Wired speaks to BioShock creator Ken Levine about the new world of Columbia, setting of his upcoming game BioShock Infinite.

Q&A: Ken Levine’s Brave New World of BioShock Infinite

BioShock Infinite's universe is sort of like ours, but just a bit different.
Image: Irrational Games

Wired: What’s the process of picking out these licensed songs like?

Levine: Well we have an original score being written, similar to BioShock. There’s music that characters hear in the world and then there’s music on the soundtrack that they don’t hear. That’s the authorial music we use to comment on the game.

I actually never really believed in that until I met Garry Schyman, who worked on the original compositions for BioShock and now Infinite. The descent to Rapture would never have been the same without Schyman’s beautiful score.

But one of my favorite parts of my job is choosing the licensed music. BioShock Infinite is set in an interesting time because it’s right at the beginning of jazz and blues. Music before jazz and blues is not very listenable. I mean popular music -– it’s really kind of awful. You know, the John Philip Sousa marches and stuff. And then you get jazz and blues coming in, with the early stuff like ragtime.

It’s much more challenging to find music from that era that sounds great to a modern ear. BioShock was set in 1959, so we had this huge slate of great music to choose from. But here we don’t have all the chord progressions, and the things we like didn’t exist or had just started to exist. So finding music has been a really interesting challenge.

You end up finding stuff like bluegrass and gospel that you can draw from. But there are a lot of hymns that are awful, right? Then you find a melody like “Will The Circle Be Unbroken,” which we used in our trailer and is just beautiful. So you have to dig a little deeper and that means my research has been a little harder this time around.

Generally in first-person shooters, you’re playing a crazy sociopath running around murdering people.

Wired: How strict are you as a creator? Do you say, “No, this game is set in 19-whatever, therefore no song written afterwards can be used?”

Levine: The most important thing is that you get people to feel things. I’ll give you a hint: There weren’t flying cities in 1912 nor were there underwater cities and genetic technology in 1959 (laughs). So, yeah, you play a little fast and loose. You could argue that this is Columbia and we do things a little differently.

You’ve already heard some of the strange musical things in the game. There’s a part where Elizabeth opens these tears to other worlds and realities. She opens up something that appears to be the 1980s and you can hear Tears for Fears playing.

So music is going to have a strange role in this game. Stranger than BioShock, at least. There’s definitely some surprises there.

Wired: I’m getting into dangerous territory here, but is the opening of tears going to be a fun little Easter egg that happens sometimes, or is it going to be integral to where the story goes and is resolved?

Levine: It’s absolutely essential in the story. It’s not a gimmick or anything because that’s what makes Elizabeth special. It’s why everybody’s interested in her and why all these powers are pursuing her. Everyone else can see these tears but they can’t manipulate them.

It’s not gimmicky but you can have a little fun with it, absolutely. Like the moment where we had Revenge of the Jedi displayed on a 1980′s movie theater marquee. Certainly that was a storytelling device. It told you what she was doing in a lot of ways. It told you that it wasn’t just a time-travel thing because obviously there was no Revenge of the Jedi.

There’s a lot packed into that little two-second clip, especially for a nerdy guy like you or me. Figuring that out was a real challenge. I knew I wanted to get that message across but struggled with the execution.

Those are going to be a major element of the game –- both in the gameplay and the story. It’s the heart of the game, that this world has this strange thing going on. The same way that geneticism and Objectivism were the driving forces for the first BioShock.

This notion of physics, this quantum mechanics issue paired with the philosophies of the city make for very interesting things that go on.

Wired: So BioShock, of course, heavily subverted and poked a bit of fun at linear game design. Does Infinite play with the conventional wisdom of design in a similar way?

Levine: You know it’s always interesting when you get into meta-spaces like that where you’re commenting on games. In that case we used the limitations of a game to talk about those same limitations. Because, look, we do a lot of math in our heads as gamers to forgive a lot of the things games do. Generally in first-person shooters, you’re playing a crazy sociopath running around murdering people (laughs).

But you’re a hero, right? How many people does Commander Shepard kill? He literally kills thousands of people. How many people does the protagonist of BioShock Infinite kill? A lot. You still want to deal with him in a human way.

When you shine a light on these sort of things, it can be disconcerting. You’re not just shining a light on the story, you’re shining a light on the player’s experience as a gamer.

Going back to System Shock 2, when we revealed Polito was SHODAN, that was very early in games in terms of messing with the player. It wasn’t an insult to the character, it was an insult to you. What you thought you had was not real. You made all these assumptions that turned out to be wrong.

I think it’s an interesting notion and I think you need to continue to evolve it so you’re not just doing the same thing over and over.

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John Mix Meyer


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