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.”

“It’s not so much brainstorming as excitable hand-waving and sub-human grunts,” admits Thomas, “and then other people decode those grunts and turn them into things that actually might one day be a game.” Like several of the core members, Thomas moved up when he moved out, ascending from level designer on BioShock to creative director of the sequel. “On the first game, I was given a lot of leeway by the team to go off into my crazy place — and I owe them for that freedom because I got to know myself a lot better as a designer. My attitude is to just try to pay forward that sense of liberation that I got to these guys, who I think are going to come back and surprise me with things I wouldn’t have thought of. I tried hard to make sure that when it was time to unveil my section [of BioShock], there was something worth seeing there — something that maybe could come only from me — and I want to see the same thing out of them.”

If Thomas is affected by the pressure of the job, it’s not evident; all he exudes is electric excitement at the creative opportunities. He likes to use big words in bold metaphors, with a childlike smile on his face. It’s as if he’s unaware that the last guy who held the title of creative director on a BioShock game became a household name among gamers: Ken Levine. “BioShock is a hard act to follow,” asserts Thomas. “There is no controversy in that statement at all. But also, I really feel like, at its core, BioShock was a labor of love that involved many different skill sets. And it’s also very fiercely subjective; there are interesting takes on a concept like that that can come from an alternate perspective. What I hope is that when somebody sees my take on the franchise, they will see that I’m treating it very respectfully, and also that it’s something they wouldn’t necessarily have seen before. That it’s something that…has the flavor of my soul, if you know what I mean.”

“I have so much faith in Jordan,” says Finley proudly. “Jordan was essential to what made Fort Frolic what it is. I think the fantasy he built in that little space shows just a taste of his possibilities.” But…how can you make BioShock 2 without the Big Daddy Levine himself? The gossip made the Marin migration sound more like a Boston defection. Thomas says it’s hardly so sensational: “Rumors aside, from our point of view, it’s been really kind of a wonderful team exercise, and really not much more than that on the inter-studio political front.” Internet pundits, you’ve been served.

“Basically, [Ken’s] on his stuff and we’re on our stuff,” says Finley in reference to Marin’s current work on BioShock for PS3. “He’s the kind of guy who does one thing at a time amazingly well. His ability to quantify and focus and say ‘This is the most important thing right now’ is unparalleled. And right now that focus,” she says, pausing for corporate confidentiality, “…is somewhere else.”

Levine may have been BioShock’s main storyteller, but he wasn’t BioShock itself. “I think he would be the first one to tell you that,” says de la Plante. “It was truly a collaborative effort — everybody who worked on that game put so much soul into it.” Thomas adds: “It’s worth noting that anybody who has ever worked with Ken as a designer has learned from him, and we all use those lessons every day. So from our point of view, it’s really not so much about being in his shadow as being part of the creative bloodline.”

“Working with Ken and everyone else back in Boston was the turning point in my career as a designer, and it was amazing,” says LeBreton. “So now it’s like, what’s the next leg of the journey?”

To be honest, 2K Marin’s cubicle farm doesn’t look like much. Or rather, it looks like something very specific. The bold, simple paint motif is two-tone blue, with a horizontal line separating the two shades…it’s hard to see it and not look at it as the office equivalent of being underwater. Combine that with the life-size statue of a Big Daddy and the BioShock portals on the walls, and…well, it looks like you’re living and working in Rapture.

“I didn’t think this was Rapture at all,” explains de la Plante with a slightly baffled tone. “The paint scheme was going to be white, and nobody was really thinking about it. I kept bugging the facilities people, saying, ‘Can we at least paint it how we want to?’ And they were like, ‘Fine, whatever you want.’ Really, I was thinking about how to make an environment that’s fun and creative and gets everybody’s juices fl owing. We make games here; it should feel like a fun place to hang out. And everyone that comes in here now says, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s the horizon line, and the ocean, and the sky!’ And we’re like, ‘….yep.’”

Like it or not, Rapture is where 2K Marin will live for at least the next year of their lives. Development of the original’s PS3 port continues parallel to the full-blown sequel. The team has grown to 25 members (plus de la Plante’s dog, Bella), with plans to double that. Everyone feels that a small group will preserve the team’s “soul” — what Fix eloquently calls “flowy hippie sh-t, like artsy fartsy stuff…you can’t even explain it.”

Gamers don’t need to understand the culture of 2K Marin; they just want to know that the team can deliver a worthy sequel to one of the most emotionally charged games of 2007. Or, as a fan posted in an internet forum, “Would you kindly not screw this up?”

“It’s sophomore-album expectations,” says LeBreton. “Sometimes it’s very well-intentioned and loving. All we can do is make something that we think is amazing to us, and make sure our standards are higher than anyone else’s. Because frankly, that’s how the first game was. I can only assume from the response that the first game got that our standards were at least as high as the public’s. That’s more of a convoluted way of saying ‘Follow your muse.’”

And buy the muse a burrito.