Meet the teams bringing BioShock to PS3 (plus new screens!)

Hello everyone! We’re incredibly pleased that BioShock is coming to the PLAYSTATION 3. Now that the news is official, we’re very much looking forward to sharing a little more about what our team is doing to bring the game to life on the PLAYSTATION 3. We’ll be using this space over the coming months to tell you about new developments, new features and any interesting happenings around our offices. We’ll also be debuting exclusive content like the screenshots embedded in this post.

But first things first – before we get into too many details, let me tell you about the fantastic team that’s working on the PS3 version of BioShock.

The project is based in the 2K Marin studio, which is located in Novato, CA. The 2K Marin team has been collaborating with the 2K teams in Australia and Boston to build the game with team members in each of the studios building, coding, optimizing, bugfixing, and polishing away. On top of that, because this is the first PS3 title from 2K Marin, 2K Australia and 2K Boston, we’ve also got another development partner with some outstanding PS3-specific coding chops helping out with the project – we can’t talk about what studio that is yet, but we look forward to revealing that in the future.

For today, we’ll give a brief “who’s who” for the three 2K studios that are working together on BioShock for the PS3.

2K Marin: We started the 2K Marin studio in November of 2007 with a group of eight people who migrated across the country (and in some cases, the world) in order to continue working on BioShock. The core 2K Marin group includes the Executive Producer (me!), our Creative Director, Jordan Thomas (designer of the Fort Frolic level), Lead Programmer Carlos Cuello, and Lead Artist Hogarth de la Plante. All the aforementioned folks worked on the original version of BioShock. We’ve also got some extremely talented programmers including Ray Graham (previous titles include Godfather, The Simpsons, NBA 2K, and NBA Street) Johnnemann Nordhagen (formerly from Sony’s R&D group), David Pittman (previously of Stormfront Studios), and Jake Etgeton (also from the original BioShock crew), who are currently hard at work making builds and squashing bugs.

2K Australia: During BioShock development, Australia was the home of the tech team – the guys who worked on the core engine and rendering features that brought to life the gorgeous visuals of Rapture. Five members of that team, Mathi Nagarajan, Ben Driehuis, Daniel Lamb, Weicheng Fang, and Tim Cooper are now working on the PS3 version, focused on rendering, graphics and optimization. Their goal is to make the game run amazingly well on the PS3, and they’ve been making tremendous progress so far on that front.

2K Boston: The Boston team is the largest chunk of the BioShock team at the moment; many of them hard at work on some of the as-yet-unannounced components of the PS3 version. I can mention the work of one Boston team member, Ian Bond, who has been optimizing and refactoring the physics simulation for the game to take the maximum advantage of the PS3 hardware.

It can be tricky to coordinate the work of so many teams across so many time zones (the Boston team has almost no overlapping working hours with the Australia team); we make liberal use of phones, videoconferencing, forums, emails, and travel to keep everyone aware of what’s going on. The good news is that with all these teams on the case, development on the PS3 version goes on for roughly 18 hours a day!

That’s a brief overview of the teams working on the PS3 version. In the future, we’ll go into more depth about what’s different and what’s new in the upcoming release. We hope that you’re excited about BioShock coming to PS3 as we are, and we’ll see you again soon!