PAX 2008: Ken Levine keyote talks sex, comics and growing up

Let's destroy your dreams now: Our friend KennyL did not talk about BioShock 2. Instead, Ken Levine kicked off Penny Arcade Expo by talking about his journey from from sex-intrigued comic nerd to Hollywood scribe and back to geekdom (which may in fact be the future plot of BioShock 2, but that is as of now unconfirmed). Regardless, Levine's keynote was a hysterical, vulgar and self-deprecating tribute to puberty and gaming.

Levine broke up into three acts, each different parts of his life. In part one, Levine described how he discoverd the adult with science fiction, from his dream to sleep with The Scarlet Witch to his dream to sleep with Jessica-5 from Logan's Run (both the comic book character and the film version's actress). "I wanted to smoke cigarettes and listen to Deep Purple," he said. "I didn't want to go to bed [thinking about Battlestar Galactica], but I did."

Act 2 was on the discovery of tribes, and how how his Dungeons & Dragons group moved onto girls. "The truth is, my tribal brothers were simply ahead of me in the game." In Act 3, in which our friend is a failed movie scribe, Levine ends up at Looking Glass Studios (System Shock). The rest, as you know, is history.

In his near-final last words, Levine offers a thanks to Tycho and Gabe, "We are united by a common element. Its not the color of our skin or our ideology or where we come from. No it's that we're a giant bunch of fucking nerds," he said to a roaring applause. Listen to it yourself:


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