Kenneth M. Levine (born September 1, 1966) is an American game developer. He is the creative director and co-founder of Ghost Story Games (formerly known as Irrational Games). He led the creation of the BioShock series, and is also known for his work on Thief: The Dark Project and System Shock 2. Levine was named one of the "Storytellers of the Decade" by Game Informer and was the 1UP Network's 2007 person of the year. He received the inaugural Golden Joystick "Lifetime Achievement Award" for his work. Life and career Levine was born in Flushing, New York to a Jewish family. He studied drama at Vassar College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama in 1988, in Poughkeepsie, New York before moving to Los Angeles to pursue a film career, writing two screenplays. In 1995, he was hired as a game designer by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Looking Glass Studios after replying to a job ad in Next Generation magazine. At Looking Glass, Levine worked with pioneering designer Doug Church to establish the initial fiction and design of Thief: The Dark Project. In 1997, following his work on Thief, Levine left Looking Glass along with two coworkers, Jonathan Chey and Robert Fermier, to found Irrational Games. The studio's first game was System Shock 2, an early hybrid of a role-playing game and first-person shooter. System Shock 2 is the sequel to Looking Glass' System Shock (1994). Levine served as lead writer and designer, and the game shipped in 1999 to critical acclaim. Irrational Games developed Freedom Force and its sequel Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich, real-time tactical role-playing games that drew heavily on the love Levine and Irrational Games's artist Robb Waters had for the Silver Age of Comic Books. After the first Freedom Force game, Irrational developed Tribes: Vengeance and SWAT 4, on which Levine served as writer and executive producer respectively. Although Tribes: Vengeance, SWAT 4, and Third Reich all shipped within a year of one another in 2004 and 2005, Irrational Games had been working in preproduction on the first-person shooter BioShock, the studio's most ambitious game at that point, since 2002. The game went through numerous revisions to its premise and gameplay, and was released in August 2007. In 2005, Levine, Chey, and Fermier sold Irrational Games to publisher Take-Two Interactive. Take-Two Interactive changed their name to 2K, just as BioShock was released. BioShock was