You’d think it would be fairly easy to make a BioShock game: After all, “there’s always a lighthouse,” as the man once said. Yet it’s proven remarkably challenging: After three acclaimed games in relatively quick succession—BioShock in 2007, BioShock 2 in 2010, and BioShock Infinite in 2013—there’s been nothing. Efforts have been made: Hangar 13 was reportedly in the early stages of work on a new game in the series in 2018, which even then seemed like an unusually long wait after Infinite. But it fizzled.
In a new interview with Stephen Totilo’s Game File, Strauss Zelnick, CEO of BioShock publisher Take-Two Interactive, said he’s not, strictly speaking, “surprised” that it’s taking so long to get a new BioShock game out the door. But he sure is disappointed.
“Think about what ‘surprise’ implies,” Zelnick said. “That’s like, one day, everything’s awesome, and the next day, I’m like, ‘Holy shit.’ And I don’t run the business that way. But I think if you’re saying ‘disappointed,’ yes. Deeply disappointed.”
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Zelnick said the next BioShock game is taking so long because it was difficult “finding the right creative purchase”—that is, a concept the dev team could build out into a fully fleshed-out game. “I think we, in retrospect, wasted a lot of time and money chasing down some creative alleys that turned out to be dead ends.”
Despite those challenges and the extended timeline that’s resulted, Zelnick said he’s “feeling a lot better” about the state of the new project now. He may have former Diablo boss Rod Fergusson to thank for that: Fergusson left Blizzard in August 2025 to take the wheel at Cloud Chamber, the studio working on the new BioShock, effectively repeating the “closer” role he played on BioShock Infinite.
Fergusson’s arrival heralded something of a reset for the project: 2K Games president said at the time that after several years of development, “we’ve made the decision with studio leadership to rework certain aspects that are core to a BioShock game.” The studio also laid off an unspecified number of employees; a Bloomberg report said more than 80 people, representing about a third of the studio’s headcount, were put out of work. That was less than a year ago, so while I’m happy that Zelnick is feeling better, I suspect we’ve still got a long wait before the next lighthouse comes into view.
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