BioShock 2 team nearly made Destiny before Destiny existed

David Lindsey Pittman, a programmer who worked on BioShock at 2K Marin, revealed on BlueSky that the studio prototyped a project known as Project Richmond. The concept was described as a shared-world, co-op experience that prefigured ideas later seen in Destiny.

He said the game would have felt distinctly BioShocky, pairing a “magic hand” with a gun hand and placing players in an open-world tundra. Brightly colored, geometric buildings would house social experiments, and the narrative involved subjects trapped in a late 1960s/early 1970s suburban timeloop — at one point the sky cracks open and futuristic rangers arrive to rescue them.

Project Richmond was one of four titles to reach prototyping and became known internally as “The Experiment.” Pittman called it his “Everest” and stayed at 2K Marin longer than he might have hoped in the chance it would be greenlit, but the game never moved forward.

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