Vending machines rule, waiters suuuuuccckkk: so sayeth the "touchstone" of Bioshock creator Ken Levine's Judas
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Source: Rock Paper Shotgun
Category: Games
Originally Published: 2025-12-03
Curated: 2025-12-03 16:22
Bloody waiters. Asking you what you'd like to eat after you waltz into the restaurant at which they're employed. The absolute cheek of it. Why can't they just ingest my money and spit a vaguely edible chocolate bar out of their belly button? This is the central philosophy which serves as the "touchstone" of BioShock creator Ken Levine's Judas and its protagonist, Judas.
Yep, there's another dev blog out for the BioShocky FPS in which you'll run around a colony ship and gradually force someone to dislike you so much they go full villain.
This time, Levine and co focus on the game's protagonist, who's called Judas. No, not the dude from the last supper, Judas is a lady who's lived her life on the game's spaceship, The Mayflower, and has had a lot of bad experiences interacting with its inhabitants. She also isn't a fan of going out for dinner.
As Levine recalls, when the team were trying to nail down just who Judas would be as a character, he was out for a run and cam,e up with a "speech" she might give. Said speech came to form "the touchstone we kept coming back to for the character and ultimately the entire game", and it went as follows:
I only eat at vending machines, because I don’t like interacting with waiters. Restaurants are more complicated: there are greetings and "hellos" and "Is this table okay?" And I’m thinking, "Why should I care what you recommend? You’re not me!" But I’m not supposed to say that, so I just have to count the seconds until the interaction can end, devise socially acceptable ways of saying "Go f*** yourself." Because for me, conversation is a prelude to failure. Vending machines never ask me a question that I don’t know the answer to. The exchange is reduced to the transaction: money in, product out. Why can’t people be more like that?”
Basically, Judas likes machines more than people. As someone who gets a bit of social anxiety when chatting to strangers, I get it, though I can't say I feel fuck off levels of strongly about waiters who're just politely trying to find me a table. According to Ghost Story Games, it's the "tension" between the robot-heavy sci-fi setting playing into Judas' hands, while her inability to play by societal rules leaves her a "pariah" or "outlaw" that forms the centre of the game, which its creators have taken to calling a "Judas Simulator".
The devs also stress that Judas' deep connection to the game's setting sets her apart from BioShock and BioShock Infinite leads Jack and Booker DeWitt, both of whom are strangers infiltrating unfamiliar worlds. I'm keen to see just how well that familiarity's played, with Ghost Story art director Nathan Phail-Liff's description of The Mayflower as being layered with history reflecting the twists and turns of the society inhabiting it over the years. Systems are being leaned on to manage the enivronment design in a fashion that means not everything'll be handcrafted, which'll be impressive if Ghost Story have pulled it off, but I'm slightly concerned could also imbue the game with the sterile coldness which can seep into game worlds which lean on tech like procedural generation particularly hard.
Breathtaking and twisted underwater city Rapture's the main thing that regularly pulls me back into BioShock, so here's hoping The Mayflower can capture some of that magic. If it does, I can't see my divergence from Judas' hardline waiter stance being a stumbling block.
This article was curated from Rock Paper Shotgun. All rights belong to the original publisher.