Irrational Games

What Irrational Games was

Irrational Games was a game development studio that worked under Take-Two Interactive's 2K Games publishing label. When Take-Two announced the acquisition on January 9, 2006, Irrational had offices in Boston, Massachusetts and Canberra, Australia, and was described by the publisher as an award-winning studio behind several earlier titles. Ken Levine, who co-founded the studio, was its president at the time of the acquisition.

Take-Two stated that Irrational had multiple titles in development across its North American and Australian studios at that point, and that the first game to be published under the 2K Games label would be BioShock. The publisher described BioShock as a role-playing shooter for next-generation console systems and PC, and said it was planned for release in early 2007.

The studio's project archive, kept on the Ghost Story Games site, lists seven released titles with dates between 1999 and 2013, including its early first-person work and its later shooters. That archive, along with the studio's legacy blog, podcast recordings and an online store, is the main public record of the team's output before the rebrand. The archive pages are dated and carry the original project descriptions.

BioShock

BioShock is the title listed under Irrational Games in our database. The studio's own project pages give the game a release date of August 2007 and describe its setting: the player survives an oceanic plane crash, descends by bathysphere to the undersea city of Rapture, and moves through a city built on the ideas of its founder. The gene-altering drug ADAM is central to the story and to the game's abilities.

The studio's BioShock page also lists the awards the game collected in 2007 and 2008. These include a Game of the Year award from the Game Critics Awards in 2007, best game and best Xbox 360 game awards from Spike TV Awards in 2007, best audio, best writing and best visual art awards at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2008, and a best game award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2007.

From Irrational to Ghost Story Games

The studio's identity changed after BioShock. The legacy Irrational Games pages now sit inside the website of Ghost Story Games, which states plainly that Irrational Games is now Ghost Story Games. Ghost Story's own news archive records the rebrand, and its studio page describes a self-publishing developer with Ken Levine as president and creative director.

Ghost Story Games describes itself as a studio founded by twelve former Irrational Games developers and says it was set up to make immersive, story-driven games. Its studio page credits Levine as the creative director behind earlier Irrational work and lists team members who shipped previous Irrational titles. In that sense the studio is the successor operation to Irrational rather than a separate company with a shared name.

The rebrand was communicated by the studio itself rather than by a third party: a post published on the Ghost Story Games site in February 2017 introduced the new studio as a self-publishing operation founded by twelve former Irrational Games developers, and a later post in 2019 confirmed that the studio had been rebranded from Irrational Games to Ghost Story Games and had launched a new website to go with the name.

Games

• BioShock
• BioShock Infinite
• BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea
• BioShock Remastered
• Freedom Force
• Freedom Force vs the 3rd Reich
• SWAT 4
• SWAT 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate
• System Shock 2
• The Lost
• Tribes: Vengeance

Questions people ask