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Zombie Bioshock: The Game That Never Got Made
Video game developer 2K Boston, makers of “System Shock 2” and “Bioshock,” recently changed their name back to Irrational Games. In celebration they have made a new website, with incredible insight in their company. One of these insights is the addition of their podcast, ”Irrational Behavior.” In it, host Shawn Elliott interviews varied groups of development and it in they discuss the game they were making right before “Bioshock” …Zombie SWAT. Read on for the game that could have been…
Lead Artist Shawn Robertson on designing. “I wrote up design pitch that I called Infection, but it was like a super design nerdy rpg.”
Art Director Nate Wells on the gameplay. “It had a lot of base building. You would be working from a base and going out into the zombie area and meet people and bring them back. They would be engineers and develop weapons for you. It was very old school, it was almost “X-com” in a way.
Lead Artist Shawn Robertson on scenarios. “If you wanted a machine gun, you would have to rescue a guy that had a machine gun, and you had to figure out where he lived…And we had this idea of zombie scent. Where you could rub dead zombies all over you, which would give you the ability to walk amongst the zombies as long as you didn’t use a weapon for scouting out areas. Strategic goals were if you got the power plant running in the city, then you could go out at night because all the lights were on. It just snowballed into this huge epic undertaking.”
Lead Designer Bill Gardner on the ending. “I remember I wanted it to be like the last level where you’re basically walking down the street and you shoot past a zombie and a window goes out and you look in and it’s actually a lab and the whole city was a just test bed to see if people could live and survive a zombie attack and therefore they could use this weapon to turn people into zombies.”
Creative Designer Ken Levine on the game mechanic. “The question was, what sort of game mechanic was it going to be. I remember thinking about “Robotron,” a game you clearly couldn’t win, but it was a trade off of of doing strategic things, like do I stop and nail the door shut, do I stop and heal my friend who is with me or do I move forward because the monsters would never stop, it was about holding back the horde versus trying to gain strategic advantage. Tactical versus strategic.”
Art Director Nate Wells on emotional game play. “The coolest thing was that if your teamate got infected and you didn’t get to him in time with your antidote, he would change right in front of you, and it would be a unique zombie, and the whole thing was wereally wanted to pull your heart strings..”
Creative Designer Ken Levine on why make Division 9. “What we were frustrated by was, we loved “Resident Evil,” but it didn’t really capture the apocalyptic nature of the “Dawn of the Dead” movies. “Dawn of the dead,” they were barricading themselves and there was a whole “We need to get food, we need to get all these things,” that weren’t in those games that we wanted that survival nature.”
Creative Designer Ken Levine on selling the game. “Actually a publisher did bite, Vivendi wasn’t interested at first, but we actually sold it them…We were just about to sell the company at the same time (to Take 2,) and obviously we couldn’t do both. The only game we ever sold and never did”
To check out more great insightful stuff (including a bunch of deleted characters in Bioshock) check out their podcast. Would you have wanted to play Division 9?
UPDATE: Apparently Game Informer has a trailer up for Division 9 and a little more insight, check out their story and the trailer HERE.
Let’s start with the good news. Lockbox looks far better than its misleading marketing materials suggest, a supernatural horror movie so darkly lit and color graded that you’ll have to squint your way through jump scares. It’s also anchored by reliable genre performers. That’s also about where the good news ends with this rote adaptation of Knifepoint Horror Podcast story “Winthrop.”
The empathetic Carla Gugino gives her all as Ellen, a saint of a woman with boundless patience who takes on life’s hard luck with a kind smile. After giving up her career as a fashion designer to become caretaker for a dying mother, she’s then forced to reinvent herself once more when her caretaker role ends. That catches us up to the events of Lockbox, where Ellen is asked to take in a cousin she hasn’t seen in quite some time who’s dealing with severe PTSD.
Just as Ellen finally establishes a real connection with Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci), it’s interrupted by the arrival of peculiar neighbor Vahna (Katharine Isabelle), who spells clear trouble. When Vahna shows up dead, it sets in motion a supernatural battle of possession.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
Director Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism, Prey for the Devil) and screenwriter Justin Yoffe approach Lockbox in the broadest of brushstrokes, dooming it from the start with clunky storytelling and woefully underdeveloped themes of heady topics like PTSD. Winthrop is a character that comes loaded with emotional baggage and trauma that’s piled on throughout his tragic life, but much like its title, his interiority and history are treated like a tightly guarded secret meant to prolong the supernatural mystery.
The problem here, though, is that Lockbox is too sparse to sustain mystery at all, and it instead robs Winthrop of characterization. It winds up trapping the talented Pucci without anywhere to go, toggling between wounded animal and mentally disoriented.
From there, Lockbox bounds through plot developments without any sense of stakes or purpose, peppered by a smattering of haphazard paint-by-numbers jump scares. The only unwavering constant is Ellen’s resolute faith, and Stamm seems to leave it entirely to Gugino to guide confused audiences through this inconsequential story right up until its supernatural climax.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
To give more credit, Lockbox at least injects an unconventional exorcism here; just don’t expect much in the way of explanation. When the film finally reveals the meaning behind its title, it dangles a fascinating carrot it has zero interest in delivering. More than a severe lack of fleshing out its characters beyond plot drivers or devices, this faith-based flick also seems terrified to offer any worldbuilding whatsoever.
Yoffe’s script stretches the short story beyond its means instead of fleshing it out, and Stamm fills out the gaps with cheap CGI scares and overwrought performances; Isabelle’s Vahna is beyond cartoonish in her villainy. It’s also pretty nonsensical, treating only Ellen’s faith with the utmost sincerity and largely squandering its typically reliable talent. So much so that the final imagery, pure sunkissed saccharine sentimentality, leaves you with the feeling that this horror movie might be better suited as an entry in Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Lockbox releases in select theaters on July 3, 2026.
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