For Freedom! Ken Levine Discusses Freedom Force and its Future

Freedom Force, the Silver and Gold age super hero game that broke the curse, didn’t feature a licensed universe with Superman or Captain America. Instead, it played like a tribute to the classic comic book story and while it never became a mainstream commercial success it remains an active and cherished game for its fans and their modification efforts.

This weekend, IGN uploaded an interview featuring 2k Boston’s( formerly Irrational Games) Ken Levine, who was executive producer on both games as well as writer, and some key members of the Irrational Games team regarding the past, present and future of the game series. Levine and his team discuss the rough ride the series experienced, their personal favorite characters in the Irrational universe and the passion it requires to get a self-published sequel out on the street.

We ended up self-publishing the second game; we were a private company at the time. That meant it was a complete a labor of love and a labor of financial love as well, because John and I, the owners of the company, paid for the development and publishing of that title out of our own pocket, basically. That cost us a fair amount of money and when the game came out, it was probably a combination of — I don’t think we did enough different from the first game and it was just a little too late and too long for the sequel. It just didn’t sell very well – it sold a fraction of what the first one sold. I thought it was a better game.

There were two additional Freedom Force projects in the planning stages before the company decided to pursue their blockbuster title Bioshock and Levine also explains the concepts behind these titles in the interview.

Ken Levine: One quick thing before we begin, can I give some description about what Freedom Force 3 and Ultimate Freedom Force were?

IGN: Sure!

Ken Levine: Basically, these are projects that we never ended up making, and I thought it might be interesting for the Freedom Force fans, because you see versions of the characters in different time periods from Freedom Force. We had a 70’s Freedom Force we were going to do, we thought about doing a modern day Freedom Force, and they’re all concepts of characters that were going to be in that game or updated versions of characters from the original game. So I thought it might be cool.

The two games recently joined the growing list of classic titles on Valve’s Steam service at an amazingly discounted price ($7.49 for both games). If you are a fan of classic 60’s and 40’s super hero comics then these games should not be missed.