2K Marin

~ the last words ~

2K announced the formation of 2K Marin on 17 December 2007, a few months after the first BioShock had turned into the year's most-discussed game. The reason for its existence was a disagreement. Ken Levine had directed BioShock at Irrational and did not want to make the sequel, so the publisher built a second studio in Novato, California and handed the sequel to it.

That is a hard brief. BioShock 2 came out in 2010 to reviews that were good and to an audience that spent most of its time comparing it to a game made by people who had walked away. It sold. It also has a reputation now, fifteen years on, as the better-playing of the two, which is the sort of verdict that only ever arrives long after it could help anybody.

The second and last shipped title was The Bureau: XCOM Declassified in August 2013. It had been in development for years, changed genre more than once along the way, and landed to a shrug. Two months later the studio was gone.

~ the record ~

~ the name that went to australia ~

There is a detail here that makes the corporate record confusing. In April 2010, for the XCOM project, the sister studio 2K Australia started operating under the 2K Marin name. It kept that name until November 2011, when it went back to being 2K Australia to work on BioShock Infinite. So for about nineteen months there were two separate buildings on two continents publishing under one studio name.

Studios are close to invisible from the player's side of this. You buy a box with a publisher's logo on it, and the group of people who actually did the work has a name you might read once in a credits scroll. I have played games from studios that were already dead by the time the disc reached Turkey and had no idea, which is the ordinary condition of caring about games from anywhere outside the US trade press.

~ still active ~

On 17 October 2013, 2K confirmed heavy staff reductions at 2K Marin. Most of the team went. The ones who stayed were moved into a new, at that point unnamed 2K studio that Rod Fergusson had announced the month before, also in Novato. Former employees later described the studio as essentially closed from that day, because the headcount had reached zero.

No shutdown was ever announced. In May 2014, seven months later, Take-Two chairman and chief executive Strauss Zelnick was still telling people that 2K Marin was active and that future BioShock games would come out of it. A studio with nobody in it stayed technically alive on the record for years, because saying it had closed meant admitting on the record that the BioShock team no longer existed.

~ who got the rooms ~

In December 2019 the answer finally arrived from the other direction. 2K announced that the next BioShock was being made by Cloud Chamber, a new internal studio, and Cloud Chamber had moved into the old 2K Marin space in Novato.

The furniture outlived the brand by six years. What was actually closed in October 2013 was never the address or the franchise, both of which 2K kept, but the specific group of people assembled to make a game somebody else refused to make, and that group had been assembled for exactly one purpose and never given a second one.

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