Then somebody gets tired of spending money on the game, or the publisher goes out of business, and the game can't be resold to another publisher because their contract ties them in too tightly. For some reason, superhero games have a tendency to get cancelled. Levine believes that it's merely bad project management, and perhaps just a smidgeon of coincidence. And they don't really think about the problems. Levine explains that every game is fraught with it's own unique problems.
Every game is a pain in the ass to make, if it's any good.
Irrational's secret is good planning, and they have done an ample amount for Freedom Force, which has been in development since May of last year. We thought of all the problems, we had a big design document, and we talked a lot about what this was going to be. We decided what was important to us. Irrational created System Shock 2, this magazine's 1999 Game of the Year, for Looking Glass Studios. We did Shock in around a year.