“Hey, hey mama, said the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove,” screams Robert Plant at the opening of Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.”

“Then a drum will come in, then the bass-line, then Jimmy Page and by the end it’s this huge explosion of sound,” says Ken Levine, creative director and co-founder of Irrational Games. “But it’s a build-up to that. You don’t start at the same level you finish up.”

From Irrational’s Cambridge, Mass., headquarters, Levine is describing the different forms of media, including rock songs from 1971, that he looks to for inspiration in orchestrating the peaks and valleys that spiral into a game’s ending. Levine would know something about it: Irrational’s 2007 title, BioShock, contains one of the greatest gaming plot-twists of all time.

Spinning a videogame tale that roars into a climatic finish is an art form that no two developers approach the same way, and it’s a mechanic that can be as thrillingly rewarding as head-slammingly frustrating.

“Remember [the ending for SNES title] Bad Dudes?” asks Epic Games design director Cliff Bleszinski. “It’s like the president, and he’s like, ‘Hey dudes, thanks for rescuing me, let’s go have a burger, ha ha.’ And you’re like, ‘Wow, thanks. All that effort.’”

There’s a lot of talk right now about how fewer players are finishing single-player campaigns: often, they’re making a beeline straight to the multiplayer suites. And yet, developers still have to walk that line of catering to folks that enjoy just tasting titles and those that want to digest the full experience.

KEEPING PACE

With few exceptions, it’s hard to really begrudge anyone for not finishing a game they start these days. So many 15-hour journeys struggle with properly executing a compelling story in the first place, piling on filler stages, extraneous challenges, unnecessarily frustrating mini-bosses, loose narrative ends, and clumsy gameplay.

Just like in a song, Levine says a game should build and release tension several times throughout the experience. “Pacing is an extremely important thing,” Levine says. “My theory — which I think makes people here sort of look at me crazy — is that it’s related to the roots of our sexual behavior, which has a similar pattern to it. The build-up into climax.”

And really, the process of hooking you into a game’s look, feel, and premise starts before it even hits shelves. “While we’re making the game, we put out teasers and trailers so that players can really get invested by asking us questions,” says Ted Price, CEO of Insomniac Games, makers of the Resistance series and the upcoming Overstrike.

Bleszinski says once a player is invested in a game, it’s critical to work straight from the opening sequence to keep them interested. For instance, the recently released Gears of War 3 is the longest campaign of the series, but Bleszinski says he wants you to finish every piece of it, whether or not you’ve ever played a previous entry in the franchise before. “People can lose track of the plot throughout the game,” he says. “So we use these little devices, such as introducing a new character halfway through the game, and he’s like, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ And it’s like, ‘Oh, hey, we’re going to go to this destination because this is where the solution is.’ And you’re like, ‘Oh, okay,’ and the player is reminded of it.”

To keep you invested in Irrational’s upcoming BioShock Infinite, Levine plans to rely a little more on puppeteering your heartstrings. In the 2012 FPS title, you’ll play as Booker, a man trying to help a young woman named Elizabeth avoid capture by Songbird, a mysterious flying creature. “I’m trying to develop a relationship between Elizabeth and the player,” he says. “And develop an empathy between the two of them. If we succeed in doing that, then you’re going to actually feel something for this character.”

One thing Levine says he didn’t want to do with BioShock Infinite is make another game about one character’s solitary journey through a mysterious world. “You have to give a character in the game a relationship that you care about,” Levine says, “because at the end of the day that’s what takes us through most stories.”