the creative satisfaction of working with members of her team on her home turf was a fairly easy call.

“It really was about opportunity,” adds Thomas, who designed the Fort Frolic level of BioShock. “2K was solving a problem by creating a studio, and the problem was all about the number of projects and the need for more development weight. They extended the opportunity of ‘Do you want to start a studio that has the creative lineage of a studio that would work on a game like BioShock? And in fact, you would be working on the sequel.’ It was a really upbeat kind of thing for us — ‘Yes, this sounds like something great that we would all like to do together.’”

“All” in this case amounted to eight core team members, and while a few jokes about piling into a VW microbus and trekking across the country were made, the truth isn’t nearly that organized. “There was a four-week period when all of us were in transit from our various points,” recalls Finley. “If you had the giant map and you were updating your Indiana Jones line…one guy fl ew from Boston, took a European vacation, then arrived here just in time to meet his stuff. And when it started out, it was just Hoagy — he was 2K Marin for a couple days.”

“And everybody thought I owned the place,” says de la Plante. “Everybody from I.T. was like, ‘Where do you want me to put these computers?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’

” The team ultimately arrived in Novato, California (just north of San Francisco), and set up shop in what used to be an enormous airplane hangar. The building already housed several other important parts of the 2K empire — the PR and marketing teams, and the finance department, not to mention the president of 2K Games himself. And while those departments already had the creature comforts of a working office, the BioShock migrants arrived to an unbuilt office. “They basically stuffed us in the room in the middle of [2K-owned] Visual Concepts,” says Finley. “They make amazing games and they do it in a very structured way — they’re very quiet, focused people. And we’re there screaming, ‘This is what BioShock 2 ought to be like!’” While the company wasn’t ready to announce what the 2K Marin crew was up to, the team got to work immediately. “There we were, eight people in a room, going ‘How do you start?’” says Finley. “And the way it starts is Jordan starts brainstorming.”

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