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One of Schilling’s early fixations was that Copernicus players should be able to play as centaurs. Designers and artists tried to talk him out of this obsession—a half-human, half-horse creature wouldn’t be able to use mounts or even fit through doors—but ling insisted and insisted before he was finally dissuaded.

A few months later, 2K reorganized again. “We had a meeting invitation sent out to us late one night,” said Chris Proctor, the designer in Australia. “‘Everybody meet in the car park at 10:00 a.m.” When he arrived at work the next morning, one of the execu-
tives started reading names off a list. This person, go downstairs.
That person, upstairs. Proctor was told to go to the downstairs group, which he soon discovered was bad news. It turned out that 2K was pulling the XCOM project from the Australia studio entirely,
leaving their staff with nothing to do but support Irrational on the next BioShock game. “The upstairs group were to stay and continue working on BioShock Infinite,” Proctor said. “And the downstairs group was laid off.” As Proctor sat there in a daze, one of 2K’s executives pulled him and a few other designers aside and told them that, actually, they could retain their jobs and keep working on XCOM, but there was a catch: they’d have to move to San Francisco.
“I was really steamed about that,” Proctor said.

Many of the veteran game developers at Irrational had been through layoffs and even studio closures before, but those were usually the result of financial woes. When a publisher canceled a game, developers knew to start updating their résumés. When a game failed to sell enough copies, the studio behind it could be in danger. Those events made sense. But with Irrational, as perhaps befit its name, logic had flown out the window. This was the studio behind BioShock, still, six years later, considered one of the greatest games ever made. Sure, the process of making BioShock Infinite had been painful and expensive, but the game sold millions and had earned a 94 on Metacritic. They’d given up countless hours of personal and family time to finish it. Their reward for that was to lose their jobs? It just felt so unfair.”

A number of senior staff were quitting Irrational, frustrated with the constant overhauls and Levine’s directorial style. To replace them—and to try to wrangle the game into shape—Irrational kept hiring.

In March 2012, Irrational brought in Don Roy, a veteran game producer, who had some experience closing out games at big publishers like Sony and Microsoft. He was shocked to see just how bad things were. “I get there and there was essentially no game,” Roy said. “A tremendous amount of work had been done. It just hadn’t been stood up as a game in any particular form. To the point where the first thing I did was go, ‘Can I play a build of the game?’ The answer was no. They said, ‘You can play these pieces of things, but there’s not an actual functioning game.’ ”