SEATTLE -- Ken Levine, the creative director of BioShock, got Penny Arcade Expo 2008 off to a rousing start Friday, revealing the dark secrets of his nerdy past to an appreciative audience.
In a brief talk that covered Levine's childhood, his high school obsession with Dungeons and Dragons, and his brief post-college flirtation with Hollywood screenwriting, Levine told the nerds in attendance not to hide from the things they are passionate about. Embracing his love of videogames, Levine said, was what brought him all of his success today, including his acclaimed masterpiece.
Not that there weren't some missteps. "I wanted to fuck the Scarlet Witch. I mean, seriously, look at her," Levine said.
Levine's speech was the perfect kickoff for this year's PAX. The crowd was bigger than ever inside the new, giant theater area, and they roared with applause and laughter at all of Levine's carefully-written nerd references. They applauded when he showed a slide of the Atari 2600 on the two massive projection screens that flanked him. They laughed when he said of his birth, "When my parents rolled up my character, they didn't get any 18s. They got a couple 12s, maybe. Two or three fives: Strength, agility, charisma."
Throughout his speech, Levine wanted to reassure the geeks of PAX that he was one of them, telling in cringeworthily embarrassing detail the tales of his isolated youth ("a sentence in Nerd Siberia") and awkward teenage years, made significantly more bearable when he found his "tribe," a local group of D&D players.
But even this was doomed to failure as the group's players, Levine excluded, started to date. Levine joined the drama club in college, majored in theater, and moved to Hollywood to be a screenwriter. "I was sharing an apartment with Marisa Tomei's brother, one of the Goonies, and the guy who starred in Leprechaun 2."
When an attempt to write a romantic comedy for Paramount didn't pan out, Levine bummed around for seven years, re-discovering videogaming as an escape from his daily drudgery. Eventually, he turned to Next Generation magazine and applied for a job as a game designer -- and the rest is history. Levine didn't go into any of that part of his life, preferring to end the speech there. "We're here at PAX because we're all fucking nerds," he concluded, drawing one final round of raucous cheers.
Image: Stephen Brashear/Wired.com
