IGN: I wanted to start off by asking some general questions. Will you tell me how you came up with the story? It takes place underwater in a city where you've got art deco design, a utopian set-up, and yet the world in which the lead character discovers finds it crumbling and in disarray.

Ken Levine: Well, I wish I can say I had some kind of genius master plan to come up with this stuff. I never really do. I just sort of sit down and it kind of accretes over time; the same with Thief, Freedom Force, and System Shock 2. I get some themes going in my head and then start building around it. For us, we wanted to have…we knew we had this theme of biological experimentation. That was at the heart of where all the players' powers and all of the creatures from the game came from. From this biological intentional mutation I wanted to build a world where that would happen and be believable and not in the far future, but something that we could speak to, like something we're dealing with now -- with stem cell research and the moral issues that go around. And I have my useless liberal arts degree, so I've read stuff from Ayn Rand and George Orwell, and all the sort of utopian and dystopian writings of the 20th century, which I've found really fascinating.