BioShock creator Ken Levine has discussed some of the blowback to 2007’s BioShock, and specifically around the game’s Little Sisters and how there were calls to remove them from the game. He also discussed the current climate of online discourse in a wide-ranging interview.
Speaking to Reason, Levine said there was a “contingent” of people pushing him to “get rid of the Little Sisters” out of fear of public backlash. For anyone just catching up, Little Sisters are people in BioShock who carry a valuable resource in their stomach, and people can decide to kill them to harvest the resource, or not. “I wanted to give that economic question to the player,” Levine said.
“People did talk to me about it and they were very concerned. And that element almost got pulled from the game because the publisher got nervous. But we had a great defender of ours at the publisher who said, ‘No, without that there’s no game.’ And so they let us do it,” he explained.
