Idle Thumbs

BioShock Commentary with JP LeBreton

On June 23, JP LeBreton allowed Idle Thumbs to pull off one of the only intelligent and useful things it has achieved in its history: a live broadcast of BioShock featuring insightful and entertaining commentary by one of its designers.

JP is a long-time friend of Thumbs and is currently working on The Cave with Chris at Double Fine Productions. He was a designer at Irrational Games on the original BioShock, then became one of the founding members of 2K Marin, where he was lead level designer on BioShock 2. He also knows way too much about the Commodore 64.

The first three videos show JP playing through BioShock’s first level, then Arcadia, of which he was the principal architect. (Apologies for the poor framerate in the first video; it’s great in all the other videos, thanks to the efforts of Twitch.tv’s friendly TheGunRun.) In the final two videos, JP plays through his Doom II demake of Arcadia, demonstrating some of the ingenious ways he captured key bits of the level’s gameplay using a game system that predates BioShock by 13 years.

Enjoy! And check out our Twitch.tv page, which has these videos as well as all kinds of much sillier shit on it.

BioShock Part 1

BioShock Part 2

BioShock Part 3

Doom II Arcadia Part 1

Doom II Arcadia Part II