BioShock Vita Still Has Not Entered Into Development Phase

Irrational Games’ made a big splash back at E3 2011 when Ken Levine took to the stage at Sony’s press conference and announced that his team was working on a BioShock game for the PlayStation Vita. Shortly after that announcement we learned that Irrational wasn’t actually “working” on a BioShock title for Sony’s handheld, but was simply interested in making one. Now (almost two years after that E3 2011 announcement) Levine has revealed that nothing has been done on the BioShock Vita project, because Take-Two and Sony never signed a deal for the game.

“I’ve got my fingers crossed that that’s [BioShock Vita] going to happen because it’s something I want to do, but until somebody starts signing the checks, there’s nothing I can do,” Levine told IGN. “At the end of the day, I work for Take-Two and they need to be able to fund that development, and they need to make sure they have a deal in place that makes sense for them and makes sense for Sony.”

Last March Levine told Joystiq that he “ideally wouldn’t have talked about the Vita game” at E3 2011, however, the announcement of BioShock Vita was “understandably important” to Sony. He further added that the platform holder had “wanted [them] to share that information” at the press conference.

As much as Sony wanted to have the BioShock Vita announcement, it seems pretty clear now that they should have made sure some deal was in place before making it public — especially, since they purposely made it sound as if the game was in development.

At this point, I’m fairly confident that BioShock Vita is never going to happen. Two years is plenty of time to at least sign a deal, and if it was something that Take-Two thought they could make money on, it most likely would have happened by now.