Take-Two Interactive CEO, Strauss Zelnick, says he’s “deeply disappointed” the publisher hasn’t been able to release a new BioShock game, more than a decade after the series’ last entry.
Speaking to Game File, the exec was asked about the perceived troubles at Canadian studio Cloud Chamber, the company formed to lead development on the next BioShock game, after original creator Irrational Games downsized following 2013’s Infinite.
Work on the fourth BioShock game was announced back in 2019, but nothing has been seen of the project, and last year its developer’s leadership team was replaced as part of an apparent revamp following a disappointing internal review.
Zelnick was asked if he was surprised that Take-Two hadn’t been able to make a new BioShock since 2013, despite the popularity and critical acclaim of the series.
“Think about what ‘surprise’ implies,” the exec responded. “That’s like, one day, everything’s awesome, and the next day, I’m like, ‘Holy shit.’ And I don’t run the business that way. But I think if you’re saying ‘disappointed,’ yes. Deeply disappointed.”
Rod Fergusson, the veteran triple-A games producer who worked on BioShock Infinite and recently helmed the Diablo series at Blizzard, was announced as the new head of the BioShock franchise last year.
Zelnick said he was “feeling a lot better” about the BioShock project now, and offered some explanation for why development had stalled.
“I think finding the right creative purchase was hard, as it turns out,” he said. “I think we, in retrospect, wasted a lot of time and money chasing down some creative alleys that turned out to be dead ends.”
He added that he feels that’s the “nature of entertainment”. “What we do is a big team activity in the same way that making a movie is a team activity. And with big team activities, you can’t necessarily tell how it’s going to be until it all comes together, or begins to come together, and that can take a while and can be very costly.”
Commenting on the leadership changes at the head of BioShock’s new developer last year, a spokesperson for Take-Two’s 2K label said it was “working hard to set BioShock up for the best possible future”.
“Right now, we have a good game, but we are committed to delivering a great one. We are working closely with leadership at the studio to define this path.”
